Squad Building

It's just a rumour that was spread around town

Directors of football and supporters want different things in a way. This seems odd when both want their club to be as successful as possible.

What separates them is their levels of patience. Fans hope their team will lift every trophy this season. In it to win it. The suits have to make the team competitive for the next, say, five years. Short term thinking doesn’t cut it.

“The ages of the players we recruited, as the guys have said, is very deliberate to make sure that we're not only competitive now, but competitive for the mid term future. And that's realistically all you can control”

Richard Hughes, The Reds Roundtable

This is why trying to assess which club has ‘won’ a transfer window is pointless. Squad building is an on-going, never ending story. A game with no endpoint, like Monopoly. No winners or losers, just participants who can’t escape.

Liverpool’s lack of business in January feels ridiculous given the uneven balance of options available to Arne Slot. Equally, if the Reds sign players they want in the summer that they can’t get now, to add to Jérémy Jacquet, their January inactivity will retrospectively make more sense.

For now, Slot has an understocked squad. High on quality, low on quantity. A big reason behind the Reds’ success last year was their ability to get their best paid players on the pitch almost every week. Seven of the top eight earners started at least 28 league games. The equivalent at this point of 2025/26 would be 18 starts, a mark only four of the best paid octet have hit.

The defeat to Manchester City helps highlight the gaps in the Liverpool squad. The starting XIs were only about £13k per week apart in average salary in favour of the visitors but the benches earn £61k and £133k per man respectively. If Alexander Isak would have tilted the scales towards Liverpool, the likes of Joško Gvardiol and John Stones would have had their thumbs on the other side for City.

The Reds’ wage bill is mostly led by veterans. There are 10 men who are over 30 and reportedly earn at least £150k a week in the Premier League; four play for Liverpool when no other club has more than two on their books. It will be fascinating to see which way the wind blows when Alisson Becker, Andy Robertson, Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk leave the club.

Three of that quartet have remained largely integral to Slot this season. The below is an update of a chart that appeared in an article on The Athletic in October. It shows the age and percentage of league minutes played by each member of the squad, with 24 to 29 years old deemed to be peak.

Several of the seven oldest players will leave this summer. There is a strong case that none of them will be with Liverpool when 2027/28 gets underway. While squad building work remains, there should be a peak age team playing together regularly in a year or two. Soon enough for suits, not for the fans.

Forty-three per cent of the available league minutes have gone to players aged 24 to 29, with only four such men featuring for at least half of the possible time. It’s worth comparing this with other clubs in 2025/26 and Reds sides of the past to see what the findings explain about the current problems.

League leaders Arsenal are the obvious starting point. Just shy of 70 per cent of their pitch time has gone to peak age players. They also have Riccardo Calafiori and Noni Madueke about to enter prime time, with nobody significant leaving it before 2027. It stands to reason the Gunners would perform better than Liverpool this season.

City are also in better shape than the Reds, though at 59.6 per cent ‘peak’, they trail Arsenal. Their backroom brains would argue that Marc Guéhi and Antoine Semenyo would be higher up the y axis had they been at the club the whole season too. They surely will be for the remainder of their best years.

Chelsea undoubtedly make for the most interesting case study. The self appointed disruptors of the transfer market have not given a minute to anyone north of 29, or even 28-and-a-half at this point. In any case, Tosin Adarabioyo is 28 until he becomes 29. That's how it works.

Despite giving 70 per cent of their available minutes to the shaded zone, the Blues do not lead the Premier League for doing this. The figures for the division may explain why Leeds United are doing better than most people anticipated they would.

With Liverpool struggling and below average for peak age minutes (though several teams below them in that respect are having strong campaigns), it’s worth looking at the Reds of last season. To clarify, the ages used below are from the start of the campaign, not midway through as is the case with the 2025/26 charts.

In terms of peak minutes little was different, with players in that zone accounting for 44.1 per cent of the playing time. What helped was the veterans obviously being younger, plus the peak age men had mostly been at the club for at least two seasons, often longer. They were embedded, attuned and ready for an assault on the championship.

The chart for the club’s other Premier League title is the one you’d assume Richard Hughes will be looking to emulate relatively soon.

Over three quarters of the minutes went to players who were somewhere between 24 and 29 when the campaign began. Trent Alexander-Arnold was of such supreme talent to constantly feature despite his age, with Jürgen Klopp not needing any of the men at the other end of the scale to play too often.

Look at the chart. Look at it again. Liverpool gave 77.4 per cent of their pitch time to men in their peak, with the best homegrown player the club has brought through this century playing over 3,000 minutes too. Chef’s kiss, with tongues.

Forecasting this sort of thing is too flawed to be of any real value. We have no idea who will stay, who will go, who will join. By this simplistic measure, it will be 2029/30 before we see a peak aged Jérémy Jacquet, if the world is even still here then.

But let’s indulge in a little fantasy. We’ve all had a rough season. Here’s the Percentage of Minutes chart for the 2025/26 Premier League, except that this time we’re looking at footballers who are between 22 and 27. The men who will be in the peak zone in two years time.

We want it all and we want it now. But wait, what’s that coming over the hill? It’s a new Liverpool team, full to the brim with talent playing at the peak of it’s powers to an extent that few other top teams can match.

Perhaps. It’s interesting to wonder.

How patient are you feeling? Like I said, it’s a long game.