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.
