Indeed. Diaz scored 8 of his goals as a CF, so in terms of output from the LW its not even close stat wise.
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Indeed. Diaz scored 8 of his goals as a CF, so in terms of output from the LW its not even close stat wise.
Yeah but there's absolutely no evidence that he's more likely to clinch titles than a potential replacement. I get that at the margin you should be willing to overpay for a players who'll get you over the line, but there really isn't much evidence that Diaz is that kind of difference maker. He's not a Suarez or a Salah.
As for the Salah question: the obvious answer is that we'll never know if it was the right decision. We might have bought one PL at a cost of 5 PL trophies and 3 Champions Leagues, for all we know. We don't know if Coutinho would've won us the CL in 2018 - all we ever hear is that it was a great deal cos we did well after it. Yeah it probably was - but it's complicated.
And Salah would have about 50 assists
3 major decisions under Slot this season with no players bought.
Gravenberch.
Diaz dropped for Gakpo on the LW.
Diaz played as a 9.
And we duly won the league.
My money is on Diaz being a better 9 than on the left.
However Diaz is not a 9, decent at best and if we managed to get a better 9 in, we will be even better.
Wanting to keep Diaz, and start him in LW over Gakpo, back to the 3 seasons he played LW and we won no titles, is just madness and it is never going to happen under Slot. Gakpo is head and shoulders the much better LW.
Gravenberch.
Diaz dropped for Gakpo on the LW.
Diaz played as a 9.
And we duly won the league.
My money is on Diaz being a better 9 than on the left.
However Diaz is not a 9, decent at best and if we managed to get a better 9 in, we will be even better.
Wanting to keep Diaz, and start him in LW over Gakpo, back to the 3 seasons he played LW and we won no titles, is just madness and it is never going to happen under Slot. Gakpo is head and shoulders the much better LW.
I'm on the Gakpo seems marginally better stat wise (but that sitter Salah missed on the penulitmate game would have swung it in Diaz's favour so assist stats as has been pointed out depend on other shit) but either way.
1) They're about the same output wise. It's not like Gakpo was never in a striker position and it's not like a number 9 has been our highest scorer for ages anyway. Wingers score more than our strikers since Klopp got here.
2) They're the best in the league. That's why they've both been in and out of the side. It seems to be a perfect mix.
3) Unless it's been said by him or someone has info otherwise, how do we know that Slot prefers Gakpo when Diaz got more prem minutes?
Summary. It's not the end of the world if he leaves, but it's probably better for our chances of winning loads of trophies next year if he stays.
1) They're about the same output wise. It's not like Gakpo was never in a striker position and it's not like a number 9 has been our highest scorer for ages anyway. Wingers score more than our strikers since Klopp got here.
2) They're the best in the league. That's why they've both been in and out of the side. It seems to be a perfect mix.
3) Unless it's been said by him or someone has info otherwise, how do we know that Slot prefers Gakpo when Diaz got more prem minutes?
Summary. It's not the end of the world if he leaves, but it's probably better for our chances of winning loads of trophies next year if he stays.
This is it for me. Its more about the opportunity in terms of Saudi/Barca paying top dollar which enables us to sign a replacement. If not, he stays.
It's kinda weird to talk about the likes of Diaz and Gakpo as the best in the league. They're good players but they don't really seem "best in class", do they? Does it speak to the paucity of elite attacking talent at the moment?
Everyone is struggling to find a #9 that is worth the money and a hundred year old Lewandowski and a knackered Kane still seem to be outperforming the rest. Many are a fan of Alvarez (including me) but when compared to guys in the previous generation such as Suarez, he's nowhere near as good.
And in the wide forward positions, you now have "good" players like Raphinha being talked about for the Ballon d'Or. I don't know which way is up any more. For example, is Olise now a true 100M player or is that valuation just another sign of the times?
Everyone is struggling to find a #9 that is worth the money and a hundred year old Lewandowski and a knackered Kane still seem to be outperforming the rest. Many are a fan of Alvarez (including me) but when compared to guys in the previous generation such as Suarez, he's nowhere near as good.
And in the wide forward positions, you now have "good" players like Raphinha being talked about for the Ballon d'Or. I don't know which way is up any more. For example, is Olise now a true 100M player or is that valuation just another sign of the times?
It's wild init? All season we've heard that arsenal would have won the league of they had a striker and saka was fit. Motherfucker our 9's were fucking gash and saka ain't ever gonna be on salahs level
Similar to the city/Liverpool prem races made us redefine what good league performances are, the Messi/Ronaldo ballon d'or battles really made us think good/great players are shite.
I think we're going to have a spell where most fans are going to have to relearn what's actually normal levels are.
Nowadays there's a lot less flair, as that's not what the top managers want anymore. It's efficiency
The money is only useful if we can get a replacement in that is better or has a higher ceiling.
I know everyone is in love with the idea of Wirtz at the moment but there's no guarantee he will succeed. Also he's suffered from an ACL in the past and it's really not unusual for a recurrence or the other ACL to go.
With the need to upgrade Nunez, and maybe get a more reliable replacement for Jota. We'd need to have someone damn good lined up to replace one of our more reliable attackers.
I know everyone is in love with the idea of Wirtz at the moment but there's no guarantee he will succeed. Also he's suffered from an ACL in the past and it's really not unusual for a recurrence or the other ACL to go.
With the need to upgrade Nunez, and maybe get a more reliable replacement for Jota. We'd need to have someone damn good lined up to replace one of our more reliable attackers.
Agreed, the attacking talent is a bit more boring at the very least due to being selected for more rigid systematic play. Its equally as effective though.
The thing with gakpo is you could make the argument with more starts he will press on, but I think it's possible with him as a nailed on starter we just watch him go from purple patch to relative drought, and not have an option or competition to push him. The issue with that is that his overall involvement is much worse than Diaz at times, like he will go long stretches without influencing anything. That's never the case with Diaz even if he's annoying people.
I think it also depends on the players on the periphery like jota. We get rid of him and Diaz can be cover for two positions and start in one. Then, maybe you can be more speculative about the 9 when there aren't any standouts. The question is whether Diaz will give full effort when he's so underpaid and wants to leave.
I’m not sure I follow the difference between market value and price in your first paragraph - we can value him at whatever we want and then choose to stick to that valuation or not.
If we value him at £100m and Barca offer £50m, we’re not compelled to accept.
Are you viewing him just as a cost or lost revenue opportunity?
I’d say we view him as a key player who’s contribution to the team in terms of us winning trophies over the next 2 seasons and the value and revenue that would bring far outweighs a transfer fee and wage cost versus the risk of replacement.
Although it’s likely a position designed to extract maximum value should the player decide he wants to leave.
We’ve made it very clear we’re rejecting the approach - Barca now have to be very careful about tapping up.
Our stance in what I’ve seen in the press is, not interested in selling, unless the player wants to go and/or the fee allows us to improve the squad.
If Diaz wants to leave to join Barca, that still doesn’t mean we have to sell for under our valuation.
This is the same stance we took with Coutinho and extracted a huge fee from Barca.
There is evidence though - we’ve just clinched a title with him being our 2nd top scorer and a significant increase in his previous 3 years figures and relative to players in his position, it’s pretty much up there.
Salah’s an outlier - risk is those 12+ goals and whatever the assists were, drop down to half that, which would be closer to the normal.
Again, it’s likely at least partly posturing on our part, but you can do that whence player hits career high figures.
To be fair on the Salah question, I think we do know to a very high degree of certainty - he propelled us to a title with record equaling stats that would be very unlikely to be matched by anyone else - and he’s consistent.
Same as Coutinho - yeah it is complicated, but sometimes also it isn’t, it’s exactly as it seems - we wouldn’t have won what we have won if we hadn’t reinvested the Coutinho money in world record fees for Virgil & Alisson.
I think Diaz is the same - if we get a fee big enough that we can go out and sign a top tier replacement - great, if we can’t, then sticking is better than twisting.
If we set some figure as a fee we'd accept I'd say that's a price. His market value would be whatever someone else is willing to pay.
Obviously I'd expect us to try to get as much for him as we can, that goes without saying.
Personally I'd just treat every player the same: what's their annual cost vs the expected benefit. I don't think Diaz warrants any special treatment.
Diaz at this point is getting towards £30m a season.
If Wirtz signs for £120m and leaves for nothing in 10 years and earns £15m a season then his annual cost is £27m, so you can see how expensive it is to just sacrifice a £50m fee for 2 years' service.
I get the point that he doesn't seem like the best in his position, neither does gakpo, but that's because we've been spoiled by Salah. They'd walk into any other side in the league. It's kinda like how Houghton and Johnstone are footnotes because of Beardsley and Barnes when really they were both fucking ace.
I don't know but I would HOPE the club isn't run on such a short term basis as being limited to signing a replacement with say 10 years in the tank to what they can get for a guy with 2 years left. If they really are that hamstrung in terms of financing then yeah that's a bit different but also means we're kind of fucked anyway.
If we bring in a player with comparable output to Diaz, that player would likely be guaranteed at least 2 - 2.5 times Diaz’s current wage, looking at the market. So that should also be factored in if we’re talking about money saved by selling Diaz. Not to mention the crazy transfer fees for such attacking players, and if the only option is to sell to Barca for 45m, not sure we’d be able to bring any readymade replacement in considering all the money we’re spending in other positions.
I think if we set a price he knows he's not wanted. If we say he's not for sale and a big bid comes in and we sell, we don't piss off one of our starting players in case it fails
That’s pretty much his response in the interview I posted, so makes sense
I mean you have to replace him if he goes this year. You'll need at least 60 million to buy someone who is worth our while, and that player will certainly be on wages north of 100k. So you're probably spending more if he leaves this year without any assurance that this new player provides the same kind of output.
Our focus really needs to be a no. 9 and a new CB, and I think the club would rather just deal with the Diaz situation a year later. Of course things change if a huge bid arrives
My personal opinion is that £50m or so for Diaz makes financial sense. Whether we should actually do the deal for me would rest on availability and affordability of a replacement and how easy it would be to bed in another new signing now compared to next year. I'd probably lean towards keeping him but I can see a good case for selling him too.
Nunez has a better season than Kudus. despite paying half the minutes. Kudus also plays more on the RW.
I think @peterhague is right in terms of the player's value. If he decides he wants Barcelona then it doesn't matter what the Saudis bid, his price will be whatever we can get out of Barca, and it then comes down to how much they want him as to how hard a bargain we can drive - in much the same way Leverkusen aren't folding on Wirtz because they know we want him so they can play hard ball.
There's also a lingering concern over how easily Barca can register players under Spanish FFP rules and how they resolve the issues they've had with Dani Olmo. Their finances should be better this year given their on-field success, but still held back by playing at the Olympic stadium and not Camp Nou.
That said, in that tweet above, it doesn't sound like the player is about to be a dick and insist on a move, but Barca will obviously try to manoeuvre him in that direction.
And just to loop back on the "Barca don't pay up" thing for anyone new to the forum or who missed it first time round...
This is something of a forum in-joke, and something I try to throw is as an easter egg in most of my posts about the club's finances. I wasn't directly involved in this particular transaction but was aware of it.
So the background is that Barca's accounts disclosed that LFC had sold the right to receive the Coutinho money to a financial institution. It was widely assumed that this was because LFC wanted / needed the money, and indeed this kind of transaction is not uncommon in football (essentially debt factoring). We'd seen debt factoring with one or two other clubs - they would need to get our consent to it as it meant we would end up paying a bank rather than whoever we'd bought the player from.
However, the Barcelona transaction was different. They had overcommitted themselves on the deal and the decision to sell the debt was driven by them, not by LFC. So to put things into context, Barca had entered into a transfer contract with the club and like the Suarez deal the fee was to be paid in 5 instalments (I can confirm the Suarez sale contract on Football Leaks is genuine, by the way). Usually deals are in three instalments, payable annually. Barca prefer to pay in five, 6-monthly instalments - it means the money comes in quicker for the selling club so that's fine. I assume they do it this way because of how their cash-flow profile works. Spanish clubs also pay their players 6-monthly so chances are they get their La Liga money in 6-monthly instalments to match those obligations.
After they had done the Coutinho deal they realised they were going to struggle to meet the payment obligations so they approached a financial institution and asked them to buy the right to receive the money from LFC. Having brokered the deal, they approached LFC as our consent was needed. This basically meant that we got paid even more quickly than under the original deal. In a classic debt factoring transaction, there will be a financial cost to the recipient but in this case LFC was to be paid in full, just earlier. The financial costs of the deal would be borne by Barca, so it was a no-lose situation for LFC.
The benefit to Barca was that once the financial institution had bought the right to receive the money, they extended the terms of the agreement to allow Barca more time to pay. To an outsider looking at the transaction the impression was:
1. LFC must be short of cash, which is why they sold the debt (not true)
2. Barca were always going to take a long time to pay the money to LFC (not true)
3. Barca still had a transfer payable on their books - not true, this had effectively become a loan, but was still accounted as transfer debt.
So the effect of the deal was:
LFC got paid early. We didn't need the money but if it's on offer then you take it.
Barca got more time to pay and managed to hoodwink anyone looking at their accounts into thinking they were not in as much debt as they actually were because analysts were looking at bank debt and thinking about transfer payables as being ordinary trade creditors, when effectively the Coutinho debt had been turned into a short term loan. Obviously their chickens eventually came home to roost anyway, they just managed to postpone if for a bit.
This is something of a forum in-joke, and something I try to throw is as an easter egg in most of my posts about the club's finances. I wasn't directly involved in this particular transaction but was aware of it.
So the background is that Barca's accounts disclosed that LFC had sold the right to receive the Coutinho money to a financial institution. It was widely assumed that this was because LFC wanted / needed the money, and indeed this kind of transaction is not uncommon in football (essentially debt factoring). We'd seen debt factoring with one or two other clubs - they would need to get our consent to it as it meant we would end up paying a bank rather than whoever we'd bought the player from.
However, the Barcelona transaction was different. They had overcommitted themselves on the deal and the decision to sell the debt was driven by them, not by LFC. So to put things into context, Barca had entered into a transfer contract with the club and like the Suarez deal the fee was to be paid in 5 instalments (I can confirm the Suarez sale contract on Football Leaks is genuine, by the way). Usually deals are in three instalments, payable annually. Barca prefer to pay in five, 6-monthly instalments - it means the money comes in quicker for the selling club so that's fine. I assume they do it this way because of how their cash-flow profile works. Spanish clubs also pay their players 6-monthly so chances are they get their La Liga money in 6-monthly instalments to match those obligations.
After they had done the Coutinho deal they realised they were going to struggle to meet the payment obligations so they approached a financial institution and asked them to buy the right to receive the money from LFC. Having brokered the deal, they approached LFC as our consent was needed. This basically meant that we got paid even more quickly than under the original deal. In a classic debt factoring transaction, there will be a financial cost to the recipient but in this case LFC was to be paid in full, just earlier. The financial costs of the deal would be borne by Barca, so it was a no-lose situation for LFC.
The benefit to Barca was that once the financial institution had bought the right to receive the money, they extended the terms of the agreement to allow Barca more time to pay. To an outsider looking at the transaction the impression was:
1. LFC must be short of cash, which is why they sold the debt (not true)
2. Barca were always going to take a long time to pay the money to LFC (not true)
3. Barca still had a transfer payable on their books - not true, this had effectively become a loan, but was still accounted as transfer debt.
So the effect of the deal was:
LFC got paid early. We didn't need the money but if it's on offer then you take it.
Barca got more time to pay and managed to hoodwink anyone looking at their accounts into thinking they were not in as much debt as they actually were because analysts were looking at bank debt and thinking about transfer payables as being ordinary trade creditors, when effectively the Coutinho debt had been turned into a short term loan. Obviously their chickens eventually came home to roost anyway, they just managed to postpone if for a bit.
