Are Liverpool really going to lose Salah, Van Dijk and Alexander-Arnold for nothing?
Liverpool's Salah, Van Dijk, Alexander-Arnold conundrum
https://www.espn.co.uk/football/insider/story/_/id/41925489/liverpool-transfer-mohamed-salah-virgil-van-dijk-trent-alexander-arnold
Mo Salah, left, and Virgil van Dijk, right, have been vital to Liverpool's success in recent seasons. Will either or both still be with the Reds next season? PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images
On a weekend when Arsenal lost to Bournemouth and Manchester City barely scraped by with another close win without the injured Rodri (this time against Wolves), Liverpool posted their best result of the season so far: a 2-1 win against Chelsea at Anfield. The win put them back atop the table and makes it seven wins from eight in the league and 10 out of 11 in all competitions under new boss Arne Slot.
With the win over Chelsea, Slot became the second-fastest Premier League manager to 10 wins -- behind only Pep Guardiola. And despite conceding a goal against Chelsea, his team have still only conceded three all season -- or five fewer than any other side.
Despite all of that, the short term looks way better than the long term. Liverpool's three best players, Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold, all have less than a year left on their contracts. While it's unlikely, the club have created a situation where there's now a real chance that this team win the Premier League or the Champions League -- and then lose Van Dijk, Salah and TAA for nothing.
There's even another world, albeit even more unlikely, where all three players agree to contracts with new teams before this season ends. Come Jan. 1, they'll all be able to enter into negotiations with clubs outside of England.
So how did we get there? And what is the most likely outcome to all the uncertainty surrounding the team that are currently off to their best start since the last (and first) time they won the Premier League title?
Why are Liverpool in this situation in the first place?
After Liverpool nearly won every trophy in 2022 but fell short of both the Premier and Champions League, two things changed. Not on the field, but at the boardroom level: (1) Michael Edwards stepped down from the director of football role, and (2) the club's owners, Fenway Sports Group, floated the possibility of selling the team.
In terms of impactful executives in the modern Premier League, Edwards might be No. 1. He rebuilt the club's academy, hired Jurgen Klopp to replace Brendan Rodgers, and empowered the club's research department to be involved in all player and coaching acquisitions. In other words, he oversaw everything that helped Liverpool reclaim its status as one of the best teams in the world.
During their glory years, Liverpool's squad-shaping decisions were ultimately made by a combination of Edwards, Klopp and FSG president Mike Gordon, who was the ownership's typical contact on the ground at Liverpool. It seemed like that process would continue without Edwards, too. It was announced that he was stepping down at season's end in November 2021, so there was plenty of time, and eventually, the club's technical director, Julian Ward, was named as his replacement in the summer of 2022.
But then, a couple of months later, in November 2022, Ward suddenly put in his notice; he left the club at the end of the season. Same for Ian Graham, the head of the club's boundary-pushing research department. While all of this was happening, news broke that FSG were attempting to sell the club.
Meanwhile, the players Liverpool had begun to acquire -- Luis Díaz from FC Porto, Darwin Núñez from Benfica, Cody Gakpo from PSV -- started to change. None of them were bad players, but none of them were the kind of sure-thing stars or the affordable high-upside acquisitions with fantastic underlying numbers that funded the core of the team that won every trophy possible. Both Diaz and Nunez were risky moves, coming over from the Portuguese league -- especially Nunez, whose transfer cost €75 million, and he was coming off an unsustainable hot finishing season. Gakpo, meanwhile, was signed right after a star turn at the 2022 World Cup with Netherlands, the last place any team would typically go to find value in the transfer market.
The thing the trio had in common was standout physical traits -- or exactly what you might expect when a manager has an outsize influence on player acquisition. With FSG focused on a sale rather than continuity of the squad and without Edwards at the club anymore, Klopp seemed to fill the power vacuum. At least, both Ward and Graham left because they felt like their work was no longer having an impact.
Then, last summer, the club hired Jorg Schmadtke -- a friend of Klopp's -- to be its temporary sporting director for a year. And then Klopp himself announced he'd be leaving the club in the middle of last season.
After reading all of that, it will probably not surprise you to hear that the club has only re-signed one non-academy player since November 2022. And that player is reserve left-back Kostas Tsimikas, who is one of the lower first-term earners and a bench player who seems happy to be a backup.
Since Edwards left, there has basically been no one near the top of the club's hierarchy looking at the team's long-term contract situation. FSG were trying to find someone to pay them billions of dollars to acquire the team; Ward quit just a few months into the gig; Schmadtke was only hired on a temporary basis. And Klopp? Well, he had no clue how to manage the payroll of a gigantic soccer club because he's a soccer coach. On top of that, he knew he wasn't long for the club anyway.
Not only was there really no one in place to prioritize or even make these massive, expensive, looming decisions, but also: why would any of these players look at this situation, see all the constant churn among the people who decide their contracts, and think 'Yeah, this seems stable. Lemme lock myself up for another five years instead of hitting the open market?'
Things are much better today. FSG have recommitted to the club after failing to find a majority buyer; Edwards is back in a role above sporting director; Richard Hughes was brought in from Bournemouth to slide into the sporting director position; Ward is back as technical director. And the research department isn't being sidelined anymore.
But all of this was solidified this spring, right as the team's three star players entered the final years of their contracts. For all the uproar over Liverpool's light activity in the summer transfer market, figuring out the futures of Salah, Van Dijk, and Alexander-Arnold should've been -- and still should be -- the new-but-sort-of-same-as-the-old hierarchy's No. 1 priority.
Salah, Van Dijk, and the price of past performance
The Salah and Van Dijk situations are fascinating, both from a theoretical and market perspective.
Salah will be 33 at the start of next season; Van Dijk 34. Broadly, we know that both players should already be well past their peak and could be at risk of a sudden decline in performance. More specifically, though, they are both arguably still the two best players in the world at their respective positions.
When the analyst Bob Hayes ran a study on aging in soccer, he found that players with high levels of both physical and technical skill tended to age the best. And those more reliant on physical skills aged worse than those who provided value with their technical ability. Salah and Van Dijk clearly both fit into that premier category of physical-and-technical stars.
It's just that there's not much evidence of any defenders playing that much in the Premier League from the age of 34 onwards, and there's even less evidence of them playing at a high level.
Let's say that Liverpool give Van Dijk a three-year deal and make him one of the highest-paid defenders in the league. You'd expect to get around 9,000 minutes from that player: three seasons of starter-level minutes. Well, since the Premier League was created in the early 90's, just three players have played at least 9,000 minutes from their age-34 seasons and on: Arsenal/West Ham's Nigel Winterburn, Manchester City's Stuart Pearce, and Chelsea's Thiago Silva.
Silva, of course, is the obvious comparison for Van Dijk. He didn't join Chelsea until he was 35, and then played a key role for the team that won the Champions League in his first season and finished third in the Premier League and reached two cups finals the following year.
Outside of Silva, though, there just aren't any players who contributed at a high level at such an important position at such an advanced age. In terms of defenders aged 34 and older who have contributed for elite Premier League teams over the past 20 years, the next one after Silva is John Terry, who still only played 2,484 league minutes for Chelsea from his age-34 season onwards.
With forwards, the story isn't quite as grim, but it's still not great. Salah has averaged around 30 goals+assists per domestic season since joining Liverpool. We'll assume the contract they pay him would be requisite to his past production, but let's just say that they'd need around 25 per season to get what they want out of the deal. That's 75 goals+assists from three seasons. Only one player, Teddy Sheringham, hit that mark from age-33 on. He got to 85, but he also stopped playing in 2007 at the age of 40. In fact, only three other players even got to 50 goals+assists from age 33 on: Manchester United's Ryan Giggs, Chelsea's Gianfranco Zola, and Leicester's Jamie Vardy.
So, history is stacked heavily against any long-term deals for Salah and Van Dijk aging well. On top of that, it's unclear what the market for either player might be. There's always the Saudi league, which would presumably offer either player the GDP of the Federated States of Micronesia to come join the league.
Outside of that? It seems unlikely that either player would willingly join another Premier League club. I could see Bayern Munich, with their rotating calamities at center-back, being interested in Van Dijk and maybe offering him a pay raise. Perhaps PSG would look to Salah as its new goal scorer to replace Kylian Mbappé, but the club have seemingly shifted very aggressively toward signing younger players over the past two seasons. Real Madrid, too, have adopted a youth movement, but maybe they would consider signing Van Dijk as a free agent, much like they did with Antonio Rüdiger. Although Rudiger was still only in his late 20s when he joined.
The wildcard, as always, is Barcelona. Signing Salah when you already have 17-year-old winger Lamine Yamal wouldn't make much sense, but there could be room for an aging scorer on the roster when Robert Lewandowski's contract expires after this season. Van Dijk, too, would immediately be the best center-back on Barca's roster, but he'd also be taking playing time away from a number of talented young center-backs. Not that Barcelona have shown an ability to think long term for longer than five minutes at a time. Plus, we still really have no idea how much money they'll be able to spend because of their financial limitations.
So, it really does seem like Salah and Van Dijk both have more value to Liverpool than any other team in the world. Liverpool are still one of the richest clubs on the planet. There's no one close to the current level of either player on the current roster. And anyone out there who might be able to replace either player, even by 75%, would require both massive wages and a massive transfer fee attached to that.
Were the club functioning in a normal state for the past two-plus years, perhaps one or both of these players would've moved on for a sizable transfer fee that could've been reinvested in the squad or been re-signed for another year or two. Instead, the current hierarchy inherited a situation where there are only two options: let your captain and your superstar walk for nothing or re-sign them for age-years that we've rarely seen anyone play at a high level during. At the same time, we've rarely seen anyone play as well as Salah and Van Dijk have at their current ages.
Given how close the current team are to winning trophies -- the whole point of this sport -- I might just bite the bullet, spend big to bring them both back, hope it works out, and at least assume that you'll get one or two more years of high level play out of them both.
What happens when Real Madrid come calling?
It's a lot easier to project the interest in right-back Alexander-Arnold for two reasons: 1) He'll be 26 at the start of next season, and 2) The near-weekly reports suggesting that Real Madrid are trying to convince him to run down his contract and sign for the club next summer.
Per estimates from the site FBref, he's currently the third-highest-paid Liverpool player beyond Van Dijk and Salah. Per those same estimates, he'd be the 12th-highest-paid player at Real Madrid. While the specific wage rankings here aren't important, the larger point is: Real Madrid would almost definitely offer Alexander-Arnold a higher salary than whatever Liverpool offer him. If that's the driving factor behind his decision, and this Real Madrid interest is real, then he's going to be playing for Madrid next season.
If Liverpool could only keep one of the three players, I think they would keep Alexander-Arnold. He is the club's captain-in-waiting, and is the only one who might be a part of the current great Liverpool team and then the next great Liverpool team. A five-year contract would only bring you to his age-31 season.
Trent Alexander-Arnold is unique in that he's young enough to still be very valuable to Liverpool's future as well as their present. But will he end up at Real Madrid? Carl Recine/Getty Images
While he's somehow still a polarizing player, I just want to quickly reaffirm what Liverpool would be losing if they lost Alexander-Arnold. Through his age-25 season, Alexander-Arnold has 59 assists. The only players with more at this point in their careers in the history of the Premier League: Arsenal's Cesc Fabregas (70), Manchester United's David Beckham and Wayne Rooney (64), and Manchester United's Ryan Giggs (61). There's a decent chance Alexander-Arnold is in second on that list by season's end, too. Oh, and he's a full-back, while the others were all attackers or attacking midfielders.
Point being: he's on track to be a Premier League legend -- if he stays in the Premier League. Except, while Van Dijk and Salah seem as important as ever under Slot, Alexander-Arnold's role has significantly changed with the new coach.
Under Klopp, Alexander-Arnold was Liverpool's main option for moving the ball up the field. He touched the ball 99 times per 90 minutes last season, and most of those touches came in the middle third, either hugged near the sideline or actually in the center of the field:
This season, he's only touching the ball 77 times per 90. Except, he's still on the ball in the defensive and attacking thirds as much as he was last season -- just nowhere near as often as he was in the midfield third:
As such, his progressive-pass totals are down massively, as are the number of passes he plays into the final third: 15 per 90 last season, nine per 90 this season. His creativity around the goal is still where it always is; in fact, his expected assists numbers are even better this year: 0.34 per 90, up from 0.25 last season. That still makes him an incredibly valuable player, but not as valuable as when he had to move the ball up the field and create chances at the same time.
On top of that, Conor Bradley has emerged behind him as a fantastic backup option. He makes way less money than Alexander-Arnold, he's nearly five years younger, and he's a much more traditional endline-to-endline full-back who might be easier to fit into a coach's tactical framework.
In a vacuum, I think Liverpool would obviously do everything they can to keep Alexander-Arnold. He's been with the club for 20 years, he's beloved by fans, he's on the path to becoming the team's first homegrown captain since Steven Gerrard, he might be the best full-back in the world, and he's still got another half-decade of prime-time years ahead of him.
Strangely, though, he might also be the least important of the three nearly-out-of-contract stars to Liverpool's immediate-future success, while also being the most sought-after on the open market.
It's really hard to imagine Alexander-Arnold ever wearing anything other than a Liverpool jersey. At the same time, it's really hard to imagine a huge club letting perhaps the best right winger and the best center-back in the world just walk out the door at the end of the season, too.
I don't know how it's all going to play out, but instead, I'll give you a prediction.
Let's say there's a 75% chance that each individual player re-signs. Taken together, there would be just a 42% chance that all three stars re-sign, and based on the context of the situations, 75% might even be generous. So, enjoy it while it lasts, Liverpool fans. By this time next season, it seems likely that at least one of Liverpool's three best players will be playing for another team.
