Throughout the summer there was a huge clammer from Liverpool fans for a so called marquee signing, I'm not sure I agree. In my eyes a marquee signing is a big name player, who is at the top of his game playing for a big club. I would be excited by the arrival of such a player but I'm not sure that singing them would always be a good idea.
By the very nature of a marquee signing they would be expensive if they meet the above criteria, very expensive and would undoubtably command huge wages. I think the better option, certainly financially is to buy, as Liverpool have done, younger players who are showing great potential and attempt to develop them into the top class, world standard players everybody is looking for.
if we look back at some previous players we have purchased under our current owners we can see how this plan has developed. Three years ago Liverpool signed Suarez, Carroll and Henderson all young players who are scouts obviously believed would go on and develop in to top quality players costing in total 77.5 million pounds. Obviously Carroll turned out to be a total disaster, (not every transfer works out as you hope) but we got £15 million back when we sold him to West Ham. Suarez has been an absolute joy whilst he was at the club and we sold him for £75 million pounds and Henderson has developed in to a star who is a major part of our team and tipped as a future captain, giving us a profit of £22.5 million and Jordan Henderson, plus the success that Suarez was a major part of in the last three years. Now consider if we had bought three imaginary marquee players aged 27, at the top of their games playing for Munich, Barcelona and Madrid. I think at the time, they would have cost roughly £35 million each a total of £105 million pounds (they would have been on higher wages than the three actual players) and let us imagine that one flops and two are successful, the same as our actual players, the flop is sold back to Munich for only a small loss for such a big drop in form and we manage to get £30 million. The second player wants to move on after three great years, but is nearing the end of his contract and is now over thirty so we snap off PSGs hand when they offer us £30 million. The third player has had a good time at Liverpool and been named captain and stays with us till he moves back to his hometown club at 34 for £3 million. All the above means we loose £41 million, spend more in wages and have roughly the same achievement level as we had from the real players, total fantasy I know but makes the point marquee players cost to much and are money down the drain if they don't turn out to be the very best in the world look at Ozil at Arsenal, Torres at Chelsea and I suspect Di Maria at United.
this summer we have again bought younger players mostly costing around £20 million who all appear to be good enough to play in the first team, now some will not make it and will never produce the form we hope for but who would bet against one or two not making it big and developing in to world class.
I heard and saw on social media all summer people asking for a marquee signing with the most popular players appearing to be Reus from Dortmund, or Sanchez from Barcelona both very talented players who no doubt would have been excellent signings if it had happened but both play in the same position as Sterling a young player who will go on to be world class would there signings have harmed Sterlings development, I think so, as to get game time he would have had to have played out of position and did we really need them or did we just want a big name to give us something to crow about on twitter.
People argue that we need to replace Suarez, a huge name now, with another big name. This isn't the case and isn't the way we do things we have replaced huge players throughout our history and never with a marquee signing Keegan, Dalglish, Rush, Souness and Torres have all been replaced and yes we spend big money and always have, but never the huge money on one individual player, we have always developed players turning them in to the world class players whilst they were at our club.
The money we made on Suarez who was himself a replacement for Torres has been re-invested in finding the next big thing and finding players to move the club forward.
At Liverpool we make world class players.
@lfclumo
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