It has been the perfect start for Arne Slot at Liverpool: three games, three clean sheets, three wins, the most recent of them an impressive dismantling of Manchester United at Old Trafford.
In terms of strategy and execution, it has all looked so serene. It is too early to go overboard, but so far new head coach Slot’s on-pitch vision has appeared as clear, precise and gently persuasive as his command of the English language. In a sport where wild, extravagant spending has come to be cheered almost as loudly as trophy successes, it is a timely endorsement of doing things calmly and quietly, refusing to be affected by outside noise.
That applies both to the process behind Slot’s appointment back in the spring and in Liverpool’s approach to the summer transfer market, where he was in agreement with new sporting director Richard Hughes and Michael Edwards, chief executive of football for the club’s owners at Fenway Sports Group (FSG), that there was no cause for panic — and certainly not panic signings — after they failed to entice top target Martin Zubimendi over from Spain’s Real Sociedad.
But noise is inevitable when it comes to the big challenge facing Hughes now that the post-Jurgen Klopp succession is in place and the transfer window is closed.
That noise started even before they had left Old Trafford on Sunday evening. It couldn’t drown out the Liverpool fans’ celebrations, but when Mohamed Salah, unprompted, says in a post-match interview that “this is my last year with the club” and “nobody in the club has talked to me about contracts”, it certainly shifts the focus.
But the focus was already intense, given that Liverpool went into this season with Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Virgil van Dijk into the final year of their respective contracts. If no agreement with Liverpool is reached in the meantime, any one of them — or even all three — could sign a pre-contract with an overseas club as early as January 1, then leave Anfield on a free transfer six months later.
In the case of Salah, 32, that has been a possibility from the moment the club rejected a £150million ($197m) offer from Saudi Pro League club Al Ittihad in the final days of last year’s summer window. In the case of Alexander-Arnold, losing a homegrown hero for nothing at age 26 would be much harder to swallow.
But Liverpool have left themselves vulnerable. This difficult moment has been creeping up for a long time.
Salah and Van Dijk during Sunday’s 3-0 defeat of Manchester United (Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images)
You might have seen a graphic doing the rounds, illustrating the total amount of time remaining on players’ contracts at all 20 Premier League clubs.
It changed by the day during the transfer window, but it did some big numbers on social media, largely because Chelsea were such a huge outlier with 191 years left on their players’ contracts across a bloated squad — almost as many as the second-highest (Tottenham Hotspur with 97 years) and the third-highest (Brighton & Hove Albion, 96) put together.
The Chelsea hierarchy insisted this was a good thing, citing the fact they have Cole Palmer and now Nicolas Jackson locked down with nine-year contracts and so many others on similar long-term deals.
Some of us are more inclined to look at the contracts awarded to Mykhailo Mudryk (seven years remaining), and goalkeepers Filip Jorgensen (also seven), Robert Sanchez and Djordje Petrovic (both six), among others, and wonder how on earth this can possibly work.
The difficulty Chelsea faced this summer in trying to offload several unwanted players underlines that. Petrovic, Trevoh Chalobah, Raheem Sterling and Armando Broja have all now left on loan, surplus to requirements, but they are under contract at Stamford Bridge until 2030, 2028, 2027 and 2028 respectively. You can expect to see more of the same struggles next summer.
Generally speaking, securing players to long-term contracts has always been regarded as a good thing. Just not when your transfer activity has been erratic and you have a glut of unwanted players on long deals, earning big wages which (as seen in the case of Sterling’s loan to Arsenal) you end up having to subsidise if they go elsewhere.
But if you are a well-run club with a clear vision and a well-balanced squad, you would hope to have your best young prospects tied down for the next four or five years and for other key players to be secured for the medium term.
Few clubs would share the Chelsea hierarchy’s enthusiasm for the extreme contract lengths in their model, but Everton’s position at the bottom of that table (47 years of contract remaining) is not likely to be regarded as best practice either. Their number of ageing players on short-term contracts reflects the difficulty of building for the long term at a club under financial constraints, desperately needing new investment.
More surprising was the sight of Arsenal (62 years), Liverpool (64) and Manchester City (71) at the lower end of the graphic.
But of City’s key players, only Kevin De Bruyne (33 years old) has entered the final year of his contract — there’s also Ilkay Gundogan (another who’s 33), who has just returned to the champions on a one-year deal — while Ederson (31), Kyle Walker (34), John Stones and Bernardo Silva (both 30) have two years to run.
De Bruyne is into the last year of his Manchester City contract (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)
It is similar at Arsenal; decisions are to be made over Jorginho (32) and Thomas Partey (31), whose contracts expire next June, and a handful of others who have a year beyond that, but the priority might be to address the group whose deals expire in 2027, which includes William Saliba, Gabriel, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli.
But it’s at Liverpool that the clock is really ticking. Even looking beyond the Salah, Alexander-Arnold and Van Dijk (33) situations, they have Andy Robertson (30) and Ibrahima Konate with less than two years to run. The cluster of players whose deals run until 2027 includes Alisson (31), Luis Diaz, Diogo Jota, Curtis Jones and Harvey Elliott.
A club who have frequently trumpeted their long-term planning under FSG’s ownership seemed to stand still between Edwards flagging his departure from the sporting director role in late 2021 and returning to the fold in an executive role this summer as the club belatedly confronted the challenges of the post-Klopp era.
In the summer of 2021, Liverpool agreed new contracts with more than half of their regular starting XI: Alisson, Alexander-Arnold, Van Dijk, Robertson, Fabinho and Jordan Henderson (the last two of whom were sold to Saudi Arabian clubs last summer). In 2022, there were new deals for Salah, Jota, Elliott, Jones, James Milner and Joe Gomez. In two years since, the only new ones have been for Alisson again (via a clause in his previous contract), Kostas Tsimikas and youngsters such as Conor Bradley, Stefan Bajcetic, Ben Doak and James McConnell.
For a sense of how things usually work when a club is running smoothly, Alexander-Arnold signed new long-term contracts in November 2016, July 2017, January 2019 and July 2021, with pay rises reflecting his progress and growing importance to the club. Under normal circumstances, with only a four-year deal agreed last time, discussions over a new contract for a star player might have started around two-and-a-half years out — so in this case, in early 2023.
Alexander-Arnold on England duty with Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)
But instead, Alexander-Arnold’s contract has been allowed to run down.
It coincided with when Edwards was succeeded by his former assistant Julian Ward, who was in the role for just five months before handing in his notice. Those five months were the only time in a two-and-a-half-year period between November 2021 and Richard Hughes’s arrival from Bournemouth in May that Liverpool had a sporting director who was not serving his notice or, in the case of Jorg Schmadtke, an interim appointment. Nor did it help that FSG president Mike Gordon scaled back his day-to-day business at Liverpool for some of that time.
Diaz is still on the relatively small contract he signed when he was signed from Porto in January 2022. A Liverpool player of his status might previously have seen his deal improved and extended after an impressive first year or two — as Robertson, Salah and Jota did, among others — but that hasn’t happened, which is one reason why there was considerable noise around the Colombia international’s future this summer.
It is an unenviable situation for Edwards to return to and for Hughes and Slot to inherit. Van Dijk and Salah continue to perform at an extremely high level, one that suggests they would ideally be retained beyond this season. For Alexander-Arnold, replace “ideally” with “imperatively”. To lose a world-class player who has been with the club since he was six — and to lose him for no fee — would be about as far from “ideal” as is imaginable.
Liverpool had this with Steve McManaman in the late 1990s, when he went to Real Madrid. They had it with Michael Owen, who was hurriedly sold to the same Spanish club at a knockdown price in summer 2004 after entering the final year of his contract. Even at the height of Edwards’ success in his first spell at the club, there were setbacks when Emre Can and Georginio Wijnaldum left for Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain respectively as free agents, having run down their deals and ended up poles apart from the club when it came to the terms of renewal.
It is striking that Liverpool have not tried to put the squeeze on their players the way some clubs do (for example, Paris Saint-Germain with Kylian Mbappe after he entered the final year of his contract last summer, with a free transfer to Real Madrid the inevitable outcome). There has been no talk of ultimatums and no attempts to brief the club’s position to the media when correcting the odd loose statement might put them at odds with the player. It is all far more respectful. As it should be. As it has to be.
PSG lost their star player Mbappe to Real Madrid on a free this summer (Florencia Tan Jun/Getty Images)
The difficulty for Hughes and Slot is that these situations, which should have been addressed long before they arrived at Liverpool, are so much harder to resolve now the players and their agents know they have all the leverage, fully aware of the kind of sums that might be on offer if they went to Spain or Saudi Arabia — or indeed a rival Premier League club.
A leading agent, talking anonymously out of respect for those involved, suggests the only smooth way for a club to negotiate a contract with a leading player is to offer improved terms at least two years from the end of their present deal. By the final 12 months, the player can effectively dictate the terms in the knowledge he can walk away if no agreement is reached.
The same agent also points to how, by the final year of a top player’s contract, negotiations almost always play out against a background of tension: opening offers come in below the expected level, in some cases, with relationships stretched and egos bruised, talks commence on a bad footing and never recover as the player is left with the feeling he will find greater appreciation — and usually more money, including a huge signing-on fee — elsewhere.
Even something as trivial as Alexander-Arnold’s withdrawal by Slot in the closing stages of a routine 2-0 win over Brentford last month becomes loaded with potential significance when the player reacts as he did then, puffing out his cheeks and looking dismayed as if he was wondering what on earth this new regime at the club is all about and why exactly he should be in any rush to commit the best years of his career to it.
The easiest way to win over an unsettled player is by making him an offer he cannot refuse.
But that has never really been Edwards’ style. He has always left the impression that there is a ceiling to every player’s value — in terms of transfer fee and wages — and that there is nobody so brilliant that a top-class recruitment team cannot propose a more reasonably priced alternative.
In so many ways, Liverpool are the anti-Chelsea: evolution rather than revolution, continuity over upheaval. When they have bought at the top of the market — breaking the world transfer records for a defender and a goalkeeper to sign Van Dijk and then Alisson in successive windows in 2018 — they have almost always hit the mark.
But Liverpool’s struggle to sign a top-class holding midfielder, going back to the unsuccessful pursuit of Aurelien Tchouameni in 2022, proves the market is not as straightforward as Edwards and Klopp made it look in that mid-to-late-2010s purple patch that yielded so much success. Even if, financially, there is a case for letting Salah pursue a new challenge rather than offering an enormous contract that might take him to the age of 34 or 35, what is the cost of trying to replace him or Van Dijk with a younger model?
And where do you find another footballer like Alexander-Arnold? For all the undoubted promise of his young understudy Bradley, Alexander-Arnold brings a whole different dimension to Liverpool’s play. That is before you consider his symbolic and commercial value as a local lad, the modern embodiment of the connection between club and city.
The problem Edwards and Hughes have inherited is that Liverpool are approaching all of these discussions from a position of weakness. They might feel they can resist the outside noise, but there is a different type of pressure to a high-profile negotiation when a star player is in the final year.
The immediate challenge facing the new regime at Anfield was to get the succession right and to ensure things went as smoothly as possible. By far the biggest challenge now is addressing those player contracts.
You don’t have to go to the other extreme and tie down dozens of players on long-term deals. It isn’t about trying to follow the Chelsea model or anything like it. It is about protecting assets and continually planning for the long term, which Liverpool were so good at during Edwards’ first spell at the club.
That is the standard they must return to.
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(Top photo: John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)