Another good (and long) article from Oliver Kay in the Athletic
A revolution is happening at Liverpool. It is unusual for them and a rarity for champions
Oliver Kay
Aug. 12, 2025
When Arne Slot eventually emerged from Liverpool’s dressing room after their final game of last season, a big smile on his face and celebratory songs still ringing in his ears, he was inevitably asked about how he planned to build on their Premier League title success.
“Radical changes, you will probably not see,” the Liverpool manager said. “That (radical change) would be a bit weird if you won the league.”
It was a response in keeping both with his own reputation and that of a club that has shown far more restraint in the transfer market than most of its rivals in recent years, both in the amount of money spent and the number of players signed.
But what has followed this summer can certainly be classed as radical, not just by Liverpool’s standards but also by those of title-winning teams more widely. They have signed Florian Wirtz, Jeremie Frimpong, Milos Kerkez and Hugo Ekitike for a combined total in excess of £250million ($338m) and are still pursuing Newcastle United forward Alexander Isak for what would be a British record transfer fee some way beyond their £116m deal for Wirtz.
Even without Isak for now, Liverpool have been the biggest spenders in the Premier League so far this summer, albeit with around £168m ($226m) recouped via the sales of Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Caoimhin Kelleher, Jarell Quansah and others. By the time the transfer window closes on September 1, they hope to have signed Isak and a new central defender, such as Parma youngster Giovanni Leoni, while Kostas Tsimikas, Harvey Elliott and Federico Chiesa are likely to have been moved on.
Only once since the turn of the century (in 2018) have Liverpool been the biggest spenders in the Premier League’s summer transfer market, but it is from a broader perspective that the Merseyside club’s approach is more interesting.
You would have to go back to 2019 — and Manchester City, with a fast-improving Liverpool at their heels — to find the last summer that the previous season’s champions topped the Premier League’s spending table. Before that? Manchester United, with the signings of Owen Hargreaves, Anderson, Nani and Carlos Tevez in 2007.
Champions do not usually make the biggest waves in the summer transfer market; indeed, according to the figures on Transfermarkt, on only three other occasions since the mid-2000s (Chelsea in 2010 and 2017 and Manchester City in 2023) have the reigning champions even been among the three biggest summer spenders.
Note the emphasis on “summer” here. There have been various instances when a club has shown restraint in the summer after a title triumph but felt compelled to spend big in the mid-season transfer window in an attempt to recover from an unexpected slump. Manchester City last season was a stark example of the genre: quiet summer, alarming collapse, £180m-plus outlay on five new players in January. Non-buyer’s remorse, you might call it.
Nobody can accuse Liverpool of resting on their laurels since last season’s title success. Indeed, the more common accusation this summer has been that they have been too active in looking to strengthen in attacking positions in particular. Their former defender Jamie Carragher sounded genuinely troubled when he said on the Overlap YouTube channel last week, with regard to going for Isak even after the signing of Ekitike, that “it doesn’t feel Liverpool-like to me”.
It doesn’t, in the sense that it seems… well, to use Slot’s word, radical. This is a club that has, for the most part, restricted itself to no more than a handful of additions to the first-team squad before each season and sometimes fewer than that — only Chiesa last summer, only Ibrahima Konate in 2021, only a couple of back-up goalkeepers in 2019.
Despite breaking the world record for fees spent on a defender (Virgil van Dijk) and goalkeeper (Alisson) in the space of eight months in 2018, they have largely steered clear of the very top end of the transfer market under Fenway Sports Group’s ownership.
This summer’s approach, led by sporting director Richard Hughes, has been very different. To commit to a British record fee to sign Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen was a powerful statement of intent, but few would have imagined, after the captures of Frimpong and Kerkez, that they would follow up with a projected £79m deal to sign Ekitike from Eintracht Frankfurt and still muscle their way to the front of the queue for Isak, should Newcastle be persuaded to sell their unsettled Swedish centre-forward.
If it is radical, it is because, unusually for a title-winning team, a revolution of sorts was overdue. Over the previous six years, their transfer expenditure was not just way below the other “Big Six” clubs (Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal in that order) but also less than what was spent by West Ham United, Newcastle, Brighton & Hove Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. In that context, last season’s title success, so soon after Slot took over from Jurgen Klopp, was somewhat unexpected.
In his book How to Win the Premier League, Liverpool’s former director of research Ian Graham cites the club’s success in integrating three new signings into the first-team squad in each of their first four seasons under Klopp’s management: Nathaniel Clyne, James Milner and Roberto Firmino in 2015-16 (when Klopp replaced Brendan Rodgers after the campaign began), Joel Matip, Georginio Wijnaldum and Sadio Mane in 2016-17, Andy Robertson, Mohamed Salah and Van Dijk in 2017-18 and Alisson, Fabinho and Naby Keita in 2018-19.
There were some significant acquisitions in the years that followed (Thiago Alcantara and Diogo Jota in 2020, Konate in 2021, Diaz in January 2022, Nunez in the summer of 2022, Cody Gakpo in January 2023) but not enough, it seemed, to give Klopp the best chance of building on the 2020 title triumph. An ageing midfield department was neglected until the summer of 2023, when Fabinho, Jordan Henderson, Milner, Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain all departed and Wataru Endo, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai arrived.
Stability has served Liverpool well, but the risk of stagnation always loomed in the background, testing even Klopp’s famed energy and powers of motivation. That was seen in the gradual deterioration of their midfield unit prior to the 2023 overhaul. That same risk has applied to their defence, with Konate and Tsimikas the only significant new additions between Van Dijk (January 2018) and Frimpong and Kerkez (this summer). The ages of Van Dijk and Robertson, plus the fact Alexander-Arnold has left for Real Madrid and Konate has yet to extend his contract beyond next summer, underline the need for change, as evidenced so far by the signings of Frimpong and Kerkez and the interest in Leoni, 18, who broke into Parma’s team last season.
There is a compelling argument that Liverpool’s summer activity, while radical by their standards, has not yet gone far enough. More central-defensive cover looks like a matter of urgency. As imperious as Van Dijk is, he is 34 and cannot be expected to maintain that standard indefinitely; Konate is in the final year of his contract and, although he achieved a personal record of 31 Premier League appearances last season, his playing time had to be managed carefully by Slot to minimise the threat of injury; Joe Gomez is the club’s longest-serving player, but his number of Premier League starts over the past five campaigns (six, four, 15, 17, six) point to the risk of taking his availability for granted. In that context, the decision to sell Quansah to Leverkusen was a surprising one, even if the 22-year-old felt frustrated by his lack of playing time.
On one hand, the pursuit of Isak, on top of the Ekitike deal, might look like an indulgence too far. On the other hand, Liverpool went into last season with six senior forwards (Salah, Chiesa, Jota, Nunez, Diaz, Gakpo) to cover three positions in the front line. At present, they have only four (Salah, Chiesa, Gakpo, Ekitike) and nobody would be surprised if Chiesa follows Diaz and Nunez in leaving before the transfer deadline on September 1. As talented as Ben Doak, 19, and Rio Ngumoha, 16, certainly are, there is a clear deficit in proven front-line experience even if Chiesa ends up staying.
It still feels horribly insensitive to discuss the death of Jota and his brother Andre Silva, in a car crash in Spain on July 3, in terms of anything other than the immense loss felt on a human level. But while his No 20 shirt has been retired in his honour, the brutal reality is that leaving a vacancy in the forward line has not been an option for Liverpool — particularly not with Diaz and Nunez having been sold to Bayern Munich and Al Hilal respectively. In an ideal world, they might not have gone for both Ekitike and Isak in the same transfer window. This summer’s circumstances have been the opposite of that: tragic, harrowing, traumatic.
Nobody can know how Liverpool players might be affected, individually or collectively, by the loss of Jota. Van Dijk has talked of the team’s wish to honour their former team-mate’s memory “each and every day” and to “carry on his legacy” while supporting his family in every way they can. That commitment comes with a heavy emotional burden, even if it is shared. Of all the threats to their title defence, grief is perhaps the most unpredictable.
It cannot go unmentioned that Jota’s frequent game-changing contributions on the pitch will be missed too. So will the match-winning qualities of Alexander-Arnold, Diaz and, though they were spasmodic, Nunez. Nor is the ease with which Kelleher and Quansah stepped up to deputise for Alisson and Konate respectively at times last season likely to be underestimated by anyone, least of all Slot. Elliott did not start a Premier League game last term until after the title was won, but he was highly effective as a substitute on occasions.
A title-winning club might typically focus on upgrading one or two positions in the starting line-up and one or two more peripheral signings; a fairly typical example would be Manchester City in the summer of 2019 (midfielder Rodri from Atletico Madrid for £62.8m and full-back Joao Cancelo from Juventus in a swap deal valued at £60m, plus a back-up goalkeeper, Zak Steffen, and left-back, Angelino) or 2022 (Erling Haaland from Borussia Dortmund for £51.2m, plus Stefan Ortega, Manuel Akanji, Sergio Gomez and Kalvin Phillips) or indeed Liverpool in the summer of 2020 (Tsmikas as cover at left-back, Thiago as a high-quality addition in midfield and Jota to add more variety to a forward line that had been so reliant on Salah, Mane and Firmino).
The unprecedented scale of this summer’s changes at Anfield reflect a range of events and circumstances: most obviously the Jota tragedy, but also Alexander-Arnold’s departure, after running down his contract, and the feeling on all sides that this was the right time for Quansah, Diaz and Nunez to move on — as it might also prove to be for Tsimikas and Elliott.
Beyond that, there is a desire, shared by Hughes and Slot, to rebuild, rejuvenate and re-energise the squad and to bring in players of a higher calibre, particularly in creative areas. As Slot put it after defeat by Crystal Palace on penalties in the Community Shield on Sunday: “Last season, we had a lot of ball possession, but that didn’t always lead to promising situations.” With Wirtz, Ekitike and others on board, he said: “We are better in creating and getting promising situations than we were, in my opinion, throughout the whole of last season.”
That might be a terrifying thought for the rest of the Premier League, given that Liverpool scored 14 more goals than the next most prolific team (Manchester City) last season and that they still hope to add Isak to their attacking options. The prospect of Wirtz as a creative foil for Salah, Ekitike and Isak is mouthwatering. But it is also possible to imagine that a more expansive approach might leave gaps that opposition teams can exploit, as Palace did at Wembley on Sunday.
There is a strange contradiction about all of this: that although Slot surpassed every expectation as a newcomer to the Premier League last season by refining and improving the squad he inherited from Klopp with only one low-key addition (Chiesa), he perhaps faces a more complicated challenge in year two — in terms of managing change and finding the right balance — with a squad that aligns more closely to his technical and tactical vision.
Conventional thinking usually dictates restraint after winning a league title — nothing too dramatic, nothing too radical.
But then again, the same conventional thinking demanded action last summer when there was so much pressure on Hughes and Slot to make an immediate impression. Instead, they embraced stability. By doing so, they ensured that this summer would be about inviting and embracing change and all the unknowns — some of them exciting, some of them unnerving — that come with it. It is radical, but it is, unusually, a revolution being conducted from a position of strength and trust.
A revolution is happening at Liverpool. It is unusual for them and a rarity for champions
Oliver Kay
Aug. 12, 2025
When Arne Slot eventually emerged from Liverpool’s dressing room after their final game of last season, a big smile on his face and celebratory songs still ringing in his ears, he was inevitably asked about how he planned to build on their Premier League title success.
“Radical changes, you will probably not see,” the Liverpool manager said. “That (radical change) would be a bit weird if you won the league.”
It was a response in keeping both with his own reputation and that of a club that has shown far more restraint in the transfer market than most of its rivals in recent years, both in the amount of money spent and the number of players signed.
But what has followed this summer can certainly be classed as radical, not just by Liverpool’s standards but also by those of title-winning teams more widely. They have signed Florian Wirtz, Jeremie Frimpong, Milos Kerkez and Hugo Ekitike for a combined total in excess of £250million ($338m) and are still pursuing Newcastle United forward Alexander Isak for what would be a British record transfer fee some way beyond their £116m deal for Wirtz.
Even without Isak for now, Liverpool have been the biggest spenders in the Premier League so far this summer, albeit with around £168m ($226m) recouped via the sales of Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Caoimhin Kelleher, Jarell Quansah and others. By the time the transfer window closes on September 1, they hope to have signed Isak and a new central defender, such as Parma youngster Giovanni Leoni, while Kostas Tsimikas, Harvey Elliott and Federico Chiesa are likely to have been moved on.
Only once since the turn of the century (in 2018) have Liverpool been the biggest spenders in the Premier League’s summer transfer market, but it is from a broader perspective that the Merseyside club’s approach is more interesting.
You would have to go back to 2019 — and Manchester City, with a fast-improving Liverpool at their heels — to find the last summer that the previous season’s champions topped the Premier League’s spending table. Before that? Manchester United, with the signings of Owen Hargreaves, Anderson, Nani and Carlos Tevez in 2007.
Champions do not usually make the biggest waves in the summer transfer market; indeed, according to the figures on Transfermarkt, on only three other occasions since the mid-2000s (Chelsea in 2010 and 2017 and Manchester City in 2023) have the reigning champions even been among the three biggest summer spenders.
Note the emphasis on “summer” here. There have been various instances when a club has shown restraint in the summer after a title triumph but felt compelled to spend big in the mid-season transfer window in an attempt to recover from an unexpected slump. Manchester City last season was a stark example of the genre: quiet summer, alarming collapse, £180m-plus outlay on five new players in January. Non-buyer’s remorse, you might call it.
Nobody can accuse Liverpool of resting on their laurels since last season’s title success. Indeed, the more common accusation this summer has been that they have been too active in looking to strengthen in attacking positions in particular. Their former defender Jamie Carragher sounded genuinely troubled when he said on the Overlap YouTube channel last week, with regard to going for Isak even after the signing of Ekitike, that “it doesn’t feel Liverpool-like to me”.
It doesn’t, in the sense that it seems… well, to use Slot’s word, radical. This is a club that has, for the most part, restricted itself to no more than a handful of additions to the first-team squad before each season and sometimes fewer than that — only Chiesa last summer, only Ibrahima Konate in 2021, only a couple of back-up goalkeepers in 2019.
Despite breaking the world record for fees spent on a defender (Virgil van Dijk) and goalkeeper (Alisson) in the space of eight months in 2018, they have largely steered clear of the very top end of the transfer market under Fenway Sports Group’s ownership.
This summer’s approach, led by sporting director Richard Hughes, has been very different. To commit to a British record fee to sign Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen was a powerful statement of intent, but few would have imagined, after the captures of Frimpong and Kerkez, that they would follow up with a projected £79m deal to sign Ekitike from Eintracht Frankfurt and still muscle their way to the front of the queue for Isak, should Newcastle be persuaded to sell their unsettled Swedish centre-forward.
If it is radical, it is because, unusually for a title-winning team, a revolution of sorts was overdue. Over the previous six years, their transfer expenditure was not just way below the other “Big Six” clubs (Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal in that order) but also less than what was spent by West Ham United, Newcastle, Brighton & Hove Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. In that context, last season’s title success, so soon after Slot took over from Jurgen Klopp, was somewhat unexpected.
In his book How to Win the Premier League, Liverpool’s former director of research Ian Graham cites the club’s success in integrating three new signings into the first-team squad in each of their first four seasons under Klopp’s management: Nathaniel Clyne, James Milner and Roberto Firmino in 2015-16 (when Klopp replaced Brendan Rodgers after the campaign began), Joel Matip, Georginio Wijnaldum and Sadio Mane in 2016-17, Andy Robertson, Mohamed Salah and Van Dijk in 2017-18 and Alisson, Fabinho and Naby Keita in 2018-19.
There were some significant acquisitions in the years that followed (Thiago Alcantara and Diogo Jota in 2020, Konate in 2021, Diaz in January 2022, Nunez in the summer of 2022, Cody Gakpo in January 2023) but not enough, it seemed, to give Klopp the best chance of building on the 2020 title triumph. An ageing midfield department was neglected until the summer of 2023, when Fabinho, Jordan Henderson, Milner, Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain all departed and Wataru Endo, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai arrived.
Stability has served Liverpool well, but the risk of stagnation always loomed in the background, testing even Klopp’s famed energy and powers of motivation. That was seen in the gradual deterioration of their midfield unit prior to the 2023 overhaul. That same risk has applied to their defence, with Konate and Tsimikas the only significant new additions between Van Dijk (January 2018) and Frimpong and Kerkez (this summer). The ages of Van Dijk and Robertson, plus the fact Alexander-Arnold has left for Real Madrid and Konate has yet to extend his contract beyond next summer, underline the need for change, as evidenced so far by the signings of Frimpong and Kerkez and the interest in Leoni, 18, who broke into Parma’s team last season.
There is a compelling argument that Liverpool’s summer activity, while radical by their standards, has not yet gone far enough. More central-defensive cover looks like a matter of urgency. As imperious as Van Dijk is, he is 34 and cannot be expected to maintain that standard indefinitely; Konate is in the final year of his contract and, although he achieved a personal record of 31 Premier League appearances last season, his playing time had to be managed carefully by Slot to minimise the threat of injury; Joe Gomez is the club’s longest-serving player, but his number of Premier League starts over the past five campaigns (six, four, 15, 17, six) point to the risk of taking his availability for granted. In that context, the decision to sell Quansah to Leverkusen was a surprising one, even if the 22-year-old felt frustrated by his lack of playing time.
On one hand, the pursuit of Isak, on top of the Ekitike deal, might look like an indulgence too far. On the other hand, Liverpool went into last season with six senior forwards (Salah, Chiesa, Jota, Nunez, Diaz, Gakpo) to cover three positions in the front line. At present, they have only four (Salah, Chiesa, Gakpo, Ekitike) and nobody would be surprised if Chiesa follows Diaz and Nunez in leaving before the transfer deadline on September 1. As talented as Ben Doak, 19, and Rio Ngumoha, 16, certainly are, there is a clear deficit in proven front-line experience even if Chiesa ends up staying.
It still feels horribly insensitive to discuss the death of Jota and his brother Andre Silva, in a car crash in Spain on July 3, in terms of anything other than the immense loss felt on a human level. But while his No 20 shirt has been retired in his honour, the brutal reality is that leaving a vacancy in the forward line has not been an option for Liverpool — particularly not with Diaz and Nunez having been sold to Bayern Munich and Al Hilal respectively. In an ideal world, they might not have gone for both Ekitike and Isak in the same transfer window. This summer’s circumstances have been the opposite of that: tragic, harrowing, traumatic.
Nobody can know how Liverpool players might be affected, individually or collectively, by the loss of Jota. Van Dijk has talked of the team’s wish to honour their former team-mate’s memory “each and every day” and to “carry on his legacy” while supporting his family in every way they can. That commitment comes with a heavy emotional burden, even if it is shared. Of all the threats to their title defence, grief is perhaps the most unpredictable.
It cannot go unmentioned that Jota’s frequent game-changing contributions on the pitch will be missed too. So will the match-winning qualities of Alexander-Arnold, Diaz and, though they were spasmodic, Nunez. Nor is the ease with which Kelleher and Quansah stepped up to deputise for Alisson and Konate respectively at times last season likely to be underestimated by anyone, least of all Slot. Elliott did not start a Premier League game last term until after the title was won, but he was highly effective as a substitute on occasions.
A title-winning club might typically focus on upgrading one or two positions in the starting line-up and one or two more peripheral signings; a fairly typical example would be Manchester City in the summer of 2019 (midfielder Rodri from Atletico Madrid for £62.8m and full-back Joao Cancelo from Juventus in a swap deal valued at £60m, plus a back-up goalkeeper, Zak Steffen, and left-back, Angelino) or 2022 (Erling Haaland from Borussia Dortmund for £51.2m, plus Stefan Ortega, Manuel Akanji, Sergio Gomez and Kalvin Phillips) or indeed Liverpool in the summer of 2020 (Tsmikas as cover at left-back, Thiago as a high-quality addition in midfield and Jota to add more variety to a forward line that had been so reliant on Salah, Mane and Firmino).
The unprecedented scale of this summer’s changes at Anfield reflect a range of events and circumstances: most obviously the Jota tragedy, but also Alexander-Arnold’s departure, after running down his contract, and the feeling on all sides that this was the right time for Quansah, Diaz and Nunez to move on — as it might also prove to be for Tsimikas and Elliott.
Beyond that, there is a desire, shared by Hughes and Slot, to rebuild, rejuvenate and re-energise the squad and to bring in players of a higher calibre, particularly in creative areas. As Slot put it after defeat by Crystal Palace on penalties in the Community Shield on Sunday: “Last season, we had a lot of ball possession, but that didn’t always lead to promising situations.” With Wirtz, Ekitike and others on board, he said: “We are better in creating and getting promising situations than we were, in my opinion, throughout the whole of last season.”
That might be a terrifying thought for the rest of the Premier League, given that Liverpool scored 14 more goals than the next most prolific team (Manchester City) last season and that they still hope to add Isak to their attacking options. The prospect of Wirtz as a creative foil for Salah, Ekitike and Isak is mouthwatering. But it is also possible to imagine that a more expansive approach might leave gaps that opposition teams can exploit, as Palace did at Wembley on Sunday.
There is a strange contradiction about all of this: that although Slot surpassed every expectation as a newcomer to the Premier League last season by refining and improving the squad he inherited from Klopp with only one low-key addition (Chiesa), he perhaps faces a more complicated challenge in year two — in terms of managing change and finding the right balance — with a squad that aligns more closely to his technical and tactical vision.
Conventional thinking usually dictates restraint after winning a league title — nothing too dramatic, nothing too radical.
But then again, the same conventional thinking demanded action last summer when there was so much pressure on Hughes and Slot to make an immediate impression. Instead, they embraced stability. By doing so, they ensured that this summer would be about inviting and embracing change and all the unknowns — some of them exciting, some of them unnerving — that come with it. It is radical, but it is, unusually, a revolution being conducted from a position of strength and trust.
Comment