Liverpool Go Super Saiyan
The Premier League champions are operating above the earthly plane of the transfer market.
Back in the halcyon days of the Nineties and Noughties, I’d come home from school and watch MTV or Cartoon Network. The latter had Dragon Ball Z, and the only thing I can remember about it was Goku going Super Saiyan. Not only did he get a free blond dye-job out of it, he also gained semi-supernatural kung-fu powers that brought him to a whole new level in his battles with … some sort of alien villains. Can’t quite remember.
Around the same time, English football manager Harry Redknapp was earning his reputation as a “wheeler-dealer” in the transfer market, an enterprising Cockney charmer who was continually shoving players out the revolving door of whichever club he was at and yanking new ones in just as fast. It was an almost FIFA Manager Mode approach to incomings and outgoings at a time when great players moved for a few million pounds, maybe eight or nine for a proven Premier League striker.
Today, in the summer of 2025, every Premier League-bound player seems to cost tens of millions of pounds at a minimum. It’s a whole ‘nother stratosphere that clubs are operating in, and managers are rarely in charge of the transfer business anymore. (In fact, they’re rarely managers: most are Head Coaches, whose Sporting Director colleagues spearhead the player recruitment.) But if we can draw a line from then to now, Liverpool Football Club are moving like Harry Redknapp went Super Saiyan.
The Premier League champions have spent tons of money. But first: the outgoings. The Athletic estimates that Liverpool have booked £99.5m in profits already this summer from the sales of Luis Díaz to Bayern Munich, Jarrell Quansah to Bayer Leverkusen, Trent Alexander-Arnold to Real Madrid1, and Nat Phillips to West Brom. They could still yet offload Harvey Elliott and Darwin Nuñez for the kind of sums that explode my brain as an Arsenal fan. Liverpool have long commanded massive fees for their squad players in a way that my club cannot or will not, and that seems set to continue. Somehow, a Red fire sale never means the unwanted players are on sale.
And then there are the incomings. Good Lord. They’re already at £314 million in transfer fees, having brought in Florian Wirtz2, Hugo Ekitike, Milos Kerkez, Jeremie Frimpong, and Giorgi Mamardashvili. That same Athletic piece from Chris Weatherspoon estimates the wage obligations across those players’ five-year contracts at £250m, meaning Liverpool have committed over half a billion pounds to new players already this summer.3
And now they’re linked to Alexander Isak, the best striker in England, and Newcastle are demanding £150 million. Even if Liverpool can whittle that down to, say, £125 million, imagine the Swede’s wages, which would be commensurate with the transfer fee. We’re looking at an outlay of well over three quarters of a billion pounds in one summer, from a club that’s always been known for living within its means and not operating like Chelsea or Manchester City. Now Liverpool have rocketed into the stratosphere without petrodollars in the fuel tank.
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Has Anfield Lost Its Formidable Atmosphere?
The songs came rolling down the Kop in waves, the ones you can make out through the television — “Li-VER-pool, Li-VER-pool” — and others with distinct verses of their own, winding tales that tell the story of what it means to follow one of Europe’s great clubs from a city in the North West of England that thinks of itself as a place apart.
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They’re in rarefied air now, and more gifted mathematicians than I have crunched the numbers and found they have the cash (and the headroom under Premier League and Champions League financial rules) to do it. They are going Super Saiyan, soaring above the rest from an already strong position, and they’re throwing crazy money around at a time when Fenway Sports Group, their ownership, may or may not be pulling back on investing in other holdings like the Boston Red Sox.
Maybe the controlling shareholders, the Americans John W. Henry and Tom Werner, sense an opportunity to become a kind of gigaclub at a time when shifts in football finance are hitting warp speed. They can take Manchester United’s place in the global food chain and set themselves up as the Real Madrid of the North, the kind of outfit that’s always in the Champions League semifinals, always winning domestic league titles, always raking in huge amounts of cash and spending plenty of it on the world’s best players just as they enter their primes.
In fact, they’re doing things that Madrid cannot or will not do. Liverpool have the Premier League coin to go with a rich heritage, and they could be entering a whole new era. Arne Slot might appear on the touchline at Anfield in a couple of weeks with a shock of blond hair.
For all the rage among Liverpool fans that TAA was moving south for free, his boyhood club did get £8.4million to release him early so he could participate in Madrid’s Club World Cup campaign.
Even if Isak leaves Newcastle, Wirtz is probably the best player on the move this summer. The 22-year-old German is a genius.
Liverpool look scary, no doubt, but I do wonder whether they’ve gotten better at the fullback positions. Andy Robertson has lost his burst at left back, so Milos Kerkez could be a step up at this point. But Jeremie Frimpong is more wingback than right back, at least historically, and now he’ll be asked to play in a back four. The Dutchman will be pushed back and challenged by many a Premier League winger.