Going back two seasons, Liverpool had one of the best squads in Europe. On paper, a lot of talent remains. Yet even accepting many players individually and collectively under-performed last season, the squad today looks well short of what Liverpool fans expected it to be at this stage.
Lacking depth and wildly imbalanced in places, with the season kicking off against Newcastle on Sunday and work still to be done in the transfer market, there’s plenty of concern and consternation amongst the fanbase.
New head coach Andoni Iraola, though, says that signings are coming.
“We will definitely sign some players,” Iraola told Sky ahead of the opening round of the Premier League season. “Some deals you have to wait until the end, but the end is the important part of the picture, the one we will have on September first, because it is true that we are still quite thin.”
In the past, Liverpool managers have tended not to explicitly say signings are coming, tending to stick to more vague promises about the club always looking for opportunities to improve and similar. The question then is if a shift in how potential transfers get discussed is just how Iraola communicates.
Alternately, it could be an acceptance of the trust gap that has begun to grow between fanbase and club watching so many of the gains of the Klopp era seeming to have been taken apart—at times almost consciously so—since Michael Edwards returned and named Richard Hughes sporting director.
Even with promises of new signings and an explicit acknowledgement that the club recognise just how thin and unbalanced the current squad is, though, things can go wrong when transfer business gets dragged out. One only has to look back to last year’s Marc Ghuei debacle for proof of that.
Still, in the current environment and with the current mood around the club—and a growing sense Iraola would be being set up for failure if a few significant deals don’t get done—it is nice to get that explicit confirmation. It’s not the new signings Liverpool need, but it’s better than nothing.
