WELCOME to the Gutter, The Anfield Wrap’s descent into the depths of transfer tittle-tattle from the tabloids, waffle from the websites. It can be murky down here, but we look to give you the best possible guide.
In the second Gutter of the week, Rob entertains Simon Hughes, Jay McKenna and Paul Cope.
Amongst various and rather tenuous links, the main focus of lads discussion centres around the importance of not just signing players, but retaining our most talented in light of interest around Philippe Coutinho.
In a free clip from the show, Rob, Simon, Jay and Paul chat about the importance of a massive summer for Liverpool.
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Rob, it sounds like you are panicking a bit early in silly season.
If Gotze doesn’t want to come, so be it, throwing silly money at him for a salary would be daft. At the moment he is a player whose value has dropped, so he should not be expecting huge step up for his next move. If he comes, he is likely to be made Liverpool’s top earner, but talk of 200k+ is insanity.
I think benchmarking him against Milner is flawed. Milner (whatever his limitations) is a senior pro, on what is likely to be his last big contract and was offered a higher salary by City. Gotze on the other hand is surplus to requirements at Bayern and they clearly want rid.
Throwing silly money at any player can be an expensive mistake. Pay a new player 200k+, and unless they are clearly a class above every other player in the team, we can expect to see all the key players using that as a benchmark for their next contract negotiation. It also opens us to the Adebayour scenario, where you can’t offload a player because he won’t take a drop in salary to move on.
Although, I am willing to believe Gotze could be a better option for us behind the striker than the players we already have, we are not short of number 10s are we? If Firmino is not our number 10, what is he?
Jay and Paul are wrong about Diouf and Diao – both were signed by Houllier BEFORE the 2002 World Cup