Liverpool urged to pull out of £118m Wirtz deal after 'wild' valuation

Not all Liverpool fans want their club ‘shopping at this table’ when they need a striker. Plus, a Ballon d’Or shout and Ange talk.

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Move on from Wirtz, Liverpool

Am I the only Liverpool fan hoping Leverkusen don’t budge on their asking price and we spend the money for two or three world-class players instead? Szoboszlai and a rejuvenated Elliot surely do the trick as 10’s. The difference in valuations for Wirtz and Cherki is wild.

I’d much rather get a defensive midfielder to push Gravenberch and a striker, as well as maybe finding a young, exciting wide forward. At the heart of it, I don’t want my team to be shopping at this table and would prefer we sign players without the price tag pressure who can develop into stars.

Niall, Annapolis

READ: Chelsea splurge £100m already to lead biggest summer spenders list

The Era of the Golden Full-Back

I don’t know when or why we started caring about the Ballon d’Or, but we do so fine.

That said, post-Messi and CR7, it’s become less obvious who should win this award and why. It seems to be awarded to the best attacking player at a big club that won some trophies. Rodri, along with Cannavaro in 2006, are the only non-attacking players to win it this century.

However, based on current form, I’d argue that the two best players in the world have actually been full backs. I’d say Nuno Mendes and Achraf Hakimi are currently the best in the world. I know this is hugely controversial, as neither is a traditional attacking player.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t tracked Mendes closely all season, so I’m not sure how consistent his impact has been throughout, however his impact for both PSG and now Portugal at the end of the season has been massive.

Hakimi, on the other hand, is a player I’ve admired for years. He has already played significant roles at major clubs in Germany, Italy, and France after breaking through in his native Spain. And yes, although his family is Moroccan, he was born and raised in Spain. As a teenager, he broke into the Real Madrid first team and was part of the squad that won the Champions League.

At Dortmund, he established himself as a first-team regular at 19, then earned a big-money move to Inter, where he became one of their star players and helped them win their first Serie A title in a decade, ending Juventus’s nine-year dominance. While at PSG, he’s won four more league titles and has arguably been one of their most important players in finally winning the Champions League.

Add to that his key role in Morocco’s historic run to the 2022 World Cup semi-finals (the first African team to do so). To emphasise his importance and leadership, he even scored the winning penalty against Spain, his country of birth, confidently converting a Panenka in the style of Zidane. While many players took last summer off, Hakimi chose to represent Morocco in the Olympics as one of the overage players, captaining them to a semi-final finish where they were defeated by eventual champions Spain.

Backing this up with some data: at just 26 years old, Hakimi already has 84 caps for Morocco and has been transferred for a combined total of over £100 million yet has continued to thrive after every move.

I know the Ballon d’Or is based only on the most recent European season, but based on his form this year and his overall impact on the game, I believe Hakimi is the most deserving player to win the trophy.

Paul K, London

Still talking about success, Arsenal and Spurs

I’ve seen few responses to my email. It was a little tongue in cheek but I appreciate that tone isn’t always clear in a written email, which I assume is where Dixon gets the assumption that I’m giddy.

To come back on that though, Poch was a very successful Spurs manager, unlike Ange who had some trophy luck. Well done to them by the way, and for all I’m an Arsenal supporter, I don’t begrudge Spurs getting to celebrate a trophy win. I wish back when we were competing in Europa we’d manage to grab one but I’ll kindly pass on being back in with a chance any time soon if we can stay in the Champions League and try and progress there instead.

My email was more about this weird binary viewpoint from fans and some sections of the media on success in football and how the actions of Daniel Levy do a decent job of showing that it is in fact far more nuanced than that. You can win a trophy and still have had a shite season. Success in football isn’t just measured in trophies, but I’m also, just to be clear, not implying that trophies aren’t important. They’re the culmination of success but often, league trophies for example, take a great deal longer to win than just the season in which they’re won. It’s the work of seasons through coaching, transfers, squad management, personality / mindset / resilience and a healthy dose of luck at the right times! The benefit of this sustained progress/success is that it can also help you win the trophies that do come down to luck a fair bit more.

This is really easy to demonstrate because we can all think of a year when someone has won a cup and they definitely weren’t the best team in a competition. I’ll help illustrate this with an example close to home.

If I wrote in in 2020 and pretended that Arteta’s Arsenal right near the beginning of their journey were a better team than Man City we’d have all agreed that was madness. If we’d said Arsenal had a better season, we’d have all agreed that was madness. If I’d said Arsenal were as good a team as Liverpool that year that would be utter madness. We were inconsistent in the league (and that team had as many shockingly awful players as it did good ones – sometimes they were the same players at different points in the same game even!).

We won a trophy because we were able to up our game on a few key occasions and rode our luck and got some lucky breaks (he’ll even Pulisic going off injured in the final counts there).

The point is success isn’t binary, winning a cup can mask underperformance elsewhere. A sustained level over a season and multiple seasons is a much better measure of success than the odd cup – hence why Arteta’s team is much better now than they were in 2020 even though they haven’t won any cups since.

Daniel Levy has demonstrated he’s not letting sentiment win out over common sense on that front by not keeping Ange who hasn’t delivered on the measures of success that matter most in the long-term. Hell if trophies did genuinely matter more than anything else we wouldn’t all write off the Community Shield – which technically is built on having had more prior success than all the teams that don’t get to play in that match.

But of course the Community Shield isn’t important and nobody sees at as anything beyond a glorified friendly and an early chance to get one over a rival team but that in truth is forgotten about before the first league game kicks off.

However, trophies are still important. Arteta’s work at Arsenal really needs a trophy to cap it off and take him beyond the likes of Poch who created good teams but were not able to translate that into that final step. If Arteta had won the Carabao Cup or even the FA Cup this year let’s not pretend you’ll all suddenly accept he was doing a good job. You don’t like him and/or Arsenal and that’s fine. I don’t like your teams either and at best I’m indifferent to their managers!

I’m disappointed we weren’t able to push on this season but I’m accepting that there’s a number of factors that played into that, including Liverpool being much better and much more consistent than us!

Hopefully we can do the work over the summer (squad and coaching) to set us up for success that’s punctuated with trophies next season. I’ll be gutted if we don’t win any because this is a good Arsenal team after a great many years of at best ok Arsenal teams with the odd good player.

In short, not all trophies are equal, not all success is equal and not all success is measured in trophies.

James (Gooner exiled in the North East)

READ: Thomas Frank sack incoming as Spurs and football are stupid, mate

Spurs decision is about the future

I just read Johnny’s take on Ange leaving Spurs, and while I’m grateful it wasn’t another piece about how VAR has ruined football or the Premier League has too much money, it was based on a common misconception.

Apparently Spurs should have stuck with Ange because he won something and didn’t get Spurs relegated. Since Spurs aren’t going to win the league that is the best we can do and he therefore should be feted. But this the flaw in Johnny’s thinking, which is that you don’t decide to keep a manager based on what they’ve achieved, you do so based on what you think they will do going forward. What has happened is in the books and can’t be changed, so it only matters whether you think Ange is the right guy to achieve your goals next year.

And that’s the problem, winning the Europa was great but league form against better opposition is a better indicator of what you are likely to get in future, and those 22 defeats were not a good indicator at all. Pretending they only happened because we prioritised the cup doesn’t wash either, both because it wasn’t what Ange said at the time (he told everyone results would improve when he got players back) and the league form wasn’t good enough before that anyway.

Ultimately Ange won a cup in which Spurs had better players than all the teams they played by playing solid, uninspiring football. There is no way those performances would wash over a 38-game league season or in the Champions League, and one reverted to his normal style there is more than enough evidence to show teams have worked it out. Spurs made the right decision.

Phil, London

This Spurs fan is disgruntled

Heated debate between Spurs and other fans about this decision and I’ve finally sobered up enough to try and process it.

Yes, 17th is abysmal, and yes Spurs were frequently blunt and porous in the league and the paying fans are entitled to feel anger about the many rubbish performances. Yes Ange dared to gamble it all and 17th and trophyless would absolutely warrant dismissal. No, Ange didn’t do enough to adapt the style to be more solid, yes he clashed with the fans (were the moaners among the millions who celebrated the trophy or the 220K who turned out for the Parade I wonder?).

There is so much mitigation for the league form. It’s unreasonable to expect chemistry when you don’t have continuity and practically every single squad player missed large chunks of the season. Hive mind of F365, where do we think a team regularly fielding an 18 year old midfielder and lovable-but-unimposing Davies as starting CBs should finish in the world’s best, toughest, fastest league? Any team that had to play 30 different back 5 combinations – top half? Get real.

To say “they almost got relegated” is preposterous. The relegated were confirmed long ago and Spurs were 13 points clear of trouble even after phoning it in for 2+ months and clearly prioritising the Europa. If they’d won 2 more games like they should have done – lets say Leicester early in the season and Brighton on the final day and finished 12th, would that really make any tangible difference?

The argument that the quality of the final or opposition somehow diminish the achievement of finally winning a trophy (we’ve been hearing for years that trophies matter?!) is equally preposterous. Similarly, the notion that you reserve the right to change the rules of a competition half way through because the winners are in X position in their league – as Ange said, Spurs does crazy things to people.

The decision to prioritise the Europa was vindicated. Resting VDV and Romero for irrelevant league games? Vindicated by their clutch performances in the final.

Hive mind of F365, who would be more likely to be successful in the league in 25/26, a guy who the players love, with a young but newly battle-hardened squad, full of confidence and boosted with a couple of new faces, or starting over with a brand new project with unhappy players and a guy who’s never managed in Europe before?

I fear that we have shot our legs off, alienated fans and players and undone all the good work. It’s going to be a long rebuild if you keep taking the foundations out just as they’re starting to set. Could he have been our Ferguson and this awesome batch of kids our class of 92? Levy has robbed us of ever finding out by making a decision that didn’t even need to be made.

O Clark (I am disgruntled)

Pjanic stations

Delighted to see Miralem Pjanic’s name. Wondered if we’d ever see the Pjanic at the Disco pun again. Shame it wasn’t possible to use it, the Pjanic button is decent, but. Fingers crossed there’s another opportunity.

Finlay x

(It was Pjanic on the streets of London in my day – Ed)

A Dick XI

All these XIs you’ve been listing brought up something from the back of my mind. I’ve been around quite a long time now and there has for some reason never been many players with my first name, which is not an unusual one, especially compared with the number of Garys, Pauls, Kevins, Davids or even Jermaines. So I had to borrow some foreigns to put together my team of Dicks:

GK Richard Wright

RB Richard Dunne

CB Ricardo Carvalho

CB Richard Gough

LB Richard Shaw

RM Ricardo Quaresma

CM Ricardo Montolivo

CM Richard Witschge

LM Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite (Kaka to his friends)

ST Rickie Lambert

ST Ricardo Fuller

Subs: Ricardo (GK), Richard Rufus, Richard Jobson, Richard Stearman, Richard Hughes, Ricardo Villa, Ricardo Vaz Te

Coach: Dick Advocaat

Quality is somewhat patchy, and I wouldn’t attack them through the middle with that pair of centre-backs keeping some decent players on the bench, but you could definitely get at them down the flanks where for one thing full-back was a problem position as I refused to let myself pick Julian Dicks, and for another I don’t fancy much tracking back from the wide midfielders.

Richard (hats off to anyone who sends in an XI of X’s) Pike

A world of their own

If anyone ever doubted the arrogance and “in a world of their own” detachment of our referees, then they need to watch the Soccer Aid special of a popular TV quiz from Saturday.

The ONLY person eliminated in the first round was our good friend Dermot Gallagher. This was a spot the difference question and echoing real life, Dermot failed to spot something seen by everyone else! He explained this in true ref watch fashion as being because he is colour blind and couldn’t see the “difference”. It was then pointed out to him that the item was not just a different colour but also a different shape!

More was to follow when Graham “I know more than you” Poll was eliminated. When told the correct answer and that he had given the wrong one, he replied “that’s wrong. Under the laws of the game, by which we live, only a goalkeeper is allowed to wear gloves and therefore mine is the correct answer”!

Cue a player, Razor Ruddock, calling out that “lots of players wear gloves when it’s cold. Why don’t you stop the game when that happens? I’ll tell you why, COS YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING”!

Further evidence of their “I’m right you’re wrong and if I’m wrong, I’ll justify it”, there was no hint or attempt at humour in their responses. No wonder our game is officiated in such an incompetent way.

Howard (they never fail to embarrass themselves do they) Jones

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