But we have also compounded that by keeping them around and letting them basically run their contracts down.
Benteke was a dreadful signing but we quickly moved him on and even got our money back which was reinvested in Mane. On a lower scale it was becoming clear we couldn't rely on Ings's fitness so he was moved on which freed up a squad place for Jota. Even Carroll was quickly jettisoned and we managed to get a lot of that ludicrous fee back.
Ox and Keita should have been moved on sooner and replaced with similar profile players to what we hoped we were getting when we signed them. So ultimately Klopp suffers from having to operate with one hand tied behind his back compared to City - or the money pits at Chelsea and United - but we really need to be more ruthless than we are. We're not a retirement home.
I can't understand why Ox wasn't sold either last January or early in the summer. Just get him off the payroll.
I know there's a sense of the club having a certain value in mind for each player and barely deviating from that, in order to preserve the value of transfer fees we receive so to help the financial side of things. But when the market won't pay that price, we're stuck with the player on the books - and the financially-constricted way we operate, that blocks us going out and signing a player who would be more useful to us.
So, for the sake of the club insisting that 'player x' is worth £20m, when the market says "nah, £5-10m", we keep a player who isn't providing any value to the squad and don't sign a replacement who could improve us, citing that we already have too bloated a squad.
This practice has now left us with a midfield that, in reality, is now below the quality required to compete at the very top level (it's been second-best against 3 very ordinary teams that will be nowhere near the top of the league come the end of the season)
It's so frustrating because we're effectively now having to down-scale our expectations of the season, and are already likely too far behind to race to the title.
Even if we do buy a midfielder or two next summer, people like Virg and Mo are another year older; what if their effectiveness starts to wane? So then next season we reach mid-autumn, and the same discussion comes along of "We should have got another [insert position] in because we're now too thin in that area"
Success in football is a case of having a collection of players all playing at the highest level at the same time. That's what we had in that 2018 - 2021 period. But we've not effectively replaced players who have declined/are declining from that peak.It's not enough to have half a side at the required level and the other half not up to it. That's a recipe for the sort of pattern we saw under Evans/Houllier/Benitez/Rodgers.
