Liverpool contract situation looks to be weighing heavy as Fulham take advantage

Liverpool suffered just their second Premier League loss with Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah making costly errors. Have the owners nailed the contract mess?

One former football chairman once told us he always found that fielding players who are soon to be out of contract is a big risk.

Whether subconsciously or not, there is always a distinct possibility that those players are not going to give it everything they’ve got when they know they’re on their way out – in much the same way that you or I would, on some level, start phoning it in after handing in our notice.

It’s hard to escape the whiff of that about Liverpool over the past six weeks or so. It’s not that they’re completely lacking – they had gone 26 games unbeaten in the league since September, for god’s sake – but Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah have looked nothing like themselves since the win at Manchester City at the end of February.

Going out of the Champions League with the knowledge that they already have nine fingers on the handles of the Premier League trophy lends an “I’ve already done my job” air to the pair’s recent performances.

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Van Dijk was unusually lax in kneeing a looping loose ball towards his own goal for Fulham to score their third, while Salah once again went into hiding on the wing. When he did get a golden opportunity to pull a goal back in the second half, he ballooned the ball well over the bar.

That has given Liverpool, as a club, an amusing chicken and egg scenario. Have their hardiest veterans started failing to turn up because their contracts are winding down? Or are Liverpool allowing those contracts to wind down because they predicted that these declines were coming?

That may be giving Liverpool far too much credit. The same argument cannot be made over Trent Alexander-Arnold, for one – a player in his prime years who has likewise found himself on the verge of leaving on a Bosman. Salah is the Premier League’s top scorer, top assist maker and until recently the favourite for the Ballon d’Or; a few anonymous performances do not erase that.

There’s also quite possibly a bit of post hoc, ergo propter hoc in there: after the fact, therefore because of the fact. Liverpool’s coast towards the title had all the narrative juice sucked out of it months ago, leaving those contract talks as their highest-profile talking point.

And those contract talks do not explain why Andy Robertson has declined so much. He, too, was guilty of handing a well-taken goal to Fulham here as they took the lead.

Nor does it explain why Liverpool have developed a distinct tendency over this second half of the season to look entirely competent and comfortable until the moment they take the lead, at which point they bizarrely fall to pieces for a spell. Fulham simply took far better advantage of that than Everton, Wolves and Aston Villa were able to.

We want to stress that we have no desire to be overly critical here. If there were anything more interesting and new to say about Liverpool, we would not be so damning of them in light of just their second Premier League loss of the season.

But even if this defeat does little to harm their Premier League prospects, you can’t help but wonder whether they might have hoisted the League Cup and remained in the Champions League running if they had not started to run out of steam so early – and how big a part those potential high-profile departures has played in their loss of purpose and clarity.

However it ends, you suspect Liverpool will be glad when we can finally shut up about it.

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