Trent transfer means Liverpool ‘This Means More’ needs an asterisk

Are Liverpool fans so upset about Trent Alexander-Arnold because it reminds them that this actually does not mean more? Plus, some Inter v Barcelona…

Send your views on any subject – maybe Mikel Arteta – to theeditor@football365.com

What a game that was…
Yeah. I’m going to say that’s the best two-legged tie of football I’ve had the pleasure to watch. Wow.
Gary AVFC, Oxford

…I still believe Barça is ridiculous. They eventually lost, bit that was a match. John Wick finally died.
Bolo (Abuja) FC Barcelona

Mystery as Liverpool fan has a pop at Spanish teams
I want to open by saying teams from every country can be dicks. But watching both Barca and Madrid this season there’s a very whiny bitchy entitlement about Spanish teams.

Barca players throwing their arms in the air every five minutes whenever any decision goes against them, correctly. It’s currently 2-0 at half time and I really hope Inter finish them off, this group of entitled babies don’t deserve to win anything.

And what’s worse is it’s so obvious all their complaining is really stemming from the fact that Inter have totally outplayed them so far. For all their ‘genius’ Barca have been totally ineffectual. They’re just a very unlikeable group of players, just like Madrid.

In contrast inter have gone about their business letting their feet do the talking instead of their arms and tears
Lee

Real Madrid are a toxic club
Real Madrid’s recent history includes deliberately injuring Salah in a Champions League final, players making throat slitting gestures to rival fans, players throwing items at referees, the club boycotting Ballon D’Or because they are pissy about their player not being picked, threatening to boycott Copa Del Rey, making a referee cry on camera, the list goes on.

These are the actions of an entitled, horrible club.

They regularly get in the ears of rival players and encourage them to wind down their contracts, because they don’t actually want to pay another club for their services. I don’t count a derisory offer midway through a (potentially, at the time) league winning campaign that the club can’t really accept because of their league position. If they really wanted Alexander-Arnold, they could have offered good money for him a year or more ago.

Add to this that they aren’t even the best team in Spain, they’re losing a legendary manager, have a squad full of huge egos and a long history of the fanbase turning on players, or players being sidelined by political spats.

The reason Liverpool fans are unhappy with Trent Alexander-Arnold leaving isn’t the fact that he wants to leave. It’s that he purposely wound down his contract to deny his hometown club a few, so he could move to a club like *that*.

We don’t understand it. Any kid growing up wearing red in Liverpool dreams of winning the league and Champions League with Liverpool. If we’d already won it, we would dream of winning it again and again, captaining the club, getting a statue.

I’ve never once dreamed of playing for Real Madrid, let alone the current toxic cesspit current itineration of the club, and definitely, definitely not leaving my lifelong club on a free.

The fact is we’ll remember the good times. But like Owen and McManaman, he won’t be a Liverpool legend.

If you can’t see why fans are hurt then you probably don’t understand football.
Seamus

READ: Liverpool write off millions on free transfers as Trent becomes biggest regret

On Scouse exceptionalism and more
Re: Trentgate – there seem to be 3 things conflated here: sadness that a great (and local) player might be off; frustration that LFC are getting £0 for him; and anger that he wants to leave at all.

Being sad is obviously fair enough — fans love seeing a local player in the team, especially when he’s brilliant. So when they leave, it feels personal. I’m a Villa fan; when Grealish left, I was heartbroken. Of course he was chasing silverware and money, but that didn’t make it any easier. It’s like my partner leaving me for Idris Elba — you could hardly blame her, but that wouldn’t make me feel much better about it.

Losing Trent on a free is a huge issue too. With FFP and PSR breathing down everyone’s neck (well…not quite everyone…) Liverpool can’t afford to let valuables go for nothing. Building after Klopp — and eventually, life after Salah and Van Dijk — will be much harder without either Trent or the £100m+ he’s worth.

The Carragher plan – that he should sign a contract for LFC’s benefit – has always been mental. Why would he leave on a Bosman? Easy. Real Madrid come along and say: here’s your wage, and here’s £50m that you can have if you run your contract down. Or, you sign a new deal at Liverpool, give up all control over your future, and this £50m goes to the club instead. It’s hardly a tough decision.

This mess is on the club. The signs were there in his last contract — even on the day it was signed, the official site called it a “long term deal” and didn’t mention it was only 4 years; surely someone somewhere should have spotted trouble on the horizon. The club should’ve acted last summer (ideally earlier): offer him an extension, sell him, or bench him. Letting it drift was a massive error.

But as for the anger that he even wants to go: that’s down to Scouse exceptionalism – the idea that the city, the club, the fans, are just better; “This Means More” dialled up to 11. Look at the LFC XI from the PSG match: Alisson, Van Dijk, Konaté, Trent, Robertson, Szoboszlai, Mac Allister, Gravenberch, Díaz, Salah, Jota. Take Trent out, and you’ve 10 players — none English, let alone Scouse.

None of them supported Liverpool growing up. They all came through different clubs and academies, and made moves based on ambition — to win more, play with better players, raise their profile, earn more money. And that’s why Salah isn’t still at Basel, why Van Dijk left Celtic, and why Alisson didn’t stay at Roma.

Ian St John wasn’t a scouser; nor was Toshack, Keegan, Shankly, Paisley, Dalglish, Souness, Hansen, Barnes, Beardsley, “Javier Maschy”… all of these people were local to somewhere else; those localities were all left in a cloud of dust when more money and glory was available elsewhere.

When Liverpool sign players, they’re usually the ones offering more fame, more money, more glory. I suspect what’s really riling some fans now is the realisation that those are the only things, not some special Liverpool magic, that took the players to Anfield in the first place. And now Trent is going to someone further up the food chain, it puts an asterisk next to This Means More, just as some of the club’s fans are putting one on You’ll Never* Walk Alone.
Neil Raines

Insane transfer fees are the problem
I was giving my feelings on Trent moving to Real Madrid a brief and admittedly fairly shallow examination when I concluded that the problem is one of football’s insane finances. I am a little disappointed because we are losing a good player. I am also a little frustrated because I despise Real Madrid, the world’s most arrogant and obnoxious club. I also felt a little resentment that LFC have to replace a £60-£80 million player without an extra £60 – £80 million in income.

That was what reminded me that the situation is as fundamentally wrong as any feelings of resentment towards Trent. Players are employees, not capital assets and the treatment of them as capital assets is the cause of many of football’s financial problems as well as a lot of ill feeling amongst fans.

These huge transfer fees should not exist. Players should be treated more like other employees, with the ability to change their employment if they wish. If clubs are willing to pay massive amounts of money for their services, most of that money should surely go to the players, not their previous employer.

A sane transfer system would ensure that every player could do this. All players should have a release clause that is related to the guaranteed part of their remaining contract. That might have a (small) multiplier or not. Additionally, any player’s new contract must have a guaranteed value greater than the transfer fee paid by the new club. That should also have some formula to calculate the adjusted annual value based on the length of contract. (More than the transfer fee over 25 years is not the answer. More than the transfer fee over 3-5 years might be). The one thing that amazes me is that the player’s unions have been so weak that they have allowed the current situation to continue for so long.

Aside from the player related aspects, the accounting for transfer fees for regulatory purposes is an obvious nonsense. Cash accounting would be one option, i.e. accounting for transfer payments both in and out as the actual payments are made or received, not payments being amortised over 5 years while receipts are accounted for immediately on contract without regard to payment schedule. At a minimum, the accounting for payments and receipts should be treated equally. Clubs would no longer favour selling academy graduates as the way to buy other players and kick the financial can down the road, hoping that football’s high inflation rates would take care of their overspending.

These changes would affect some clubs approach more than others. The ability to buy players for £10 million and sell them 1 or 2 years later for £60 million would disappear. Any other variations of what is essentially a capital based approach to finance would also disappear. That there would be apparent losers as well as winners from this is an unavoidable fact.

Because we have a worldwide game with wildly varying income levels and multiple promoters, many of whom are also supposed regulators, there are no approaches to financial regulation that can be used without upsetting someone. Some owners want to spend beyond their means and gamble on success bringing more income. Preventing them from bankrupting their club is essential, so spending must be controlled in some way. Absolute limits are impossible as the disparity in income is too great.

The current rules and likely future rules allow owners to invest but restrict their ability to commit the club to future expenditure that is likely to be beyond their means. The rules can probably be improved in detail but as the rules can only relate to proportions of income spent on future commitment, they cannot equal the gap between rich clubs and relatively poor clubs. The greatest equaliser is actually squad size limits. Whether the difference in salary between the biggest clubs and the smallest is a factor of 2, 5 or 10 doesn’t change the fact that is a player cannot get a job with one of the biggest clubs, they will play for a smaller club.
Mike LFC, since before Shankly

Liverpool fans, give your heads a wobble
Ahh fans, weird aren’t we?

Firstly, well done Arne and LFC some job that. Very very happy.

As a plastic fan that very rarely gets to Anfield but arranges his whole life around live games on TV, I think (us plastics) have a different take on our club and our players and as I watched the securing of the league in the covid asterisk season on the TV and as it had been so long, I felt the emotion maybe more than I did this year.

I wasn’t in the crowd, I had ‘recently’ seen us win in. It was a different experience to not having a crowd but seeing Jurgen in tears and Hendo unable to talk almost, just seemed to be a more massive deal.

Sadly I have binned SKY TV off as it was insanely expensive to watch TV, what with needing SKY. TNT and Amazon ( I was paying over £200 a month.. just to watch the tele.. insane!) so I lost all the recordings of that great time.

Can you still buy season dvds?
Has any still got a dvd player?

So overall I am struggling to be any happier with the season (PSG aside of course) Spurs beating Manu in the Europa Final would be nice but let’s be honest, Manu seem to have decided they have found an effort button and can try again. Been a while since they tried. So sorry Spuds but you won’t win that either. (come on the reverse psychology….)

Anyway I sidetrack from my first thought.. Fans and Trent….

Joel Wilt in the Tuesday morning mailbox literally wrote “Trent willl never be revered like Virgil…” (amongst others)

That’s Virgil from Celtic and Southampton, The one we paid 75milllion for? That Virgil? The player we had to purchase from another team..?As Kenny said this week I think, You had to buy me too..

So Trent leaving after winning everything is (fee aside maybe is the only issue) just part of football, give your heads a wobble.

We all hope he does a little mickey and goes to Real then has to sit and watch Liverpool win it as soon as goes, Karma is a wonderful thing sometimes..

The fans are as fickle as anywhere in the world at Madrid and he will have less help in defending that he got from Mo Salah (almost none) which is why he takes criticism as a right back – he gets very little help from his winger.

Gab YNWA – Deface his Mural… Don’t be dick mate! Unless you are 12, that’s mental! He’s done all he can do for our club in a football sense. He has deserved his mural. He hasn’t gone to Manure ffs! Hes more Macca then Michael (and I still love Macca, Bosman be damned!)

So good luck Trent – Go and be the legend you hope to be at Madrid – You will always be a Liverpool superstar to me.

May you never win the Champions League again and as for the Ballon d’Or… well that;s a lovely dream but its never happening.
Al – LFC – Let the boy go and be happy for him. – Come on Connor Bradley, step up lad. Lets forget all about the last fella. The king is dead, long live the king..!

Who would want a statue anyway?
Did the Liverpool fans that are denying TAA a statue stop to consider that maybe he’s moving just to avoid having a statue after seeing the caliber of some of the recent footballing statues?

Maybe it’s not you, it’s him.
David, Ireland