Sometimes in life, you get what you pay for. Liverpool know that.
For football clubs, that often means having to shell out eye-watering amounts on players if you want the finished article.
And while football history is littered with big money flops, there are also plenty of examples where a team’s decision to break the bank has been handsomely vindicated, whether that be by adding a player who takes the team to the next level, or one that gives you years of top quality service.
What went into Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk decision
Liverpool faced such a dilemma during the 2017/18 season, opting to pull the trigger on a £75million move for Southampton defender Virgil van Dijk.
The fee was a world record for a defender at the time and remains Liverpool’s most expensive outlay, ahead of 2022 signing Darwin Nunez, who could end up eclipsing the Netherlands international if all add-ons are met.
Former Liverpool head of research Ian Graham was part of the internal team that decided to pull the trigger on Van Dijk during the 2018 January window and has reflected on what went into that process.
“He was 26 and we had an informal rule to only sign players under 24, to get players before they reached their peak,” Graham tells FourFourTwo. “But the team was already good, we wanted to take it to the next level and under 24 is very young for a centre-back, so we were happy to sign someone slightly older, with lots of Premier League experience.
“We had him as the best centre-back in the league for the two seasons before he arrived – the best centre-back not already playing for Barcelona, Bayern Munich or one of the European giants.
“The anxiety was the price, because we’d always looked at value for money and he’s turned out to be value for money even at that price, but there were players who were 80 per cent as good as Van Dijk and 80 per cent of the cost.
“The question was, ‘Do we want to spend a world-record fee on a centre-back?’ The fact we’d sold Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona meant funds were available that hadn’t been before.”
Fast forward eight years and no one at the club will have had any regrets over Van Dijk’s fee. The 33-year-old – ranked at No.1 in FourFourTwo’s list of the best centre-backs in the world in December – has turned out more than 300 times for the club, helping end their 30-year wait for the title in 2020, while winning every other domestic honour, plus the Champions League during his time at Anfield. Practically a bargain…
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