Liverpool's Recruitment Chaos: A Flawed Squad for the Season

Liverpool have just thrown another £200m-plus at this squad. More than last summer. Bigger numbers, bigger noise, bigger expectations.

Yet Andoni Iraola walks away from the window with a squad that looks anything but complete.

Jamie Carragher did not bother dressing it up on Sky Sports. "It does not look like a balanced squad," he said. "Liverpool are short in the full-back areas and probably a midfield player as well." One sharp line that cuts through all the optimism around a lavish window that included a £123m swing for Bradley Barcola from Paris Saint-Germain.

Even that headline signing points back to the same problem.

Liverpool have just lost Mohamed Salah, the best left-footed right-winger the Premier League has seen. Their response? Stack the other flank. Load up on left-sided forwards. Build an attack that leans heavily in one direction.

Carragher again: "Liverpool have not got a real out-and-out right-sided attacker. We have not got anybody with a left foot on that right side, like Mo Salah. I am disappointed. I am not quite sure what we are going to do on that right wing right now."

Barcola can play across the line. He has done it before. But a £123m player needs to live where he is most dangerous, and it is a stretch to call the right wing his natural home.

Cody Gakpo has started on the left. Florian Wirtz has operated there. Hugo Ekitike too. Rio Ngumoha broke through on that flank as well before being flipped to the opposite side in pre-season. Victor Munoz, signed after just one top-flight campaign, also arrived as – of course – a left winger.

None of this, on its own, condemns Liverpool’s recruitment. It is not chaos. It is curiosity. But when you scan the rest of the pitch, the picture sharpens. The squad feels swollen in some zones and stripped bare in others.

Full-Back Concerns

Full-back is the clearest example.

When Jeremie Frimpong came in last summer, Liverpool insisted he was not a Trent Alexander-Arnold replacement. Yet when this season kicked off, that is exactly where the Netherlands international lined up. Two games, two starts at right-back.

With Conor Bradley injured, Frimpong is the closest thing Iraola has to a specialist in that role. Some argue Dominik Szoboszlai could drop in, but that looks like a compromise, not a plan. Shunting a centre-back wide is even less attractive when the full-backs are so central to Iraola’s ideas.

You can see it in the numbers already. Frimpong and Milos Kerkez sit among the top three players in the Premier League for sprints this season. Above them? Adrien Truffert, the left-back at Iraola’s former club Bournemouth. The pattern is obvious. The full-backs are asked to live in the fast lane.

Compare the average positions from Liverpool’s opening two league games with that title-winning season under Arne Slot. The full-backs charge on, often together. It looks thrilling. It also leaves a huge responsibility on the midfield to plug the gaps.

Midfield Dynamics

And that is where the doubts grow louder.

Ryan Gravenberch once stepped up to drive Slot’s side to the title. Now he is being asked to do similar heavy lifting in a different structure. Alexis Mac Allister, whose physical output has dipped over the past 18 months, must somehow help shield a team that wants to attack with numbers.

Is Iraola even interested in using a classic holding midfielder? At Bournemouth, he wanted his midfielders to engage, not sit. Alex Scott spoke about being "very aggressive" without the ball. Tyler Adams said: "The players really believe that we are going to win the ball high up the field."

The intent is clear. The risk is, too.

"We have already seen signs that this could be a problem," Carragher warned. "I do not believe that midfield can function with the personnel in there. For me, it does not work. And it is not just about personnel, it is the structure the manager is asking for."

The first Premier League game offered a brutal early example. Inside five minutes, Liverpool’s rest defence was ripped open. Full-backs high. Centre-backs deep. No midfielder patrolling the space in between. Newcastle poured through and scored.

Given how Iraola wants his full-backs to play, and given Virgil van Dijk’s increasing instinct to drop off rather than step up, that gap is not going to close on its own. Which leaves Iraola in charge of the most expensively assembled Liverpool squad ever – and arguably the most obviously flawed in a decade.

If the market will not fix it now, the solutions must come from within. That means compromise.

"You do not want to lose the offensive side, the fluidity, the arrivals with numbers, but obviously we were punished the other day, especially in the first goal," Carragher said. "We did not do a proper lockdown. But there is a balance. We cannot go from one way where we send a lot of people forward to keeping everyone back so we do not arrive with numbers.

"I do not want to tell Ryan Gravenberch not to carry the ball or arrive in the box. It is a matter of identifying the situation. You cannot be with the joystick every time [controlling] the player. There are players that are very good at smelling the danger. 'I cannot risk going now. I think I have to stay.' Recognising those situations is the job."

For now, Liverpool look exactly what their early scorelines suggest: a team built for 4-3s and 3-3s, not 1-0s. Wild, open, exhilarating, exposed.

Imbalanced. Imperfect. But impossible to ignore.

The question is not whether they will entertain. It is whether this thrilling chaos can carry them anywhere near a title race.