There's a balancing act between getting landing the number 1 target (Bellingham) and keeping the squad competitive against a ridiculously strong City side.
We have shifted our approach in recent years to only targeting players that walk into the first team (Thiago, Nunez, Diaz, Konate) and supplementing that with young talent (Elliott, Carvalho, Ramsay) There's no real in-between, which is creating shortages in some key areas. It paid off waiting for VVD. However lets not forget we chose to wait for Konate, had a massive injury crisis and effectively wrote a season off as a result. Not saying Konate will not prove himself worth the wait - I think he will, but we did leave ourselves short and the worst nightmares were realised. We also chose to wait for Naby Keita, who has never fully justified the time we waited, or the fee, with his impact over the course of his contract.
If you consider that Keita and Chamberlain are out of contract next summer and cannot be relied upon to play most weeks, Thiago has a long history of muscle injuries, which are not going to disappear any time soon, Henderson is already on a visible decline in terms of his athletism and often gets a few knocks throughout the year, and Jones did not progress at all last year, there was more than enough evidence to warrant entering the market for a decent CM to share the burden. Klopp has very few faults, but I don't think he, or the team, realistically assess the likeliness of already injury prone players picking up further injuries, and fail to take that into account when planning the squad. Suggesting we have 8 midfielders when it takes 3 of them to play the amount of games Gini did just is not convincing.
Occasionally you just need a sensible, pragmatic signing to make up the numbers. Bissouma at £25M always looked an astute buy, could have contributed from day 1 and in the future. I'm sure there was plenty of others.
