I can sympathize with the point you're trying to make (who doesn't want world class players at Liverpool...) but the way you go about arguing it is letting you down.
http://www.express.co.uk/sport/foot...ls-why-Liverpool-missed-out-on-Alexis-Sanchez
Straight from the horses mouth. We were in for him. By all accounts offered more money (as per your argument) and ultimately it made no difference. At some point you just have to accept that.
As for Costa, He had a release clause. Chelsea paid it. Chelsea were never going to have to pay more and Costa was never going to end up anywhere else. It's just a complete non-starter.
According to some reports, Fabregas didn't (re)settle in Barcelona and my view is that he wanted to go back (home) to London.
But that's enough about individual players.
I think everyone would've liked to see us add a world class talent or two. You're not alone in that sense. Part of the problem we encountered this summer is that there weren't that many available. The ones you mentioned, we either tried and failed to sign (Costa, Sanchez) or had absolutely no hope (Fabregas). Then you're basically left with 50M plus signings on mad wages and even then there wasn't anyone
really that had everyone convinced.
The club took a more pragmatic approach this summer. We needed to build out the squad, which looked pretty thin last season, and so spread our bets. It's feels not too dissimilar to the approach Spurs took several years ago when they were trying to transition from mid-table to top 4 (though obviously we're doing it with a higher class of player).
This is our first year back in the CL after a 5 year absence and the most important thing right now both on and off the pitch is re-establishing ourselves as a CL team and maintaining some kind of financial flexibility in case that doesn't happen as quickly as we'd like.
This is a great post.
The thing for me though is that I'll never be convinced that the place you live will be such a huge deciding factor on where you want to play. For me, that's Rodgers covering for the people spearheading the transfers, and a lame cop out from those folks, than an actual justification on why we missed out. Like I said, location is an intangible, not a deciding factor, regarding where players land.
I never seriously expected us to even be in for Diego Costa this window, and I'd completely forgotten he was on a release clause. My fault, that price couldn't have been driven up. Granted, we
could have made a competitive offer on wages.
Fabregas is the one that really irks me though, Chelsea got him for an absolute steal. He might've wanted to go back to London, and not have settled, but I don't think that's enough reason for him to decide to exclusively go to London. I don't precisely remember the United saga last summer, but IIRC, it seemed like he was keen enough to go to United, but Barca didn't want to let him go at that point.
Absolutely agree that beyond Costa/Fabregas/Sanchez, there aren't a whole lot of reasonably priced players. But that's the whole issue of it for me: Our direct rivals are getting top class players at cut rates. Players who we seemingly decided against going after. And with FFP watching the numbers, it would behoove us to push our rivals to spend as much as they have to, to make deals happen.
I don't have a problem with the approach we took though, I thought Spurs did really well last summer. The caveat though is that there wasn't much communication there between the people making the deals, and the people actually managing the squad. We seem to be more tightly knit than that, which is promising. The issue though is there is a ton of parity in the side: our starters aren't as far ahead of our bench options than they should be. We've been able to paper over those cracks with Suarez last season, and the (very reasonable) amount of talent that we do have.
But to truly reach the level of squad we're striving to have here, we need options like Sterling, Coutinho, Markovic, Moreno, Can, Origi, Ilori and Ibe to develop into the sorts of top class players we think they can be. And with that much youth, there's a good chance that a fair few will make it. And while it's a noble, frugal, and ultimately smart way to approach developing talent, there's a huge inherent risk that could at times leave us toothless and hopeless on the pitch, either due to youthful naivete, or simply a lack of progression and stagnation of the squad in hopes of those young players panning out.
As far as financial flexibility goes though, wouldn't it make more sense to go the approach of signing a few elite players at exorbitant prices(Carvalho, Draxler, etc), so our investment isn't spread out over numerous signings? Bit like how Monaco or Anzi were able to quickly get their money back by selling the few top players they had invested in. Plus you don't end up paying the wages for a bunch of options. Just my initial thinking on this, not really anything of how we should approach transfer policy.
