Bradley Barcola: Arsenal transfer regret to a Liverpool flop in 158 minutes | OneFootball

Bradley Barcola is quick, but that won’t be enough at Liverpool. Those are the views of Pat Nevin, Paul Merson and we suspect a fair few other knee-jerking analysts after watching the £123m summer signing’s first three appearances for his new club.

“If you said to me, what’s Barcola’s game? He’s quick,” Merson said. “Now, you play at Liverpool, you don’t really have to be that quick.

“You don’t have to be like the fastest man in the Premier League. You’ve got to have a bit more. And at the moment, I am not sure.

“He’ll have his games, don’t get me wrong, but I think they needed someone with more guile.”

Barcola will have hoped British pundits might hold fire before belittling him as little more than a sprinter playing football, but Nevin has joined Merson in taking no time at all to temper expectations at Liverpool, criticising the France international’s skills and vision.

“He is staggeringly, stupidly, ridiculously fast,” he said. “I really can’t underline how fast this guy is, he will destroy defences with his pace.

“But when he gets beyond defences, I’ve seen better people picking out passes. I’ll try to put this delicately: he’s not the finished footballer yet.

“He’s not terrible, but he has slight flaws in his game. It’s amazing the flaws you can mask with blistering pace.

“You’re getting somebody with world-class pace, that’s the best way to put it. His skills are okay to good, but his vision is not at that level. So, he will be good, but you have to remember his limitations.

“The big thing, underlying it all, is that you also need space to run into. If you play for a team that is always breaking into space, it’s great because you can run into those gaps.

“But if you’re really fast and playing against a low block, there’s nowhere to run. At that point, you need pure skill and intelligence, not just speed.”

The 24-year-old is 158 minutes into his Anfield career and he’s already being written off. But the immediate condemnation arguably says more about Liverpool and the narrative that surrounds them than Barcola himself.

We’re all now very used to slamming nine-figure footballers on Merseyside. Alexander Isak still looks as though he’s trying to remember exactly how to play football after an injury-plagued first season at Anfield and now the overriding feeling with regard to Florian Wirtz is that he may never have what it takes to succeed in the Premier League.

There’s joy to be had, content to be made and clicks to garnered through another big-money Liverpool flop.

Barcola hitting the ground running would be good in so much as it’s nice to watch very good footballers playing very good football, but the overriding feeling from the majority of fans and therefore the majority of media outlets would be one of disappointment at a missed opportunity to plunge the knife in further to Such A Well Run Club that have made a real mess of things in the transfer market of late.

Barcola faced similar end-product criticism at Paris Saint-Germain, but he did also manage 76 goal contributions across three seasons for the best team on the planet.

The problem for Barcola is the now lower level of patience on Anfield thanks to Isak and Wirtz. He won’t be afforded the same time to adapt as his fellow £100m+ signings simply because he’s the third in a year and Liverpool fans are still waiting for one or both of the first two to prove they’re worth anything close to the fee they paid for them.

But diminished tolerance withstanding, dismissing him so soon is absurd.