Liverpool are the masters of letting players go, but FSG now face three defining decisions | OneFootball

It’s fair to say that Liverpool have shown up many of their Premier League rivals with their transfer activity over the past decade.

The Reds didn’t always have such a glittering reputation for sensible investments in the market, but more often than not they’ve gotten it bang on the money when it comes not just to signing players, but also knowing the right time to cash in.

When it comes to transfer decisions in football, it’s similar to when you go to buy BTC – do you hold onto your assets in the hope of a return on investment, or try to play the long game by selling when the circumstances seem favourable?

Liverpool usually get it right when deciding to let players leave

Quite often in recent years, Liverpool have had a happy knack for judging when to sell players or let them leave, even if it felt like a highly questionable decision at the time.

Perhaps the best exponent of that is Philippe Coutinho, who between Luis Suarez leaving in 2014 and Mo Salah joining three years later was probably the most gifted player at Anfield, and the one man who looked likeliest to conjure a match-winning moment for the Reds.

It felt like a hammer blow when he was sold to Barcelona for £142m in January 2018, but he never rediscovered his Merseyside form at Camp Nou and didn’t have the happiest of stints when later returning to the Premier League under Steven Gerrard at Aston Villa.

(Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images)

The money from his sale effectively funded the signings of Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker, both of whom transformed a previously porous Liverpool defence.

The departures of Sadio Mane and Bobby Firmino in later years also felt heartbreaking initially, but neither of the duo has lit up the Saudi Pro League in the same way that they did the English top flight when playing alongside Salah at Anfield.

LFC have also been the masters of commanding sizeable fees for squad players, with such examples including Jordon Ibe (£15m to Bournemouth), Harry Wilson (£12m to Fulham), Rhian Brewster (£23.5m to Sheffield United), Sepp van den Berg (£25m to Brentford) and Fabio Carvalho (£27.5m to Brentford) .

Liverpool must avoid any regrets over crucial trio this year

If Liverpool were to part with some (or all) of Salah, Van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold in the summer, they’d do so in the belief that letting them depart on a free transfer would be less of a risk than handing them big-money contract extensions – especially in the case of the former two, who turn 33 and 34 respectively this year.

However, the last time that the Reds parted with a player who’s hitting such stratospheric standards was when they sold Suarez to Barcelona in 2014, and the club’s attempts at replacing him were botched until they put together the Salah-Mane-Firmino triumvirate.

Should LFC fail to renew the contracts of their three highest-paid players, what happens next could define how their boardroom powerbrokers are viewed in time.

Liverpool are usually excellent at judging the right moment to let someone go, but surely it’s too soon to allow any of that trio to walk away for nothing in the summer. To say that sporting director Richard Hughes has some monumental decisions on his shoulders would be a vast understatement.