‘Pundits who favour other clubs’ – Arne Slot hits out at Wirtz critics and comments around Liverpool’s spending | OneFootball

Liverpool boss Arne Slot has fired back at critics of summer signing Florian Wirtz and suggested some pundits are not treating Liverpool fairly when it comes to discussing their spending.

Wirtz has yet to score or assist for Liverpool since arriving from Bayer Leverkusen in a deal worth up to £116m, but Slot has defended his young midfielder and also took aim at some pundits discussing the club’s spending over the summer.

“I put that down to Bournemouth, Newcastle, Arsenal and to a team we faced this weekend that only conceded 14 goals last season,” Slot said when asked about Wirtz perhaps not being at his very best.

“Someone told me that it’s the first time Burnley lost a home game and it tells you how hard it is to play these games and win.

“There’s so much focus on our new signings and especially pundits who favour, not us, but some other clubs in the country that cannot stop talking about £450m, £450m, £450m, but always forget the £300m that we’ve sold.

“These players we’ve brought in are a lot of money but are playing now with players worth the same amount of money. If we want to strengthen the squad we almost have to spend that money. If we were to sell Dominik Szoboszlai tomorrow, he’d be worth £100m as well.

“There is so much focus on Florian but the ones who have stayed behind in the team haven’t scored four goals or got 12 assists as well. So he’s been part of a team, Florian, that is on top of the league, that won four games. He’s part of the team that won against Newcastle, that won against Arsenal, whereas the team of last season didn’t win at Newcastle, didn’t win at home against Arsenal.

“He’s part of a team that is number one in the league at the moment.”

Slot also further voiced his frustrations on the way Liverpool’s summer spending has been discussed in the media, continuing: “He (the reporter who asked the question) was saying we’ve spent so much money. It didn’t come to him, probably, that we’ve sold £300m. I repeat, for £300m.

“I think it’s only a compliment that people tell everyone we’ve spent so much because that tells you the players we’ve brought in are seen as very good players.

“I’m, for a part, responsible for bringing the players in as well together with some other people and I think we should see this as a compliment that everybody is like ‘wow they did great business’.

“And I think we did. We brought in great players and to add to that we’ve already lowered the age of the players.

“Some other teams prefer to bring in 27-year-olds because they are already ready but we think we’ve brought in players from 21, 22 that are ready but are also 21 and 22.

“If they are four or five years with you, you can still sell Luis Diaz for £80m. I think it’s harder to sell him for £80m if he would have been 32.

“So that’s our model. I think that model should get a lot of praise.

“I’ve said it here in England once or twice and I can say it one more time to you as well. I think all the money we’ve spent, we generated ourselves by selling and winning the league after we didn’t buy anyone at all.

“I don’t know if you know but if you win the league, that’s quite good financially as well.

“Those two situations, that we could spend £450m, it wasn’t as if we looked in the ground and saw there’s money coming up, let’s spend £450m.

“No. We’ve generated it ourselves and that I think is a big compliment to the model we have and for the quality players we’ve brought in that everybody is only talking about the £450m we’ve spent.”