Not that it was unexpected, but Georginio Wijnaldum has left Liverpool,
choosing to join Paris Saint-Germain on a free transfer.
Wijnaldum appeared in every Premier League game last season, starting 34 times,
meaning that the squad has lost one of its most familiar faces, a player inextricably linked to
recent domestic and European success, and one of the best all-round midfielders in world football.
Liverpool have already committed significant funds to the signing of Ibrahim Konate,
so their budget for a replacement No.8 is unlikely to be inexhaustible without further departures.
Nevertheless, Wijnaldum was too important simply not to be replaced.
Liverpool aren’t really looking for a goalscorer.
In fact, Wijnaldum never scored more than 6 times in a Premier League season and,
with the exception of the 2016-17 season, his tangible creative output has always been minimal.
So, the club aren’t really hunting for numbers, but a player of no fixed definition, who can do
many things well in lots of different areas and, if possible, can address some of Liverpool’s
broader issues. They don’t necessarily have to find an instant starter, either,
because with Fabinho returning to full-time midfield duty and Jordan Henderson and Thiago both
fit and available again, Jurgen Klopp can start the season with an excellent three-man midfield.
With only a year left on his AC Milan contract, Franck Kessie is attracting
significant interest this summer - and that’s a queue Liverpool should be part of.
Rather than trying to replace Wijnaldum, this would be an instance of equipping
the Liverpool midfield with the widest range of abilities that it’s possible
to find – including a few that the department currently lacks.
Kessie is a terrific all-round player. He’s as good at going past players as he is at taking the
ball away from them, and he’s as capable of being conservative in possession as he is expressive
with it. He’s a carrier, he’s a passer, he’s a creator and also a stopper, all rolled into one.
That’s a rare and useful range under any circumstances, but particularly in this case as
it would allow Kessie to operate within all sorts of different Liverpool midfield combinations.
Alongside a pure distributor like Thiago, or more back-and-forward players like Fabinho
and Jordan Henderson. Perhaps as a counter-balance for other,
more attack-orientated options, such as Naby Keita or – in the future - Curtis Jones.
Kessie is Ivorian and, as such, would miss part of every other season
to take part in the Africa Cup of Nations, but that’s really the only downside to as
rounded a midfielder as Liverpool could hope to find in the summer of 2021.
It’s very difficult to find any potential drawback to Gladbach’s Florian Neuhaus.
Stylistically, he’s also a type of player that Liverpool don’t currently have,
while also being a theoretical complement to the incumbent midfielders.
It sounds contradictory, but Neuhaus both elegant and scrappy. A cultured passer and
ball-striker who can survive a press in deep areas and carry the ball upfield, he’s also
defensively combative and happy to compete for possession physically or on the ground.
In fact, aside from his knife-like through passes and relatively high shot-volume,
one of the features of his rise has been the capacity to steal the ball
away or make dramatic interventions. He’s an eye-catching and entertaining
player – a scorer of very watchable goals – but he’s box-to-box in the old-fashioned
sense and would be a nice contrast to a more static, orchestrating player like Thiago.
He’s affordable, too, with his contract suspected to include a €40m release clause.
With Gladbach suffering a disappointing season and missing out on European football entirely,
it’s questionable whether they could demand even that.
And, in the face of that bad year, Neuhaus was one of the few Gladbach players whose form was
relatively unaffected by Marco Rose’s decision to leave and the team’s subsequent decline,
which speaks encouragingly for his resilience and for his ability to cope with adversity.
It’s difficult to see how whoever signs Neuhaus could end up regretting it.
And the same could be said for Roma’s Lorenzo Pellegrini,
who is among the finest passers in Italy and might be among the first casualties of
Jose Mourinho’s arrival in the Italian capital. Pellegrini is also believed to
have a release clause in his contract and for the relatively affordable fee of just €30m.
He’s different to Kessie and Neuhaus, in that he would likely play further forward. That’s
no bad thing, though, because Liverpool have struggled for goals from midfield for some time,
and they’ve also been without a true attacking midfield for just as long.
Naby Keita was signed to provide some of those qualities, and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain
was bought to make the department more dynamic. For a variety of reasons, neither transfer has
been a conclusive success and that makes the case for going back into the market.
Pellegrini would be a smart move. He could play at the tip of a midfield-three in front of any
two from Henderson, Fabinho and Thiago and, as in Serie A, could operate centrally too.
It would involve a reformatting of the way the team operates, but it’s an appealing
prospect nonetheless – firstly because the midfield trio of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane
and Roberto Firmino would so obviously benefit from Pellegrini’s medium and long-range passing
and his general craft, but also because of his goal-threat. Pellegrini scored seven
times in Serie A last season. More importantly, though, he also averaged 2.1 shots per game,
compared to a Liverpool midfield in which no player average more than 0.9.
Pellegrini is a very fine player; he might also be a way for Liverpool to evolve.