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I would say this is the most likely scenario.
Coutinho wants to leave - he is a prized asset worth a huge amount, we don’t want to sell him - Klopp loved him - but we are in desperate need of a CB - Klopp identifies Virgil but he costs a lot. We are going to have to match the kind of money City would pay.
Surely you can see the link.
I'd agree with Steve the club didn't want to sell coutinho. They were forced into it and made sure to get their great fee out of barca who came in for him in a panic.
I disagree with some of his other claims.
What he's saying is that we wouldn't have signed others without Phil's fee. Which I'd contest as being a falling for the narrative and not seeing how that narrative benefits the club.
But as I replied to Milner, if you take away the phil fee and remove the addition of keita we are 90 million extra on net spend.
Evidently that is affordable for us given our net spend and profits posted.
For me that is no big deal as essentially it just leaves more money in the bank to acquire players.
We were in for virgil long before neymar's move to PSG led to Barcas desperation to replace him.
BBC 7th June 2017 lfc apologise and end interest in VVD
August 3rd 2017 - Neymar joins PSG - in a move that shocks Barcelona chiefs. Which led to their scramble to sign a replacement.
We were in for Salah before he went to Chelsea..
Coutinho’s head was in Catalonia a year before he left.
None of this is proof of anything really. What matters is what happened.
What he’s saying is the fact that we invested heavily after selling Coutinho supports his idea that the owners are guilty of under investment.
The reason this is self-evident to him is because of the net spend.
If the net spend was in the red like all the other clubs, then he could not claim there was under investment.
He has also claimed we are a selling club under FSG, which means we have to (or choose to) sell players like Coutinho in order to invest. The idea seems to be that if only the owners dipped into their own pockets a bit, finally we would have a proper squad or team.
These are all rational arguments but the problem with them is they don’t stand up to reality.
In reality we have enjoyed success beyond the expectations of the FSG critics (or the FSG ‘supporters’). Now that we have hit a rough patch, they are forgetting all this and throwing their dummies out the pram again.
When BR was manager in January 2014, not Klopp.
We were in for virgil before the interest in coutinho materialised.
We'd signed Phil upto a new deal the season beforehand to secure him and he was happy at the club.
The evidence points to us being interest in signing Virgil beforehand and not by selling Phil.
Phil was only bought by barca when they lost neymar. He had his 'bad back' for the first time after neymar left and the interest materialised.
The fee we got was based in part on their desperation.
Phil if he had left the year beforehand as you claim might not have signed a new deal with the club and as we saw, when the interest was there his bad back was instantaneously present.
Had he been sought by barca a year earlier when neymar was there, with hindsight we can speculate hed have acted as he did when the interest actually materialised.
Reading a few predictions and some seem to suggest possibly no full grounds until 2022/23.
This is not my rant about BCD but if the above is true then that will be another £80-100m we will lose.
Now surely if the above is true transfer fees have to come down otherwise the oil clubs will be the only ones bidding for the best players.
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