General Premier League Thread 2025/2026 - See Post #1 for Mod Note

That's the most dyslexic spelling of "Frank" I have seen - and you got a letter wrong as well! 😁

Here is Skybet's brutal take on a replacement

Kieran McKenna – 6/4, Thomas Frank – 5/1, Frank Lampard – 7/1, Jose Bordalas – 9/1, Kjetil Knutsen – 9/1,
Edin Terzic – 10/1, Liam Rosenior – 10/1, Bo Svensson – 10/1, Arne Slot – 10/1, Martin O’Neill – 10/1,
Graham Potter – 11/1, Pierre Sage – 11/1, Mauricio Pochettino – 11/1, Paulo Fonseca – 11/1, Robbie Keane – 11/1,
Ralph Hasenhuttl – 11/1.

Apparently he has flown to Italy to present his vision to AC Milan!

Rosenior?

Yeah if the gamble you want to take is with your PL status…

So Konate away to Madrid after all. Thats half of Liverpool’s first choice defence from a year ago gone to them for free.

I'm amazed by how often you see people still claim that Trent went on a free when based on contract time remaining it was one of the most expensive signings of all time

Spurs moving for Van Hecke from Brighton. Seems that RDZ is going to get them sorted out. Van Hecke and Senesi as a pairing is a vast improvement over Romero & VDV

If only Spurs are in for them it'd make you wonder.

when you consider they signed n Frimpong to replace him then you would have to say he went on a free seen as what pool ended up with from it.

I don't think there is anyway to glorify the Trent exit.

It's got nothing to do with glorifying it, he was worth more than what he went for, it wasn't a good thing that he left

But there's just no need to rewrite history and pretend he went on a free when it was very very publicly documented that Real Madrid paid a fee for an early release

I have no idea what Frimpong has to do with Trent and why he means it was a free transfer?

There seems to be a concerted effort to paint it as a free transfer to make it look worse than it is. If you have to exaggerate facts to make a point, maybe it's not that strong to begin with?

Frimpong doesn't have anything to do with the deal, if anything I think Frimpong, and Quansah, were both pawns in getting the Wirtz deal completed

Of those 10 I wonder how many would Pool would prefer were still there.

Jota tragedy of course but I guess some the club were happy to let go for whatever reason

I guess we'll agree to disagree then as I can't see how to equate paying €10m with picking someone up for nothing

I'm fine with comparing to a free transfer - but not equating it to actually being a free transfer.

€10m for a player with 30 days left on his contract, when there's no games left for him to play, is a significant transfer fee and was very widely reported as such. That's the same fee Atletico paid to take Griezmann on a 2 year loan and double what Villa are paying Liverpool for Harvey Elliott's loan. The fact that Villa had a loan fee to pay is precisely why Elliott ended up staying a whole season at a club who didn't want to play him, it wasn't for nothing.

It's silly to keep going on about but I guess I didn't expect you to double down and continue to argue that they picked him up for nothing. My position is that they absolutely did not get him for nothing, so let's move on.

Ok, you had a good say there and I’ll move on after I have my say back. €10m for a player like Trent is a steal. Madrid did not try and get him in 2024, or earlier due to the fee that they would have had to pay. They put the deal in place to get him on a free and then paid a premium to get him for the CWC. Had they not got €100m for playing in it, he’d have joined for €0 at the end of it. Madrid would not have had any interest in buying Trent for what he was worth in 2022, 2023, and 2024. €10m for a player like that, who was worth far more than that at the times I mentioned, was a disaster for Liverpool. Ok, technically not free, but Liverpool came out of it on the losing side.
My overall point then I suppose is that Real got Konate and Trent for €10m. Another massive mistake from a club that needs to be sustainable.

He made his bed.

Liverpool weren't ready to let Trent go for free. The club wanted him to stay and made some very large offers of contract renewals to him, with significant pay raises, over a number of months.

The player chose to leave.

People think of it as a free transfer because TAA ran down his contract and agreed his own move to Real Madrid, and there was nothing Liverpool could do about it. They lost a generational player in his prime for a fraction of his market value.

The only reason they got a few quid was because Madrid decided they wanted him a bit earlier. If Liverpool had refused or Madrid had a fit left back then there would have been no 10m and TAA would still have finished up his contract and joined Madrid a few weeks later.

So was the 10million to buy TAA? Not really, because Madrid already had him. Don't need to buy what you already have.

So was the 10m just a luck penny? An early access fee? Something else?

I know Liverpool fans will spin it one way, rival fans the other, but it isn't all that hard to see why people consider that deal to have basically been a free transfer. The 10m wasn't to buy the player, it was to change some dates on the paperwork.