KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum Third party ownership

Good article from the Echo. The reason why we had no chance with Costa and why Mark vic cost so much.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/sport/foo...scourge-8350724

Cue the talk of excuses and that the journalist is pro FSG! Who fecking knows what happened exactly anyway?

It's also strange that we suddenly had the money available for Markovic, but not for Mkhtaryan and Konoplyanka.

When we tried to sign those players we suddenly stopped bidding around the £ 22 M mark.

How come?

Did we rate Markovic higher than the other 2?

Thanks for the post buddy...very interesting!

The Reds paid Benfica £9.9m for their 50% share in the Serb, with a third-party, believed to be linked to agent Pini Zahavi, receiving a further £9.9m for the other half. Markovic had long been expected to join Chelsea, whose links with both Benfica and Zahavi would have enabled them to acquire him for a reduced fee.

A suspicion also lingers that the failed pursuit of Diego Costa in 2013 was down to third-party influence over the player. Liverpool met Costa’s buyout clause at Atletico Madrid, but were never afforded the chance to speak to the player.

Twelve months later, the striker moved to Stamford Bridge, with suggestions, unconfirmed at this point, that a portion of the £32m transfer fee may have found its way into the pockets of third-parties, including Mendes and a number of companies with financial links to Chelsea.

Liverpool also found TPO an issue when chasing Armenian midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan, then of Shakhtar Donetsk, the same summer. Liverpool wanted the player, but found that his rights were split between Shakhtar and the player’s former clubs Metalurh and Pyunik, with all three parties wanting a say in what happened next.

Rinat Akhmetov (Shakhtar’s oligarch owner), Sergei Taruta (the owner of Metalurh and another oligarch) and Ruben Hayrapetyan (Pyunik’s owner, and an Armenian billionaire), all wanted to sell Mkhitaryan to Anzhi Makhachkala for €35 million.

Mkhitaryan, who had no intention of moving to Anzhi, hired Italian agent Mino Raiola to negotiate his exit from Donetsk, and eventually joined Borussia Dortmund, with the German club’s chief executive, Hans-Joachim Watzke, stating upon completion that the transfer had been “very difficult”.

FIFA, for its part, has acted. The governing body announced earlier this month that TPO will be banned globally from May 1 next year, after a meeting of its executive committee in Marrakesh.In the meantime, expect the issue to rear its head again, somewhere, in January. It’s a murky world, is the transfer market. And TPO simply muddies the waters further. Plenty in the game will be glad to see the back of it.

Yeah. Great Post. Glad it shows i've not been making up stories about transfers too.

Champions league money has helped but with Miki we offered the same as Dortmund but he chose them and Kono was in the bag as we met his release clause. Their chairman then decided to be a nob and not sign the deal off. What more could we have done?

We could perhaps have upped our bid a bit? It's hard to say as none of us actually know exactly what happens behind closed doors.

To me it seems as if we are trying to get out of every window on the cheap, but when that strategy backfires half way through, or just before the window shuts, we suddenly have the money available to find a last minute panic solution - but not our main targets or targets we really need (right position).

In the summer window 2013 we signed:
-Sakho for £ 16.7 M
-Mignolet for £ 9.3 M
-Aspas for £ 7.9 M
-Ilori for £ 7.3 M
-Alberto for £ 7.0 M
-Touré on a free transfer
-Moses on loan for £ 1.1 M
-Cissokho on loan for £ 0.9 M
That's a total of £ 50.0 M

Instead of finding our targets and getting them signed, we spent the time dithering around and trying to get fees down. It lead us to signing players in positions we really didn't need to strengthen, and at the same time we ended up with holes that weren't filled at all.

The result: How many of those players were still playing for the club one year later? The answer is 3 out of 8. And out of those 3, how many have really shown their worth on a consistent basis? I'd say none so far. But at tthe same time I think all 3 have shown glimpses of what they are capable of at a few occasions.

I better add that a few of the 5 that are not playing for the club at the moment might turn up here again, as they are out on loan. But how much did we really need to sign Ilori at that time, given that he was rapidly sent out on loan before he even had a chance to claim a spot in our squad? And why did we spend on Alberto as we already had Suso - who ended up going out on loan too?

Many strange decisions there if you ask me.

And in the end we tied up a fair amount of capital on signings we never have used - and at the same time we didn't fill out the squad properly with true class players - because we didn't have the money available?

Or is it because we have a policy that restricts us from signing players over £ 20 M?

Mkhitaryan went for £ 24.2 M to Dortmund. Maybe he didn't want to come to us at all. Or maybe we let Dortmund have him because we didn't value him that highly?

Konoplyanka reportedly stayed because we couldn't accept the payment plan. Dnipro's president suddenly wanted all the money (or at least a large chunk of it) on the table at once. Maybe we were right to cancel the transfer - maybe this wasn't true at all and Dnipro's president just refused to sell him no matter what.

In the same window we were reportedly after Costa. But yet again we failed to sign our target. He stated at that time that the reason was that he wanted to stay one more year with Atletico - and who could blame him in the end. They won the league and were in the CL.

A year later Costa went to Chelsea for £ 33.4 M.

In the same window we signed:
-Lallana for £ 27.3 M
-Lovren for £ 22.3 M
-Markovic for £ 22.0 M
-Balotelli for £ 17.6 M
-Moreno for £ 15.8 M
-Origi for £ 11.1 M
-Can for £ 10.6 M
-Lambert for £ 4.8 M
-Manquillo on loan for £ 1.8 M
That's a total of £ 133.3 M


Now there's proof we have the money available, but we clearly don't seem determined to sign our main targets. We seem to be prepared to (over)pay for players if needed, but only up to around the £ 20 - 25 M mark.

And also we seem to have a habit of signing players regardless of what we need, and whether they fit into our sytem or not. Did we really need 2 more wingers/offensive midfielders above replacing our talisman striker?

Oh, and the source is http://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/

. Actually it can. The way it works is "good business practice". We met Costa's release clause too but were never given the chance to speak to him. When a release clause is met it is standard practice to allow the player to speak to the club, however i don't believe it is a legal obligation to sell.

Like with a car dealer, you could agree that the car is worth 3grand...and you could offer 3grand...but he doesn't HAVE to sell. It is good business practice though and there isnt much you can do with a disgruntled player in your squad. We cheated Suarez' out of his release clause once, then we revised the contract...no point in forcing him to stay a 2nd time. He would have just sulked and taken us to the court of sport arbitration.

Kono was on the last day of the window where there was no time to negotiate. That was our fault. Suarez release clause was met early in the window for a LOT of money. We were never going to keep him and neither would any other team in the world for that. Completely different situations.