People really want Mbappe? The transfer fee and wage is more than the club can realistically spend on one player and any improvement he'd bring wouldn't be worth it.
The wage thing is the big question isn't it? And not just for someone like Mbappe either. It's kinda our roadblock going forwards. Which is why I genuinely buy that a major part of FSG's plan on 'investing' is to buy one massive profile player, or two major players, on competitive wages to Europe's elite, whilst focusing the rest of their efforts on our main players. We don't know how these conversations go, but, if any sources are to be believed, FSG are famous for their bonuses as part of contract negotiations. We don't tend pay upwards of 200 grand now, but we do find ways of turning profit for the club into money in our player's pockets, and outside of Can, I don't recall any grumbling from our players in recent years about their wage.
If they're gonna go bust on wages, it has to be on a figure the rest of the squad are going to recognise immediately. Take Robbo for instance, he's woefully cheap in price and wage (still) for what he has become, but no one blinked twice at the time, both within Liverpool and it's fans. Even Salah over performed immediately, and we spent no time in bumping up his profile and status in the squad when he started to break out. Sadly, finding unknown talent for us is likely going to be a case of diminishing returns.
Mané, Robbo, Gini, Fabinho, Salah are all players that have flourished under Klopp, showing how abysmally cheap they were in retrospect. No club worth their salt are going to look at Liverpool approaching their 'squad' player offering them £15/£20 million and think "sound, easy money." Everyone knows we have a good backroom team of scouts and researchers who, if they're telling Klopp and Edwards to get this guy, they have clearly seen something even the player's own club hasn't. It may not even happen to the extent this season, but we are going to be treated like City/Madrid/Barca when it comes to other clubs' and agents' demands of us, we're proven to be at the top class at spotting world beaters.
This brings massively inflated fees, and, like I said with agents, more and more inflated wages whether we like it or not. For what it's worth I don't believe in anything to do with the Mbappe shit, I've more faith in fucking Fekír which is saying a lot, but whoever we do sign this summer, is going to be far more closer to Van Dijk in transfer fee than Salah, for a player who is only ever going to be on Salah's level, or just beneath him, because that's where we're at now. We have the best, we know all the other players of our team's level. It's going to be very, very interesting to see what we actually do this summer. There is school of thought that going for broke for someone of Mbappe's status can only be done by us this summer (unless we win the league and/or CL next year), there is school of thought that we could replicate Spurs - we are building a new state of the art training facility after all, and then Anfield Road end (only with us we have a stronger squad). But finding rank unknowns isn't going to be commonplace anymore, nor is it going to be cheap. What I think is, if FSG wants us to be more than a win-it-once-a-generation, no matter their intentions, they're gonna have to deliver more cash - which, scarily, isn't something you can even really criticise them of not doing.
