Liverpool have spent more than twice as much on attackers as defenders since this rebuild started, conceded more goals per game last season than in any Premier League campaign in the club's history, and their answer to it is a borrowed centre-back from Barcelona who arrived two weeks before Newcastle away. That is not a philosophy. That is a club that keeps getting the same job wrong.

Here are the numbers, and only the ones that have actually happened.

Alexander Isak £125m. Florian Wirtz £100m. Hugo Ekitike £69m. Victor Muñoz £34.5m. That is £328.5m on forwards across two windows. Those are the guaranteed fees — add every performance clause and the attacking figure goes past £354m, but I would rather use the money Liverpool have definitely handed over.

Now the defenders. Jérémy Jacquet £55m. Milos Kerkez £40m. Jeremie Frimpong £29.5m. Giovanni Leoni £26m. Ifeanyi Ndukwe £2.6m. That is £153.1m — and Kerkez and Frimpong are attacking full-backs, so I am being generous by putting them in that column at all.

The gap is £175.4m.

They tried to make it worse

Somebody will say those are last year's signings and this summer has been different. It has, but not in the way that helps. The one enormous bid Liverpool have made this window was €100m for Yan Diomande, a nineteen-year-old winger at RB Leipzig. Leipzig wanted €120m and turned it down. Diomande decided Liverpool were heading into a transitional season after Arne Slot was sacked, went to PSG instead, and Real Madrid then came in willing to pay €140m.

So the intent is on record. Andoni Iraola said it out loud: they definitely need to sign a winger. Liverpool were ready to spend the guts of £90m on one and only stopped because somebody outbid them and the player didn't fancy it.

Their entire defensive outlay this summer is £57.6m. One of those two signings is Ndukwe, an eighteen-year-old who couldn't get a UK work permit and is going straight back out on loan.

The defence was already the worst in the club's Premier League history

Liverpool conceded 53 goals in 38 games last season. The club's record for a Premier League season is 55, set in 1992-93 and again in 1993-94 — both across 42 games. Per game, that is 1.31 then and 1.39 now. Nobody wearing this badge has ever defended worse across a Premier League season.

Arsenal won the title conceding 27.

That is the number that should have set this summer's budget. Instead the club lost Ibrahima Konaté to Real Madrid on a free after 183 appearances, and by the first week of August had Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez, Giovanni Leoni, Jacquet and Conor Bradley all unavailable. The response was a season-long loan for Ronald Araújo, a player who had fallen down the pecking order at Barcelona, with a non-mandatory option to buy at around £47m and Liverpool covering his wages.

I am glad he is here. For a fortnight it looked like nobody was coming. But being relieved that a loan signing turned up is not where a club that spent £450m in one summer is supposed to be.

And Liverpool are not pretending otherwise. Paul Joyce of The Times reported on the eve of the medical that Araújo has not been identified as a long-term signing at all — the club see him as a sticking plaster until the rest of the defenders are fit. That is their own assessment, not mine. They have looked at the worst defensive season in the club's Premier League history and concluded that what it needs is cover until the injured lads come back.

This has happened before and they learned nothing

Konaté is the second first-choice defender in two years Liverpool have allowed to run his contract down and walk to Real Madrid. Trent Alexander-Arnold went the summer before for a nominal fee that only existed because Madrid wanted him early for the Club World Cup. Andy Robertson left for Tottenham on a free this summer. Mohamed Salah left on a free.

Four senior players in two years, and the club got close to nothing for any of them.

Arsenal in the same period moved Leandro Trossard on while he still had value rather than waiting to find out what he was worth at the end. That is the difference, and it has nothing to do with money.

The best case against me

The strongest argument on the other side is that net spend was just over £200m last summer, not £450m, because Liverpool recouped serious fees for Darwin Núñez, Luis Díaz, Jarell Quansah and Caoimhín Kelleher. Sell well, buy well, and the gross figure is a red herring.

It is a fair point about the accounting and it does not touch the argument. You can be excellent at generating money and still spend it in the wrong places. Liverpool sold shrewdly and then put the proceeds almost entirely into the third of the pitch that was already working. They scored plenty last season. They finished fifth because they could not stop anyone, and every pound of that £201m gap was a decision somebody made.

Nobody knows who made them

This is the part that bothers me most. Richard Hughes is taking the criticism, and he signed off on all of it. He also leaves for Al-Hilal the day the window closes on 1 September, which means the man who spent £450m, sacked the head coach he appointed and built this defence will not be at the club to answer a single question about it.

Michael Edwards has already gone. He resigned as FSG's chief executive of football on 10 July with a year still on his contract, having returned in 2024 specifically to build a multi-club operation for the owners. ESPN reported that FSG looked at more than twenty clubs, Bordeaux and Málaga among them, and then shelved the whole idea. Edwards told them he wanted out. FSG called his departure a planned transition.

So the man hired to expand FSG's football operation walked when the owners changed their minds, and FSG president Mike Gordon has taken over the running of football himself. That tells you what you need to know about where the decisions are made. Boston are not sitting three thousand miles away letting a sporting director do as he pleases. They shelved a strategy, lost the executive who wanted it, and their own president now has his hands on the wheel.

Which means when Hughes goes, the criticism goes with him, and the people who signed off on everything stay exactly where they are.

And they aren't even good at the thing they prioritise

Here is the part that finishes the argument. If you are going to neglect a defence in order to build an attack, the attack had better work.

Alexander Isak cost £125m and scored three league goals. He played 703 Premier League minutes across the whole season — twenty-one per cent of Liverpool's total — made eight league starts, and broke his leg in December. Florian Wirtz cost £100m and finished with five goals and three assists in 2,388 league minutes. That is not an injury excuse. That is the best part of twenty-seven full matches for eight goal involvements. Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong have not got near what they were doing at Bournemouth and Leverkusen. Giovanni Leoni did his cruciate on his debut.

One signing delivered. Hugo Ekitike finished as top scorer with eleven in the league and seventeen in all competitions, and became the youngest Liverpool player to reach double figures in a league season since Michael Owen in 2000-01. He was also the cheapest of the three forwards at £69m.

So the £125m striker managed three goals and the £69m one carried the team. That is not a recruitment department with a plan. That is a recruitment department getting lucky once out of six.

And Ekitike ruptured his Achilles in April. L'Équipe report he is targeting Boxing Day, which would be eight and a half months and the most optimistic end of everything predicted at the time of his surgery. The medical expectation back in April was nine to twelve months. That means January 2027 at the earliest, and possibly April.

Where I actually stand

I still think Liverpool can win this league. If Iraola gets the best out of Wirtz and Isak they will beat anyone. That is a genuine possibility and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make this piece angrier.

But you cannot know what Isak is going to do. Ekitike will not kick a ball before Christmas at the very best, so Isak leads the line at Newcastle and for the whole first half of the season. He could pull up in the second week and be gone until October, and not one Liverpool supporter would be surprised. That is what happens when you build a squad where the season rests entirely on the fitness of the forwards, because the alternative to them scoring three is losing 3-2.

So here is the prediction, and you can hold me to it. Liverpool will concede more than 40 league goals this season. Arsenal won the title conceding 27. If Liverpool come in under 40 I will have been wrong about this squad, and I will say so in May.

A club that spends £328m on forwards, loses four senior players for nothing, concedes at a rate it has never matched in the Premier League, and then plugs the hole with a loan is not unlucky. It is badly run.

And the worst of it is that they are not even good at the bit they care about. They emptied the vault on the attack, got one hit out of six, and left the defence to a twenty-year-old with an injury and a borrowed captain from Barcelona.

Richard Hughes leaves for Riyadh the day the window shuts. The rest of us have to watch it.