Ronald Araujo arrived this weekend on a season-long loan. No transfer fee. Barcelona's condition was that Liverpool pay his salary in full, reported at £180,000 a week after tax — which, depending on which salary site you believe, puts him somewhere between £250,000 and £300,000 a week before it. He walks in as one of the highest earners at the club without costing a penny to sign.
That's Liverpool. In the accounts for the year to May 2025 their wage bill came in at £428m, the highest in the Premier League, ahead of Manchester City on £408m — and that's before a penny of Isak's, Wirtz's or Ekitike's money went through the books. When Liverpool want something solved, they solve it with wages. And that habit is the reason the squad is full of players nobody can shift.
Because here's what Liverpool wages do to a footballer who isn't quite good enough. They make him unsellable. Put a squad player on Liverpool money and he can't move to a club a rung below, because a club a rung below can't match it, and he isn't going to take the cut. So he stays, and he keeps taking the money, and every summer we have the same conversation about him.
Kostas Tsimikas is the case study.
He came from Olympiacos in August 2020 for £11m, signed as backup to Andy Robertson. Three years later, having never displaced Robertson, Liverpool handed him a new long-term contract. Nobody forced them into it. He wasn't being chased. They chose to extend a squad player who hadn't won the shirt in three seasons — and in doing so guaranteed he'd still be here years later, on money nobody below them would match.
You can see the logic from the club's side, and it's worth spelling out because it explains everything else. Go and buy a proper backup left-back and the wages are much the same. The only thing extending Tsimikas actually saves is the transfer fee. That's the calculation. It isn't recruitment and it isn't wage discipline, whatever the club would call it. It's avoiding a cheque.
Look what it produced. Milos Kerkez arrived and Tsimikas dropped to third choice. Liverpool wanted a permanent sale and put a €10m price on him, found nobody willing to pay it, and settled for a loan to Roma with no option to buy — with Roma covering his reported £75,000 a week in full. He made 25 appearances there and started eleven, six of them in Serie A. And here's the bit that should worry Liverpool: when Angelino was ruled out for months with pneumonia, Roma manager Gian Piero Gasperini didn't turn to Tsimikas. He moved Wesley across from the other flank instead. Roma had a left-back shortage and still wouldn't pick him. They didn't want to keep him either.
He came back to Merseyside and walked straight into the squad as backup left-back. Six years at the club now. If his deal runs out, I can promise you Real Madrid won't be phoning.
Most Liverpool fans would agree he isn't good enough, and it didn't take six years to work that out. Ask yourself what happens if Kerkez picks up something long-term. The honest answer is that we'd spend the season worried about it, because the alternative is Tsimikas every week.
Federico Chiesa is the same story with a different shirt number. Reported at somewhere between £120,000 and £150,000 a week depending on which salary site you believe. One hundred and four minutes of Premier League football in his first season. Two years at the club and still here — and at that money, where exactly is he going? You could replace him with someone better for the same wages or less. You just couldn't do it without paying a fee, and that's the part Liverpool won't do.
Compare that with what Arsenal did last month. They sold Leandro Trossard to Beşiktaş for around £17m. This is a player who started 21 league games and scored six in the season they won the title, and who set up the opening goal in the Champions League final. Thirty-one years old, a year left on his deal, and out of the door — because they believe Christos Tzolis is an upgrade.
Trossard is a considerably better footballer than Chiesa and he contributed far more. Arsenal moved him on anyway, at the exact moment every supporter in the ground would have forgiven them for keeping him. That's what deciding a player isn't good enough looks like. Liverpool haven't done that to anyone in years.
Arteta is being ruthless, and it hurts to say it, but that's the trait that wins leagues. Ferguson had it more than anyone — Ince, Stam, Van Nistelrooy, eventually Beckham, all sold with plenty left in them and all to howls from Old Trafford, and he was right nearly every time. Thirteen league titles. Better a year early than a year late. It's a rare quality now, partly because managers don't stay long enough to need it: you only have to be ruthless if you plan on still being there in four years. Even Pep Guardiola has spent two seasons rebuilding a great side without winning a league title in either of them.
Even Liverpool's greatest manager of the modern era struggled with it. The one criticism I'd ever aim at Klopp is that he kept some of those players a year or two longer than he needed to.
Then there's Joe Gomez, eleven years at the club and its longest-serving player.
The injuries are well documented. What's less discussed is that last season he was largely available and still wasn't picked. Thirty-three appearances sounds respectable until you break it down: sixteen starts, seventeen off the bench, sixteen games as an unused substitute. Seven Premier League starts out of thirty-eight. His first league start didn't come until 30 November.
This was a season when van Dijk had his worst campaign in a Liverpool shirt and Konaté was making mistakes every other week. If Arne Slot rated Gomez, that was the year to play him. He didn't.
You could argue a new manager means a clean slate, and that's fair enough. But Iraola has had one look at him. Eight minutes into the first friendly of pre-season, Gomez was off injured again. At some point the clean slate has to survive contact with the fitness record.
Now turn it around, because the other half is worse.
Ibrahima Konaté left on 30 June for nothing after Liverpool paid £36m for him in 2021. Trent Alexander-Arnold went the summer before for £10m. Curtis Jones is down to twelve months, Alexis Mac Allister to twenty-four, and nobody appears to be in any hurry about either.
That looks like a separate problem and it isn't. It's the same one, and underneath both is money. Renewing Konaté meant meeting his wage demands. Selling Tsimikas meant swallowing a loss. Replacing him meant paying a fee. Every one of those costs something today, so Liverpool take the option that costs nothing today and everything later. They'll spend whatever it takes on a player they've decided they want. On the decisions that are merely necessary, they won't spend at all. And players shouldn't be getting anywhere near the last year of a deal this often.
The contracts side of it deserves an article of its own and it'll get one. For now, just note that it comes from the same place.
There's a serious defence of all this and it deserves stating properly. Net spend of around £150m across four windows. No PSR trouble while Chelsea and City get dragged through hearings. And a league title in 2024-25 won doing exactly this, which is more than most of the clubs spending wildly have managed.
But that title wasn't won by the squad. It was won by Mohamed Salah having one of the great individual seasons in the club's history, by van Dijk at his peak, by an excellent first eleven with a couple of proper players behind it, Diogo Jota among them. Those players carried the squad ones. That's what an elite core does — it hides everything behind it until it stops being elite, and then you find out what you've actually got. Salah's gone. Van Dijk is 35. Konaté's in Madrid.
Which brings us back to Araujo, and why the deal tells you more than it looks like it does.
It's a good piece of business and I'm glad he's here. Iraola needed a body: Jacquet is short of fitness, Leoni is coming back from an ACL he tore on his debut, Gomez is injured, Bradley is out. But look at the shape of it. Liverpool didn't buy a centre-back. They borrowed one for a year and took on a quarter of a million a week in wages to do it, with an option at £47m they don't have to exercise.
And that's the tell. Across this rebuild Liverpool have spent roughly £354m on attacking players — Isak, Wirtz, Ekitike, Muñoz — and £86m on centre-backs, split between a twenty-year-old with no Premier League minutes and a lad who tore his ACL on debut. Isak on his own cost more than every defender at the club combined. That deserves a piece of its own and it'll get one, but it tells you where the appetite is. Compare it with Arsenal, who have Saliba, Gabriel, Mosquera, Calafiori and Hincapié on the books, bought and paid for.
I wrote earlier this week that Iraola, Wirtz and Isak would take Liverpool to the title, and I stand by it. That front end is good enough to win the league. That's exactly why this bothers me. You don't assemble an attack like that and then patch the defence with a loan.
So here's where I'll stake it. Come next summer, Liverpool will not have taken up the option on Araujo, Tsimikas and Chiesa will still be on the wage bill, and we'll be having this same conversation about a centre-back for the third year running.
Big clubs decide a player isn't good enough and move him on. Liverpool decide a player isn't good enough and give him a pay rise, rather than getting rid of him and spending the money on a transfer fee.