The Manchester City charges have dominated the conversation over the past couple of weeks, and rightly so. I have written enough about them myself.
Put them to one side for a minute.
What Sunday at Anfield showed me was something different. Manchester City recruit better than Liverpool.
That is the problem I cannot get away from now.
Liverpool are not being priced out of the market. They are not shopping for bargains while City take every player they want. Liverpool are spending enormous money themselves. The difference is what they are getting back from it.
Elliot Anderson cost City £116m. That is huge money. He came to Anfield and looked worth it straight away.
Liverpool paid £116m for Florian Wirtz. City paid £34m for Rayan Cherki.
I do not want to turn this into another Wirtz article because that is a separate argument. The point here is recruitment. One club is repeatedly finding players who come in and make an impact. Liverpool are repeatedly spending big money and being left waiting for the return.
The spending figures make the argument harder to dismiss.
Using Sky Sports' transfer-window records from summer 2024 through summer 2026, including both January windows, Liverpool's gross spend comes to about £706m. Manchester City's is about £916m. Arsenal's is about £567m.
So City have spent far more in total. I am not hiding that.
But City have also brought in far more through sales. On the same Sky Sports figures, Liverpool have received about £321m in disclosed transfer fees, City about £545m and Arsenal about £226m.
That leaves Liverpool with the highest net spend of the three: roughly £385m, compared with £371m for City and £341m for Arsenal.
Figures use Sky Sports' transfer-window records. Fees include potential add-ons. Undisclosed fees are excluded, deals agreed before summer 2024 are excluded, and Giorgi Mamardashvili is counted once when Liverpool agreed his transfer in 2024.
That does not mean Liverpool and City have spent exactly the same way. They have not. City spent heavily in the January windows while Liverpool did not.
It does mean the easy explanation no longer works.
Liverpool cannot look at City and say the difference is simply that they spend money Liverpool cannot spend. Liverpool's own net outlay across this period is higher.
The question is what they have bought with it.
Go back to summer 2024.
Liverpool signed Federico Chiesa for £12.5m and agreed the £29m deal for Mamardashvili. I do not think either has been anywhere near good enough.
Arsenal spent £42m on Riccardo Calafiori and £31.6m on Mikel Merino. Calafiori, for me, is the best left-back in the league. Merino has been a good, solid player who has scored important goals. I would call both signings hits.
Then Liverpool started spending the really big money.
Wirtz has been a massive miss for me so far.
Hugo Ekitike has been a hit.
Alexander Isak has been a miss. I know there is an argument for giving him more time, and I have tried to be fair to him, but Liverpool paid £125m. At that price I expect far more than they have had back.
Jeremie Frimpong has been a miss. Milos Kerkez has been a miss.
Giovanni Leoni is different. He played one game, looked excellent and then suffered a serious injury. It would be ridiculous to judge him on that. Armin Pecsi has barely played and I have not seen enough of him either.
That distinction matters. I am not interested in declaring every new signing a failure after a few weeks.
Bradley Barcola is the same this season. Liverpool paid £123m and I have not liked what I have seen so far. If nothing changes, my judgement will change with it. For now, I am giving him more time.
Jérémy Jacquet, on the other hand, looks like a hit already.
So this is not me saying Liverpool get every transfer wrong.
They do not.
My argument is that they get too many wrong for the amount of money they are spending.
City have misses as well. Savio did not convince me. Rayan Aït-Nouri has not worked for me. Tijjani Reijnders did not work. James Trafford did not work.
But there is another part of recruitment that City seem to handle better: what happens when they realise a signing has not worked.
Savio cost £33.6m and City later sold him to Tottenham for £85m. Reijnders cost £46.3m and was sold for £51m. Trafford cost £31m and went to Leeds for £40m.
That is not me pretending every one of those deals is pure profit. Football accounting is more complicated than purchase fee minus sale fee.
The point is simpler than that.
City move on.
They make a mistake, recover value and go again.
Liverpool have had too many players who are not good enough hanging around for too long. Chiesa was one of the first signings of this period. He is still there.
Meanwhile City have kept adding players I would class as hits.
Cherki has been one. Gianluigi Donnarumma has been one. Antoine Semenyo came in for £64m and made an immediate impact. Marc Guéhi cost £20m and has strengthened them.
Then this summer they went huge again. Anderson at £116m has been fantastic. Enzo Fernández at £125m has been a hit for me. Iliman Ndiaye at £65m has been a hit.
Some of their younger signings are too early to judge. That is fine. Not every transfer needs an instant verdict.
Arsenal's record is another reason I find Liverpool's difficult to defend.
Calafiori and Merino were good business. Martín Zubimendi has been a hit. Viktor Gyökeres has done a job for them. Cristhian Mosquera has been a hit.
This summer I would put Bruno Guimarães, Ezri Konsa, Christos Tzolis and Piero Hincapié in the hit column as well.
Arsenal have made mistakes. I do not think Noni Madueke, Eberechi Eze or Christian Nørgaard worked particularly well.
That is normal. Every club gets transfers wrong.
What is not normal, if you want to compete at the very top, is spending at Liverpool's level and getting this many major decisions wrong.
That is why I keep coming back to recruitment rather than spending.
Richard Hughes was Liverpool's sporting director during much of this period, so he has to take responsibility for the record. Whether every signing was his decision, or how much of the blame belongs to him personally, nobody outside the club truly knows.
Recruitment at a club like Liverpool is not one man sitting in a room picking names. Scouts, analysts, coaches and executives are involved. I am not going to pretend I know exactly who pushed for which player.
But somebody has to be accountable for the outcome.
Liverpool have spent enough money to build an outstanding side.
The net-spend figures make that impossible to ignore. They have spent more than City on a net basis across this period and considerably more than Arsenal.
The answer cannot simply be to spend another £200m and hope it fixes everything.
They need to buy better players for the money they are already spending. They need to identify mistakes quicker. And when a signing clearly is not working, they need to be better at moving him on and recovering value.
Liverpool's problem is not a lack of ambition in the transfer market anymore.
It is recruitment.