When it comes to judging a transfer window, the best time is not when there are still 17 days left to go. In fact, the ideal time is years later, though the new Liverpool sporting director Richard Hughes won't have that luxury — at least from the outside.
It is not just a new head coach in Arne Slot that Liverpool has had to integrate this summer, with a new set-up behind the scenes taking shape as well. Hughes has arrived from Bournemouth and is leading on transfers, with one of the first big moves he has made — Martin Zubimendi — having failed to come off.
The 25-year-old Spaniard has opted to stay with Real Sociedad , deciding, eventually, that he wasn't prepared to leave. Liverpool felt that he was open to a move and so had worked on getting an agreement in place.
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What happens next, though? Liverpool should be searching for an alternative to Zubimendi in its holding midfield department but it is not that simple. If there was an obvious player to come in and play there, they would have been bought a long time ago.
Having identified that position in the team as one that could do with strengthening, however, failing to bring in another body in that area would feel like a risk. Wataru Endo has limitations and Ryan Gravenberch and Curtis Jones are both better suited to playing further forward. Neither has a great amount of experience playing as a lone number six and would take time to adapt.
Time is not something that Liverpool really has this summer but nonetheless, there is no guarantee that the Reds will move for another option. There are players out there that would improve the quality of Slot's midfield and, quite simply, Slot looks short in that department.
Elsewhere, given the injury history of center-back options like Ibrahima Konate and the limitations of Sepp van den Berg , a center-back, having missed out on Leny Yoro , would ideally be sourced. That might seem like overkill — not least to Joe Gomez , who wants more minutes in that role — but Liverpool has recent experience of how quickly things can unravel. There can be no repeat of the campaign that saw Jordan Henderson and Fabinho fill in at the back.
In a year that sees the Champions League expand and the Reds potentially play even more matches than ever before, going in with a squad too light in numbers could quickly become a calamity. It would be a gamble to hope that players with a track record of missing significant periods of the season would be able to get through completely unscathed this time around.
Anthony Gordon is a player that Liverpool admires and his contract situation — his deal has two years left to run — makes it feel like the England ace is going to be attainable at some point. However, convincing Newcastle United to sell for a reasonable fee in the next fortnight — for an amount not considerably more than the $96m (£75m/€88m) agreement that was reached in principle earlier in the summer — is likely to be impossible.
And then of course there are contract considerations to be made. Liverpool still needs to open talks with Virgil van Dijk , he confirmed over the weekend, while Trent Alexander-Arnold and Mohamed Salah are in the same position: inside their final year. Each of the trio should be retained, even if for no other reason than to protect their transfer value.
It could be a busy period for Liverpool, then, with the August 30 transfer deadline approaching. Hughes has plenty on his plate — ideally a center-back, a Zubimendi alternative, keeping tabs on Gordon and making hay on new big contracts. He knew that would the case when he arrived, though now, of course, the clock is ticking.
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