Liverpool's Unbalanced Squad: Can They Compete?

Liverpool have just thrown another £200m-plus at a squad that already went close last season. On paper, it is the most expensively assembled group in the club’s history. In reality, Andoni Iraola walks away from the window with a team that looks anything but complete.

Jamie Carragher did not bother dressing it up on Sky Sports.
"It does not look like a balanced squad," he said. "Liverpool are short in the full-back areas and probably a midfield player as well."

That is the nub of it. The money has gone in. The holes remain.

Salah gone, left-footers everywhere else

The headline signing is Bradley Barcola, £123m from Paris Saint-Germain. A statement fee. A statement talent. Yet even that deal feeds into the nagging sense of imbalance.

Liverpool have lost Mohamed Salah, the best left-footed right-winger the Premier League has seen. Their response? Stack the squad with players who prefer the opposite flank.

"Liverpool have not got a real out-and-out right-sided attacker," Carragher said. "We have not got anybody with a left foot on that right side, like Mo Salah. I am disappointed. I am not quite sure what we are going to do on that right wing right now."

Barcola can operate across the front, but everything about his game screams left side. Cody Gakpo has started there. Florian Wirtz has been used there. Hugo Ekitike too. Rio Ngumoha broke through on the left and has only been nudged over to the right in pre-season experiments.

Victor Munoz? One season of top-flight football, again as a left winger, and suddenly he looks like the likeliest option to plug the gap on the right.

One decision on its own is understandable. Taken together, they form a pattern. The attack is loaded with players who want the same spaces, the same channels, the same side of the pitch. Curiosity, not catastrophe, but it leaves supporters staring at other parts of the squad and wondering why those areas were not prioritised instead.

Full-backs on the edge

Nowhere is that more obvious than at full-back.

When Jeremie Frimpong arrived last summer, Liverpool were at pains to stress he was not a Trent Alexander-Arnold replacement. Two games into this season, he is playing exactly there. He is also the only fit specialist in the role with Conor Bradley injured.

Some have floated Dominik Szoboszlai as an emergency option, but that feels like a workaround rather than a plan. Shunting a centre-back wide is even less attractive given how central the full-backs are to Iraola’s football.

The numbers show it. Frimpong and Milos Kerkez sit among the top three players in the Premier League for sprints so far. Above them? Adrien Truffert, the left-back from Iraola’s Bournemouth days. That is no coincidence. The system demands constant running, constant width, constant aggression from those positions.

Look at the average positions from Liverpool’s opening two league games and compare them to that title-winning season under Arne Slot. The full-backs are flying on, often together. The midfielders have to plug the gaps behind them.

That is where the alarm bells ring.

Midfield without a brake

Ryan Gravenberch once stepped up to help Slot deliver a title, driving from midfield with power and timing. Iraola would love that version. The question is whether he has the right blend around him.

Alexis Mac Allister’s physical drop-off over the last 18 months has been hard to ignore. He still reads the game, still uses the ball, but in a system that demands repeated high-intensity actions, his limitations without it become more obvious.

Is Iraola even planning to use a traditional holding midfielder? At Bournemouth, he did not want a sitter. He wanted hunters. Alex Scott spoke of being "very aggressive" out of possession. Tyler Adams talked about a group that truly believed they would win the ball high up the pitch.

That approach has already shown its risk at Liverpool.

"I do not believe that midfield can function with the personnel in there," Carragher said. "For me, it does not work. And it is not just about personnel, it is the structure the manager is asking for."

The warning signs came early. Within five minutes of the first Premier League game, Liverpool’s rest defence was cut open. Full-backs high. Centre-backs deep. Nobody occupying the critical space between them. Newcastle walked into that void and scored.

With Alexander-Arnold’s attacking instincts, Frimpong’s licence to bomb on and Virgil van Dijk now more inclined to drop rather than step out, that gap will not close by itself. It is a structural problem, not a bad day at the office.

So Iraola finds himself with the most expensive squad Liverpool have ever put together – and the most obviously unbalanced in a decade.

Compromises or chaos

Can he fix it without another dip into the market? Only by sacrificing something.

"You do not want to lose the offensive side, the fluidity, the arrivals with numbers, but obviously we were punished the other day, especially in the first goal," Carragher said.

"We did not do a proper lockdown. But there is a balance. We cannot go from one way where we send a lot of people forward to keeping everyone back so we do not arrive with numbers. I do not want to tell Ryan Gravenberch not to carry the ball or arrive in the box.

"It is a matter of identifying the situation. You cannot be with the joystick every time [controlling] the player. There are players that are very good at smelling the danger. 'I cannot risk going now. I think I have to stay.' Recognising those situations is the job."

That is the tightrope. Keep the attacking chaos that makes this team so watchable, or rein it in to protect a defensive structure that already looks stretched.

For now, a couple of wild, high-scoring draws feel like the natural outcome for this version of Liverpool. They can overwhelm teams. They can be picked off. Both truths can live in the same 90 minutes.

Imperfect, imbalanced, undeniably thrilling. The only real question is whether that volatility carries them towards a title race or blows their season apart by Christmas.