Season Preview for Liverpool FC – Valid Reasons For Optimism

Excited By This (Incomplete) Liverpool Squad, Plus Caveats

I've been unusually un-Zen on the TTT Main Hub about the unfathomable negotiating over Roméo Lavia, which is a rare instance of me looking at something Liverpool FC does and thinking “that's just plain wrong”. It seems an avoidable series of missteps, that can be partly corrected, but at the opportunity cost of lateness.

While I'm generally positive, I also think certain standards need to be met; I don't expect perfection, but I do expect basic competence.

I also do realistic optimism, not blind, thoughtless optimism. If it was just the latter, you wouldn’t bother reading.

However, Liverpool still have a very exciting squad; it's just not (yet) quite big enough. And the XI, as I will discuss later in the piece, is generally really nicely balanced, bar one single position.

I would still expect midfielder/s to be signed; too late to help them settle quickly, but we'll see what happens. (Again, failure to sign the correct midfielders last summer made this summer even more vital, and belatedly selling two midfielders made acting swiftly even more important.)

Still, Lavia frustrations aside, I just want to point out how excited I am by the existing players, the new players, and the young players. (And hopefully that will be supplemented by further arrivals.)

But as with any season, it seems that a) you need a good team, and b) your chances depending on how many injuries you have. If a Jürgen Klopp squad stays fit, success usually follows – as Andrew Beasley’s incredible graphic shows:

While not an expert scout, I called both Stefan Bajcetic and Ben Doak as the best young players I'd seen for ages in the U18s, within a very quick time of them playing for the U18s. With Doak it was half a game, and preseason last year showed Bajcetic as a standout; ditto Doak this time.

This article – analysing the XI and the squad – is for paying ZenDen subscribers only.

*Note: the ZenDen is additional content separate from the TTT Main Hub. Rather than seek to write freelance work for other outlets, to supplement my income and keep TTT running (as everything gets more expensive), I write paywalled, zen-like material on the ZenDen. The ZenDen is a quiet space with no commenting – just articles to read. The community remains on the Main Hub, and its where I interact with subscribers, write different articles, and provide post-match analysis.*