Kieran Maguire has suggested that Liverpool’s strategy of raising funds is following a similar trajectory to that of Premier League rivals Chelsea.
The Blues have earned a reputation of late for gathering numerous young talent with the goal of selling them for profit down the line.
“I think we will see clubs utilise players as commodities to a greater extent,” the finance guru told Football Insider.
“The classic example is Chelsea. If you take a look at their player sales over the past five years, they’ve sold players for £688m
“We can name some of them, Costa, Hazard, Morara. But many are players who’ve barely played for them.
“What we are seeing now is that, if a player has a bit of experience at an elite club such as Liverpool, it has a huge impact in terms of his market value.
“You can start to make significant sales in that £8-15m bracket, and these actually fly under the radar as far as excitement goes.
“It’s the factory shop model. You just scoop up loads and loads of talent, process them and make money out of them.”
The Reds have already raised over £30m from the sales of Kamil Grabara, Liam Millar, Marko Grujic, Taiwo Awoniyi and Harry Wilson – all players that barely featured for the club’s first-team squad.
As far as transfer strategies are concerned, purchasing highly-rated youngsters deemed to have high ceilings and parting ways with them for profit is sound in practice, as Chelsea have demonstrated.
It does, of course, raise further questions about how this “factory shop model”, as Maguire puts it, affects player welfare and development but from a purely financial perspective, it apparently works.
We’re not quite sure that Liverpool are hoping to emulate this model exactly, though we’ve no doubt benefitted from selling on young talent who failed to make the grade with the first-team previously.
In the past 5 years Liverpool have banked £108.5m from selling academy players and that doesn’t include loan fee’s & wages saved over the 5 years……..smart business!.