The Harry Wilson story was one of the most interesting tales I’ve written about in this close season, and I knew when I heard it that it would do the article. In that article, I said that the Wilson deal collapsed, in part, because Celtic wasn’t prepared to guarantee the kid first team football, which Liverpool requires before letting its loanees go out … and I also pointed out that Sevco had one of them already and the press had never asked the question.
Well yesterday they signed their second one, the winger Ryan Kent.
And I knew I had heard the name somewhere before. Lo and behold, he was the kid who Liverpool charged Bristol City a whopping great £500,000 extra for, when that team gave him only a handful of first team appearances. The story is interesting in a couple of ways.
First was the number of games. It was shockingly low for a footballer the papers are falling all over themselves to big up. Neil Cameron wrote one of his puff pieces today which put so much flowery language around the facts that you’d be forgiven for ignoring what they were; this player failed during a loan move to Germany and then failed again when Bristol City took him on. Liverpool might have offered him a new deal, but Cameron ought not to get excited.
Clubs do that when they think they might still get a transfer fee somewhere down the line.
It was, after all, why Windass and Tavernier were given extended contracts at Ibrox last season, because the club fully expected there to be interest in the summer.
(Which, hilariously, there has been exactly none of, despite one spectacularly well-timed leak of Windass’ release clause, a highly improbable £3 million.)
Bristol City signed the kid expecting him to be better than he was.
But once they realised he wasn’t going to cut it they actually dropped him although they knew that would spark a hefty fine from his parent club. In other words, they would rather pay the money than have him in their team, and that’s pretty telling don’t you think?
Not that this bothers Sevco fans, who seem delighted that a “highly rated prospect” is signing for them. But they better ponder what it means. They have players in those positions right now; one of them is Windass himself. Murphy is on the left and Candelas is on the right. If the club is obliged to play this loanee, no matter how indifferent his form, one of those three drops out completely. And how’s that going to make them feel?
Because Sevco is not Bristol City. They don’t have the spare £500,000 lying around.
They cannot afford to simply throw that kind of money away, so Gerrard is going to be under real pressure from inside the club to give this player games, and lots of them, so that they fulfil the terms of the deal and don’t have to pay the overage.
What does that do for morale in the dressing room? What does it say to those who are already there, and who assumed they would be starting … or even just that starting in the team would be based on such frivolous and outdated concepts as “form” or “merit”?
I have complained, bitterly, this last week about the complete absence of signs of life from the Celtic boardroom on Resolution 12, the Sevco-SFA war and on our lack of signings. People inside our club better get the finger out and fast, because fans are losing their patience, and nobody should think that last season’s success will blind folk to the fact that these things are taking far too goddamned long to get done.
The board had better be aware that anger is growing and nobody is going to hold Brendan Rodgers accountable if he can’t do more with less.
But I’d rather have no signings than taking some youngster on loan from another club and facing financial penalties for not choosing him over first team footballers who have earned their place in the team. The simple fact is, most Liverpool youth players wouldn’t get near the level of our squad as it currently stands. For Sevco fans it might be an improvement on the dreck they’ve been used to, but I wouldn’t count on that being a game-changing upgrade.