Liverpool's Imbalanced Squad: Tactical Flaws and Recruitment Challenges

Liverpool have just thrown another £200m-plus at a squad that still does not make sense.

On paper, this is the club’s most expensively assembled group of players. On grass, Andoni Iraola walks away from the window with a team that looks more like a puzzle dumped on the table than one carefully pieced together.

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

That is the nub of it. Liverpool have spent big, but not necessarily where the gaps are.

Barcola, Salah’s shadow and a lop-sided attack

The £123m move for Bradley Barcola from Paris Saint-Germain should be the sort of transfer that calms a fanbase. A marquee forward, a huge fee, a player with versatility.

Instead, it only deepens the main tactical question.

Liverpool have just lost Mohamed Salah, the best left-footed right-winger the Premier League has seen. They have responded by stockpiling players who prefer the opposite flank. The attack tilts heavily to the left, the right wing now a riddle.

"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 line, but a fee of that size demands he plays where he is most dangerous. That is not the right. Cody Gakpo has started on the left. Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike have also been used there in the past. The left is crowded, not solved.

Rio Ngumoha broke through on that flank too, only to be flipped to the opposite wing in pre-season. Victor Munoz, signed after one top-flight season, arrives as – yes – another left winger.

None of these decisions alone condemns the recruitment strategy. They raise eyebrows rather than alarms. But they feed into a wider picture: a squad loaded in certain zones, strangely hollow in others.

Full-backs on the edge and a system that demands more

The clearest fault line runs through the full-back positions.

When Jeremie Frimpong arrived last summer, Liverpool insisted he was not a Trent Alexander-Arnold replacement at right-back. Two games into this season, that is exactly where the Netherlands international has lined up.

With Conor Bradley injured, Frimpong is the only fit specialist in that role. Some argue Dominik Szoboszlai could fill in there, but that is a square peg solution. Shunting a centre-back wide would be worse, especially in Iraola’s set-up, where full-backs are not just defenders – they are the system’s accelerators.

The numbers tell the story. Frimpong and Milos Kerkez sit among the top three players in the Premier League for sprints so far. Above them? Adrien Truffert, still at Iraola’s old club Bournemouth. High-speed, high-risk full-backs are not an optional extra for this coach. They are the starting point.

Look at the average positions from Liverpool’s opening two games and compare them to that title-winning season under Arne Slot. The full-backs fly on, often together. They stretch the pitch, they pin teams back, but they also leave a yawning responsibility behind them.

That responsibility now falls on a midfield that does not obviously look built for it.

Midfield without a net

Ryan Gravenberch grew into a key figure under Slot, driving Liverpool to the title. He can carry the ball, break lines, arrive late in the box. Alexis Mac Allister offers control and craft, but his physical edge has faded across the past 18 months.

So who protects the middle of the pitch when both full-backs go? Who kills the counter?

Is Iraola even looking for a classic holding midfielder? At Bournemouth, he wanted his players to engage, not sit. Alex Scott spoke about being "very aggressive" out of possession. Tyler Adams said the squad believed they would win the ball high up the pitch.

That is the idea being imported to Anfield. The early evidence suggests the risk is real.

"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."

Within five minutes of the opening Premier League game, Liverpool’s rest defence was split open. Full-backs high, centre-backs deep, a gaping hole between them. No midfielder dropped in. Newcastle surged through that space and scored.

With Alexander-Arnold’s natural instinct to push on, Kerkez and Frimpong sprinting into the final third, and Virgil van Dijk increasingly inclined to retreat rather than step up, this is not a one-off tactical blip. It is a structural fault line.

Iraola has inherited Liverpool’s most expensive squad. He may also have inherited its most obviously flawed group in a decade.

Compromise 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."

That is the tightrope. Keep the waves of runners, the chaos in the final third, the overloads that make Iraola’s football so watchable – but somehow plug the leaks behind them.

"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," Carragher added. "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."

For now, Liverpool look exactly like their early results: a couple of high-scoring draws in human form. Thrilling going one way, vulnerable the other.

An imbalanced, imperfect team, yes. But one that will drag the season into a constant argument: will their firepower be enough to burn through the league, or will the gaps they have left behind finally catch up with them?