The pressure has been building on Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group to loosen the purse strings in the January and summer transfer windows to address the club's challenging start to the Premier League season.
While Liverpool have been returned to the European elite under the ownership of FSG and, crucially, the management of Reds boss Jurgen Klopp, there have been consistent calls for the owners to provide greater funds in the transfer market to strengthen from a position of success.
The Reds have consistently been one of the biggest Premier League clubs with the lowest net spend, the club having adopted a model of player trading that has proved successful in the past, most notably with the £134m profit that was made on the sale of Philippe Coutinho.
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Over the past five seasons Liverpool's net transfer spend sits at ninth in the Premier League overall with a figure of £216.6m, slightly higher than Manchester City's net spend of £213.8m, although City's gross spend has been significantly higher.
Liverpool's owners have been far more conservative when it comes to outlay compared to their rivals and their stricter costs controls, while lauded in some quarters for delivering success on a more sustainable footing, has been seen by others as a handbrake on ambition that has hamstrung Liverpool's opportunity to apply more pressure from a strong position.
The recent defeats to strugglers Nottingham Forest and Leeds United brought the ownership back into sharp focus, and the calls for them to back their manager to avoid a potentially damaging season where Champions League football wasn't achieved have grown ever louder.
Borussia Dortmund's Jude Bellingham is the name that has been most strongly linked, but with a fee in excess of £100m likely needed to prise the 19-year-old from the Bundesliga side it won't be an easy, or cheap, task.
The Reds likely need more than one new arrival, and with midfield identified as a weakness at present, other options such as Konrad Laimer at RB Leipzig and Leicester City's Youri Tielemans have also been mooted.
Whether the spend begins in January or whether it the summer where the heavy spend occurs, it is vital that it does, indeed, occur.
The money that will be made available for transfers won't tally with what the club can afford to spend within the Financial Fair Play limits, where the Reds could have the most headroom of the Premier League clubs when it comes to FFP.
In November of 2021, football finance expert and author of the Price of Football, Kieran Maguire, conducted research for Sportsmail into the allowable spend when it came to FFP, with Liverpool sitting second with £273m and Tottenham Hotspur topping the list at £400m.
As of November the FFP room for manoeuvre for the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United will likely have diminished from £241m and £243m, respectively, a result of financial losses and heavy transfer spend from both clubs.
Liverpool, by contrast, made comparatively small losses in 2021 of £4.8m, a figure down from £41.5m the previous pandemic impacted year. According to insights from sports business website Off The Pitch, Liverpool are projected to see revenues rise to £602m in the next set of accounts, with a pre-tax profit as high as £76m suggested. Those figures are projections with the actual accounts for the financial year ending May 2022 due for publication in early 2023.
Liverpool's acquisitions of Darwin Nunez and Luis Diaz would be amortised over six and five-and-a-half years respectively, with Nunez's amortised cost £10.7m in the accounts each year of the life of his contract and Diaz's £6.7m The fees received for the likes of Sadio Mane and Neco Williams are not amortised, they ban be booked as profit immediately.
Liverpool's allowed spend within FFP limits, given another strong balance sheet and keeping net spend low this season, now pushes them beyond the £300m mark and potentially sees them leapfrog Spurs as the club with the most room to spend after the North London side spent £172m in the summer window, a net spend of £143.1m against the backdrop of an £80.2m loss for the 2021 financial year. According to the Off The Pitch projections, Spurs could post a £48m pre-tax loss in their 2022 accounts.
Of course, the fact that the spend is allowed doesn't mean that it will be acted upon, although it does place Liverpool in a strong position when it comes to how far they can go if needs be without causing any FFP issues for themselves in the longer term. With some of their rivals, some who have been linked with interest in Bellingham, having seen their room for manoeuvre become tighter through losses and spend, the Reds would be well placed should Klopp be handed the backing of the owners in the next two windows.
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