The dilemma in Liverpool’s midfield and the risks of taking another chance.

Romeo Lavia appears to be on the verge of joining Liverpool, but it would be extremely risky to wait until after the Belgian before adding another midfielder.

One would anticipate Liverpool to step up its efforts to sign Lavia as their third player of the summer after the departures of Jordan Henderson and Fabinho were officially confirmed.

Lavia won’t have had a proper preseason with Liverpool, so it is unclear whether he will be ready to start the opening Premier League game at Stamford Bridge should the deal go through.

In either case, Lavia’s addition to Jurgen Klopp’s team would be a thrilling development for the current campaign as well as many years to come.

He’s obviously still developing, and there will be plenty of room for improvement as he grows and develops, but his potential is alluring.

But if and when Lavia does, a critical question arises: will Liverpool still pursue another midfielder during this transfer window, or will they opt to make due with what they already have for the upcoming season?

The midfield numbers game

Liverpool unquestionably has fewer midfielders than they did at the end of the previous season, just in terms of personnel.

Five senior midfielders have left the team in Henderson, Fabinho, James Milner, Naby Keita, and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (excluding Fabio Carvalho and Arthur Melo), and only two have been replaced them.

It might be more helpful to concentrate on minutes played rather than player count when evaluating the breadth of Liverpool’s midfield options.

The Liverpool midfielders who played the most minutes in all competitions in 2022/23 were Fabinho (3,534) and Henderson (2,556).

If all goes well, Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai should be able to more than adequately fill those minutes in 2023–2024.

While Lavia played for Southampton last season, Milner, Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Keita only clocked up slightly more than 2,300 minutes (the equivalent of 25 complete games) between them.

Therefore, even though Liverpool may be down two players, it’s likely that Mac Allister, Szoboszlai, and Lavia will have made up the minutes that the five senior midfielders lost by their departures.

It should also be taken into account that it’s highly likely that Curtis Jones will log significantly more time than the 1,153 minutes he logged last season.

There is a scenario in which it could all work out absolutely fine if Liverpool enters the new season with just three new midfielders, provided that injuries and form go according to plan.

The problem is that it wouldn’t take much to go wrong before the options started to look uncomfortably limited.

It’s important to keep in mind that Stefan Bajcetic and Thiago are both recovering from serious injuries, and it could be some time before they are fully fit again.

The only remaining midfield options (aside from Trent Alexander-Arnold in the hybrid right-back role) if we place an asterisk next to both of those two for the time being would be Mac Allister, Szoboszlai, Jones, Lavia, and Harvey Elliott, and only one of those six is a specialized defensive midfielder.

However, Mac Allister and Jones are best used higher up the field where they can connect with the front three. Sure, they can occasionally drop back into a deeper role.

You wouldn’t want to see it for a very long time, but it might work well against specific types of opponents as a temporary fix.

All it would take is for Lavia to sustain an injury for Liverpool to find themselves suddenly down to just one senior defensive midfielder. Of course, this is assuming that Lavia picks up speed relatively quickly, which is by no means a given.

Furthermore, it would be unfair to expect a 19-year-old to step in and immediately take over the defensive midfield void on his own.

Another unnecessary gamble

When this summer’s transfer window first opened, the general opinion was that Liverpool needed to sign three midfielders.

Nobody anticipated that two Saudi Arabian clubs would be successful in luring Henderson and Fabinho away for exorbitant sums of money, significantly disrupting preseason plans and greatly expanding the scope of the rebuild that would be necessary.

Given how poorly Henderson and Fabinho played for the majority of last season, there was already a compelling argument to sign Lavia before any news about them broke.

Due in large part to a lack of dynamism and intensity in the middle of the pitch, Liverpool was regularly and easily penetrated last season, frequently by so-called inferior opponents.

Lavia would have offered strong competition without having to worry about becoming a guaranteed starter week in and week out if Henderson and Fabinho had stayed.

If Liverpool’s midfield rebuild ends with Lavia, given the unanticipated departures of Henderson and Fabinho, they run the risk of leaving themselves dangerously short of players.

A second midfielder would be added to the Belgian, which would lessen the pressure on Lavia to start playing right away and lessen the effect of any potential injury problems that might develop.

The choice not to address key positions in the squad and plan for the possibility that certain things might go wrong resulted in Liverpool performing significantly worse than anticipated in two of the last three seasons.

In 2020–21, Liverpool came dangerously close to missing out on a top–four finish due to the team’s decision to not replace Dejan Lovren and start the season with just three senior center-backs.

Liverpool’s failure to qualify for the Champions League last season was largely caused by the decision not to strengthen the midfield.

It is to be hoped that the lessons from those campaigns have been applied, and Liverpool won’t make the same type of error by trying to cut corners this time.

It might be Manu Kone or Khephren Thuram, who were both strongly connected earlier in the window, or it might be a sudden development that catches everyone off guard like Szoboszlai.

However, completing the transfer window by adding one more midfielder (and a left-sided center-back) after Lavia could be the key to proving that Liverpool are capable of mounting a serious challenge on all fronts.

Although there are many reasons to be optimistic about this new beginning for Klopp’s Liverpool, there is still significant work to be done.