As Pep Guardiola once said, "I'm so happy, believe me. I'm so happy. Happy new year." I, too, am so happy. Happy new year. It's time to roll out the second edition of our mailbag. You can send me questions on Twitter (@rwohan) or via email to ohanlonmailbag@gmail.com. We'll do more of these throughout the year, and as long as the question is at least vaguely soccer-related, there is a chance I will answer it.
Let's go!
Hey, Luis Diaz is joining Liverpool! Tell me about what this means for Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino and, more broadly, Liverpool. -- UF
While they're not true reflections of player quality in any way, you can glean some expectations from the relative amount a team is willing to pay for a player.
Liverpool's deal for Diaz, a 25-year-old attacker from FC Porto, is reported to cost around €40 million, with another potential €20 million in add-ons. According to the latest Deloitte report, Liverpool's most recent annual revenues were €558.6 million. Pre-add-ons, that means Liverpool spent about 7% of their revenues on Diaz. If all the add-ons all come into play, that's slightly more than 10%.
When a team is spending in that range on a player, he usually falls into the solid-starter-to-key-rotation player category of expectations, which is useful for this when thinking about Salah, Mane and Firmino.