Klopp Talk: Liverpool Have “a too Big Squad” and a Week to Fix It

Next Wednesday at 11PM BST, the transfer window closes. Between now and then, many Liverpool fans will be hoping to see a signing or two. Left back is the most popular shout, closely followed by defensive midfielder. Yet so far, all signs point to it being highly unlikely the club will be bringing anyone else in this summer.

What Liverpool will be trying to do, though, is to offload a few spare parts that have been sat on the sidelines and appear to have no place in Jürgen Klopp’s plans moving forward. But what happens if players like Mario Balotelli and Lazar Markovic are still at the club this time next week despite Liverpool’s efforts to deal them?

“That situation, the squad, you have to make decisions and of course until the 31st of August everything is possible,” said the Liverpool manager, who believes the deals will get done in the end. “When it’s the 1st of September, then we’ll have to analyse the situation and we’d have to think about what we would do then.”

If Mario Balotelli is still a Liverpool player on Thursday of next week, then certainly the club will have to figure out just what to do with him. But until they’ve exhausted all their options and the transfer window shuts with Balotelli still a Red, that’s not a subject Klopp is interested in spending very much time worrying about.

“The ideal squad is a squad where everybody has the perspective they can play,” Klopp added. “You need to have players who are convinced that they have to start—they need to be angry when they don’t start. That’s not a problem. It’s my job to talk to them, but in our situation, of course, the squad should not be too big.

“We have still a lot of games, but we don’t have 60-something, so to have a good atmosphere the players need to have that perspective. That’s what we’re working on in this moment. There’s no point thinking what we do if we have a too big squad because we’re working on it, but I can’t say anything before the 1st of September.”