WHEN it comes to the quality of the squad and the potential need for reinforcements, Liverpool are building from both a position of strength and one of weakness.

What is certain is that Liverpool and their owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG) need to build soon, or else the position they’ve found themselves in will not be sustainable.

It has been refreshing to see a team storm to the top of the Premier League without using the transfer market.

Liverpool’s only summer signing, Federico Chiesa, has only played 18 Premier League minutes and one minute in the Champions League, but Liverpool have still been the best team in Europe in the first half of the 2024/25 season, topping the league tables in both competitions.

Football teams need to always be looking to improve, and the transfer market is often seen as the only way to do so, but things like coaching, a strong youth academy and pathway, and the transition of players approaching their peak into players at their peak can all improve a team without making new signings.

But to stay at or near this level into 2025 and beyond under new manager Arne Slot, Liverpool will need to go into the transfer market at some point soon, and this is where we encounter their weak position.

With the contracts of three key players expiring at the end of the year and a clear need for eventual improvements in defence and at centre-forward, Liverpool potentially have six or seven first-team spots where reinforcements will be needed in the coming transfer windows. More than half a team.

Many of these are not merely squad pieces that can be given the time and space to settle and develop at the club.

The three contracts expiring are those of world-class players—Trent Alexander-Arnold, Virgil van Dijk, and Mohamed Salah.

Given the age of Salah and Van Dijk, their successors need to be considered regardless of whether or not they sign new deals.

One or more of this trio signing new contracts will buy more time, but that such key players have reached this stage of their contracts with nothing resolved further weakens the club’s position.

Liverpool have done well to create a process that found a suitable Jurgen Klopp successor when, on the face of it, it didn’t look like such a manager existed.

And even if they found the best manager possible, a period of transition post-Klopp, where Liverpool challenged for the top four and a respectable performance in the cups at best may have been expected.

As is often the case in football (and sports generally) where only a very small percentage of teams are successful at any one time, it was easier to predict failure or decline post-Klopp and line up the “I told you sos”, but that has not happened.

As it is, Liverpool top the Premier League by four points with a game in hand and look like the best team in the Champions League with half the season played under Slot.

These, along with their avoidance of the financial fair play (FFP) pitfalls that have befallen numerous clubs in recent years, are their strong positions.

FSG has regularly been criticised for their frugality, but as other clubs are scrambling around in court, forced to sell first-team level academy players, or selling hotels and training grounds to themselves to get around FFP-type rules, Liverpool have been free to focus on the sporting side of things.

The idea of FFP in European football will have been one of the reasons FSG were attracted to Liverpool in the first place.

Their data-led approach is built on getting advantages in places other clubs might not be looking at, and this approach works better when opponents don’t have unlimited funds to cover up their own mistakes.

FSG may have been disappointed FFP was not applied more stringently, but still produced Liverpool’s first title-winning team in 30 years and were agonisingly close to overtaking the Man City juggernaut on a couple of other occasions.

Liverpool’s success post-Klopp should not be downplayed either. It is very rare that a legendary, generational manager leaves a club and said club remains at the same level.

If anything, Liverpool have arguably gone up a level under Slot so far in comparison to the previous couple of seasons.

The clamour for transfers can also ignore the practical and human side of dealing with players.

Slot still regularly has a bench full of senior players, and adding new signings without selling means some would have to be left out of the squad altogether.

Too many ins and outs can also affect morale and team unity, but dealing with all of these psychological considerations as well as technical, tactical and media-related ones is part of the increasingly all-encompassing job of the manager.

Liverpool are approaching that side of the delicate balance where investment in the squad through new signings is needed, and it is made more complicated by the expiring contracts of those three key players.

It’s time for Liverpool’s much-lauded recruitment team to live up to its reputation.

When assessing whether owners are acting in the best interests of a football club, it’s always worth coming back to a point made by Kenny Dalglish during his time as a manager at Liverpool.

“The people who come to watch us play, who love the team and regard it as part of their lives, would never appreciate Liverpool having a huge balance in the bank,” Dalglish said.

“They want every asset we possess to be wearing a red shirt, and that’s what I want, too.”

It reinforces the idea that football club owners should be custodians, regardless of the level at which their club is operating.

In modern-day top-level football, run by billionaires of the global capitalist state and by the authoritarian rulers of rich individual states, the dynamic between owner and club and the fans is more complicated and more transactional, as seen when clubs use the clamour for transfers as one of their excuses to raise ticket prices, but Dalglish’s statement still rings true.

When FSG has chosen to build at Liverpool — whether that's improving the squad or the club’s infrastructure, including Anfield itself — they have generally been good at it, but on the squad side of things they have arguably not done enough in key moments.

They could make sure 2025 is not a moment that becomes part of those arguments by building from this position, however strong or weak it has ended up being.