Spending can bring its own problems. Some footballers can be weighed down by their price tags, though there were precious few signs of that when the £100m signing Florian Wirtz found the £69m buy Hugo Ekitike to score four minutes into their Liverpool bows. But some teams can be unbalanced by expenditure.
Arne Slot assessed a first meaningful match after Liverpool gave their defence a £75m makeover and concluded: “We need to be better defensively.” It wasn’t an attempt to make the Community Shield an indictment of Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez, his deluxe pair of new full-backs. Rather, it was a broader view.
