The OBVIOUS solution to Liverpool’s striker problem

Liverpool and Darwin Nunez look set to part ways, but completing his transfer isn’t proving easy.

It can be simply to drift into Football Manager mode sometimes as a football fan, thinking that you can just swap a player out and bring another one in, with relatively little fallout to deal with.

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But the reality is that Liverpool are in a hole with Nunez and if they are to dig themselves out, then they will need to re-evaluate their perspective. The striker market is littered with problems.

Furthermore, in just over a month, the Reds will have to field a team to kickstart the 2025/26 Premier League season as reigning champions. We might have to accept the obvious solution to our situation.

Is a new striker really on the cards?

The main choices for a new No. 9 are Hugo Ekitike at Eintracht Frankfurt, Benjamin Sesko at Leipzig, Victor Osimhen who looks to be headed to Galatasaray and Viktor Gyokeres who is Arsenal bound.

Beyond the latter two, priced at around £60-70m, the others will likely cost £80-90m.

That is a significant amount of money and given the situation that Liverpool now find themselves in with Nunez – an expensive failure that they can’t sell – another high stakes move feels like we would be falling into a trap that we have yet to get out of. Ekitike and Sesko are enormous risks.

The Frenchman has 44 career goals to his name, and half of them were scored last season. At 23 years old, he has clearly shown potential, but his ability to become a reliable goalscorer is doubted.

Sesko, on the other hand, has a proven track record, with 82 goals to his name, and he is a year younger, but 21 of those strikes came in a youth league, and 22 came in the Austrian Bundesliga, so the 39 goals scored during his time in Germany are all we can reliably assess him on.

The lack of Premier League experience, for someone that will cost so an eye-watering fee, is what let the pair down. Nunez had 47 goals for Benfica in two season before he joined the Reds in 2022.

So it’s clear that we’re in a situation that no one wants to be in. Far more suitable and value-for-money strikers such as Alexander Isak and Julian Alvarez simply aren’t on the market right now.

Where do we go then? What happens for the remainder of the summer? What will the squad look like?

Well, the simple answer to our problems is to keep Nunez this season, despite our outward intention to sell him. Now, I know what many of the people reading this will be thinking. ‘This is a terrible idea’.

Here are my reasons. One, he is an established Premier League player, even if the last three years have told us that he can’t handle the expectations we have on him. We all know he can’t cut it.

But across all competitions, he has 40 goals and 22 assists in the last three seasons – that is enough to compete with Sesko and Ekitike’s numbers, although they are roughly three years younger.

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Secondly, he doesn’t need integrating. He needs love and affection and an unwilling desire from the fans to support him – even when he’s constantly making the same mistakes. He isn’t the clinical striker we all thought he was, but he is an asset and the team benefitted from his efforts last season.

In the Champions League, he scored the decisive goal in a 1-0 win against Leipzig, and he made the assist for Harvey Elliott’s winner at the Parc de Princes against PSG, which sent us into bedlam.

Likewise, the three points Liverpool took from the GTEC Community Stadium in a 2-0 Premier League win over Brentford were masterminded by Nunez, scoring twice in the 91st and 93rd minutes.

Deep down we all know that his time on Merseyside has been underwhelming, but also, the moments that he gave us were nothing short of extraordinary and he’s helped us towards reaching success.

And then we have the elephant in the room, which is that he isn’t going anywhere because he’s contracted until 2028 and no one wants to buy him. Napoli most recently retreated from their interest in him because they found a more viable option that could be wrapped up more seamlessly.

The asking price that Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes have set is £70m, in an attempt to cut most of the losses we could face. But it’s an incredibly bold strategy because only really teams from Saudi Arabia would be willing to meet such a demand and we don’t know if they’ll bid for him again.

January saw the figure that we are hoping for being dangled in front of us, but losing a player who could be pivotal in the title race proved to be too much of a risk, so we dismissed Al Hilal’s approach.

Now it’s convenient for us, we’d kindly like them to take him off our hands. That’s not how it works.

So if we’re stuck with him, the question you need to ask yourselves is this. ‘Is losing Nunez going to be something you’re okay with, if there isn’t a guarantee that his replacement will surpass him?’

Florian Wirtz is now here and so we have a new creative dynamic that he could thrive in and if he is able to produce a more impressive campaign next season, then new buyers might become interested.

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In order to cover the loss of Diogo Jota next season, it feels as though the most appropriate action that Liverpool could take would be to promote Jayden Danns to the first team to play a regular role.

And given the options available to replace Nunez, it seems as though leaving the striker recruitment business this summer would be better for everyone all round. In time, more solid options will arrive.