Harvey Elliott (signed on loan)

[Brazilian Villain]

What if another club signs him, but then loans him to someone else with an option to buy. I bet he could play then!

Yes. Get Fulham to sign him in January and loan him back to us for the second half of the season, with us covering most of his wages. Liverpool make the sale now, we have an extra body for the run-in, Harvey gets another PL Winners medal, and Fulham have an improved player in the summer who's had another 6 months of coaching under El Maestro. It's a win for all involved.

[paul_e]

What if another club signs him, but then loans him to someone else with an option to buy. I bet he could play then!

Yes. Get Fulham to sign him in January and loan him back to us for the second half of the season, with us covering most of his wages. Liverpool make the sale now, we have an extra body for the run-in, Harvey gets another PL Winners medal, and Fulham have an improved player in the summer who's had another 6 months of coaching under El Maestro. It's a win for all involved.

Didn't Chelsea cause a law change by doing that a few years ago? Can't remember who it was but I'm pretty sure they made a signing or 2 and immediately loaned them out to another premier league team and the loophole got closed straight away.

[LeeB]

I can't help but feel we've been twats about it all.

I feel for the lad, he’s ended up with the shitty end of the stick. But we could’ve easily been shafted by Liverpool’s clause. It’s them who’ve created the situation.

It's not. They wanted to sell him in the summer. We wanted to buy him but needed to piss about with clauses because of our sailing-close-to-the-wind accounting. They were just as happy taking £30m from Leipzig last summer but agreed to structure the deal to make it work for us.

We've now made the best of the situation, so good for us. But if there is a bad guy in this (and for now, it looks like we'll come out of it well, so I couldn't care less if we are), then it's us not them.

I wouldn't say it's as clear cut as that, I doubt it was us inserting the '10 games compulsory purchase' clause knowing the buying club is walking a financial tightrope.

[N'ZMAV]

why did we take him in the 1st place ?

I generally think that Emery had written off Buendia, so we needed an addition to the squad.

[LeeB]

I do lean towards algy's thinking that the manager agreed to the loan and Monchi, maybe pressed by time, money and options agreed to the clause, and I reckon that was the main reason he went when he did.

[N'ZMAV]

What if another club signs him, but then loans him to someone else with an option to buy. I bet he could play then!

Yes. Get Fulham to sign him in January and loan him back to us for the second half of the season, with us covering most of his wages. Liverpool make the sale now, we have an extra body for the run-in, Harvey gets another PL Winners medal, and Fulham have an improved player in the summer who's had another 6 months of coaching under El Maestro. It's a win for all involved.

we can't do that - as the loan would be terminated by the transfer from Liverpool to Fulham, and we've had our maximum of 2 domestic loans, so we couldn't loan him again, as it would be a third domestic loan.

[LeeB]

The PFA should work to try and have those kind of clauses banned in deals in my opinion.

[Mister E]

I do lean towards algy's thinking that the manager agreed to the loan and Monchi, maybe pressed by time, money and options agreed to the clause, and I reckon that was the main reason he went when he did.

Yes, agreed.
I wonder at what price we might agree to buy him. Perhaps if the loan-to-buy price dropped from £35m to - let's say - £20m, do you think the club might say "it's worth a punt and we'll need MF talent in the run-in" or is Emery simply not fancying him at all? We do know that Elliott has capabilities, and 5 months of being exposed to Emery's approach must have rubbed off in some way, so maybe his contribution would be pretty valuable in the second half of the season.
Having said all that, he's almost-certainly going back to 'pool, you'd think!

[lovejoy]

The bottom line is, the contractual situation left the position we are in now as a possibly outcome ie that we wouldn’t want him for the money so he’d be left in limbo. This idea that it has suddenly come as a surprise to player or either club is poorly thought out. The payer should be angry with his advisors. Equally we should be mad at whoever agreed £35 million because even as his best that’s a stretch for the lad.

[eye digress]

On a side note, we could actually do with him on the bench tonight…

[LeeB]

On a side note, we could actually do with him on the bench tonight…

It would be great and entirely in keeping with this season if he was and came on with half an hour left and won the game for us.

[Somniloquism]

What if another club signs him, but then loans him to someone else with an option to buy. I bet he could play then!

Yes. Get Fulham to sign him in January and loan him back to us for the second half of the season, with us covering most of his wages. Liverpool make the sale now, we have an extra body for the run-in, Harvey gets another PL Winners medal, and Fulham have an improved player in the summer who's had another 6 months of coaching under El Maestro. It's a win for all involved.

we can't do that - as the loan would be terminated by the transfer from Liverpool to Fulham, and we've had our maximum of 2 domestic loans, so we couldn't loan him again, as it would be a third domestic loan.

I believe it is not a maximum of 2 loans a season, but two at the same time. So if we lost Elliot back to Liverpool and then loaned someone else in from a premier league team, it should be fine. Not stating the above option would be valid as a purchased player can't be loaned in the premier league in the same window but we could get someone else in up to a maximum of four domestic loans.

[algy]

What if another club signs him, but then loans him to someone else with an option to buy. I bet he could play then!

Yes. Get Fulham to sign him in January and loan him back to us for the second half of the season, with us covering most of his wages. Liverpool make the sale now, we have an extra body for the run-in, Harvey gets another PL Winners medal, and Fulham have an improved player in the summer who's had another 6 months of coaching under El Maestro. It's a win for all involved.

we can't do that - as the loan would be terminated by the transfer from Liverpool to Fulham, and we've had our maximum of 2 domestic loans, so we couldn't loan him again, as it would be a third domestic loan.

I believe it is not a maximum of 2 loans a season, but two at the same time. So if we lost Elliot back to Liverpool and then loaned someone else in from a premier league team, it should be fine. Not stating the above option would be valid as a purchased player can't be loaned in the premier league in the same window but we could get someone else in up to a maximum of four domestic loans.

You’d imagine if Liverpool wanted that deal then they could just remove the compulsory purchase clause from the loan deal with us and then agree with Fulham to flog him to them at the end of the season.

[Dave]

I can't help but feel we've been twats about it all.

I feel for the lad, he’s ended up with the shitty end of the stick. But we could’ve easily been shafted by Liverpool’s clause. It’s them who’ve created the situation.

It's not. They wanted to sell him in the summer. We wanted to buy him but needed to piss about with clauses because of our sailing-close-to-the-wind accounting. They were just as happy taking £30m from Leipzig last summer but agreed to structure the deal to make it work for us.

We've now made the best of the situation, so good for us. But if there is a bad guy in this (and for now, it looks like we'll come out of it well, so I couldn't care less if we are), then it's us not them.

I wouldn't say it's as clear cut as that, I doubt it was us inserting the '10 games compulsory purchase' clause knowing the buying club is walking a financial tightrope.

They wanted to sell him, and coming off the U21s success was the time to extract maximum value from selling him. The ten game thing is very deliberately set at that low level to make sure that we ended up buying him. This wasn't intended as one of those "see if you like this player, and then you can buy him if it turns out he's good" type deals, this was a "you're going to buy this player and the deal will be structured to make sure that you do" type deals.

More fool them, as it didn't work out as planned - to our (probable) advantage and their, and his detriment. If they could go back to the summer, Elliott would be playing in the Bundesliga right now and Liverpool would be £30m better off.

[Rigadon]

I’m probably missing something important, but this deal looks awful for every party.  We have a player we can’t : won’t play who is no doubt picking up hefty wages, Liverpool have a player who must’ve dropped in value fun quite a lot, and probably worst of all, he isn’t getting a game.  It’s been a massive fuck up however you look at it.