Richard Hughes transfer risk THREATENS to blow up in his face

For all the big names that Liverpool signed in the summer, it was questioned how they'd all fit in.

With a new goalkeeper, a right-back, a left-back, a centre-back, a midfielder and two strikers, all coming into the first team, it's difficult to have an XI where they all play. In order to facilitate such a move, Arne Slot would have to drop a lot of his title-winning stars. We're yet to see it happen.

The general notion of spending £450m on transfers was praised by the fans at the time, because it was so out of character for owners FSG. But when you outlay such a huge amount, you open yourself up to scrutiny. There can be no excuses for not delivering success in the upcoming season.

Of course, we're now so deep into this year's campaign that it's clear that success isn't likely to happen and the overall squad planning is starting to come into question. In the Reds' 2-0 home win over Brighton on Saturday night, the starting XI indicated a big problem is going under the radar.

Liverpool's squad is incredibly thin

If we look at the defence first, the available right-backs in midweek were Conor Bradley and Joe Gomez, and while knowing that Bradley was unavailable for the Brighton game, Slot still decided to pick the centre-back against Inter Milan. As expected, Gomez pulled up with an injury on Saturday.

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So we missed a trick by not playing Bradley on Wednesday, although the compact nature of the team might have been weakened slightly if the Northern Irishman had featured. It was a complex trade-off.

And on Saturday, we saw Calvin Ramsay make an appearance on the bench, since Jeremie Frimpong is still unavailable through injury. But the decision to play Gomez once again, result in the team losing it's only available back-up centre-back for Virgil Van Dijk and Ibrahima Konate. We've got no depth.

But that's just the beginning. In midfield, all of Florian Wirtz, Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Curtis Jones featured against the Seagulls, with only Wataru Endo missing out because of an injury. There was no depth on the substitute bench for Slot to look to bring on. In the end, Szoboszlai came off for Federico Chiesa and Wirtz was replaced by Andy Robertson.

Had players like Endo, or Stefan Bajcetic or Trey Nyoni been available, then perhaps we'd have seen different changes, but for all the good things about the Reds' win, it didn't look like a sustainable plan.

Greater depth is required and targets like Kees Smit would make a huge difference, if Slot decides to continue with this system, which is a bit of a hybrid between a diamond and a Christmas tree. With the full-backs staying high, we played a sort of 2-5-2-1, with Van Dijk and Konate largely abandoned.

This meant that despite the Reds keeping a clean sheet, Brighton had created 1.96xg from their three big chances and 14 shots. Last-ditch defending and blocks meant that only one effort went on target, but we surely can't rely on this strategy working in future. If we attempt to use it, then we need depth.

And this is all down to sporting director Richard Hughes and the executive team that oversaw the recruitment in the summer. Losing players like Harvey Elliott, Tyler Morton and Jarell Quansah, to name a few, was part of a decision to thin out the squad. Instead, it's now causing us problems.

It's plausible that things might work out, and the system will continue to deliver results, with the risks taken by not having depth failing to negatively impact us, but not having enough players available in the key areas of the pitch is a catastrophe and it will constantly threaten to blow up in our faces.

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