You cannot replace one top quality player with an amalgamation of mediocre ones.

That’s the lesson Liverpool have failed to learn from top six bedfellows Spurs and their Bale-facilitated shopping spree, as they seek to fill the holes left by Suarez and Sterling in successive seasons.

It’s the reason they owe no threat to Arsenal this season.

Liverpool’s own negative spiral

Two seasons ago Liverpool finished second, and, frankly, should have propelled themselves over the line. They then became weaker that summer with the Suarez sale as they failed to spend the money wisely.

A season later, they had a reality check of gargantuan proportions as they finished a sorry sixth, and then became weaker still as they sold Sterling (and their souls) to the blue side of Manchester.

I’m taking bets on where Coutinho will move next summer…

It seems the only thing Rodgers and his management have learned from Tottenham is how to indulge in their own negative spiral.

Among friends

When Tottenham finally released their vice-like grip on Real Madrid’s theoretical gonads, they bought a tranche of average-to-poor footballers in a desperate attempt to fill the void.

Of the seven players brought in that summer for a combined £110m, only three even remain at the club, and of those only Eriksen and Chadli can be considered to be moderately successful transfers. The likes of Soldado and Lamela have been far more adept at providing comedy moments than footballing ones.

Just one of those seven was over 25 when signed – if you’re going to spunk money on players, it makes sense to at least ensure they are moderately proven.

Position Savvy

The thing with selling a world class player is you cannot usually buy in another great player for the same money – the best you can hope to do is invest the funds in a larger number of players.

The trouble is that if you buy four mediocre players (or even four passably good players) to replace a top class one, it doesn’t work like additive maths. No matter how their transfer fees compare, you cannot field four players instead of one, hence the premium on top drawer footballers.

Liverpool tried to replace Suarez with Balotelli, Markovic, Lambert and Origi, in a sort of “Ghost of Christmas past, poor, past it and yet to come” way. It didn’t work.

Instead, the only way to come out of these type of situations smelling of roses is to spend at least part of the money on other positions where you genuinely can buy an improvement on your existing crop of players, and thereby improve the overall team, if not the position of the player sold.

Learning the lessons of the past

It seems that spending money, especially in such a scattergun fashion, does not necessarily equal success after all, something us Arsenal fans would perhaps do well to heed. United proved it, Spurs proved it, and now Liverpool are hell bent on doing the same.

When Suarez left, Liverpool only purchased one player over the age of 26 – the lucky Rickie Lambert. He made a whopping seven Premier League starts, and just 15 appearances in total, during his ill-fated spell at Anfield.

Sterling’s departure has been softened by numerous arrivals, but this time there is just a solitary outfield signing over the age of 24: the hugely exciting James Milner. Liverpool still lack a central midfielder who can run a game and although Clyne is an improvement on Glen Johnson, their back line still looks suspect.

Arsenal have only made one real signing this summer, but it’s one which has improved (first-day-at-school jitters aside) a position of relative weakness.

Perhaps winning the “Transfer Trophy” is not quite as simple as spending a bucketload of cash.

Who’d have thought it?