There is a major rock and hard place when players believe their own hype. Liverpool will hope a few of them are taken down a peg or two by their individual performances this season; but footballers very very unlikely to show humility, especially when it comes to contract negotiations.
They have an insane amount of players with two years left now & the next few months will be pivitol for them in terms of agreements. I believe Van Dijk and Fabinho have agreed new contracts, but they have left themselves on the edge of an Arsenal style cliff of free transfers.
Separately - The "Giving the ball away" stat is an absolute red herring. KDB has given the ball away the most over the last three years.
Unless it's been done in the last few days and I've missed it, neither of them have. Both gave 2 years to run.
I suppose there challenge is not only as you say, there is going to be quite a big diference between what the club is willing to pay and what they players feel they can get elsewhere, but also a lot of their key guys are arriving at that point at the same time, in an age range thats problematic. All of them are late 20s to early 30's. Thats not a massively easy renewal discussion to be had at all. And yes, like Arsenal players will start to get their heads turned, and frankly the value of said players starts to decine further from this summer if no contract is signed.
The complication is Covid. The inevitable throwing out of FFP will probably help them a bit but essentially the values of those players will have probably declined in a like for like by 50% by the summer, and when you compare a 27 year old to a 29 year old it could easily be a decline of upwards of 75% on each. The exception may be Van Dijk had he not be bang in the middle of a career threatening injury. The plan may have been to have sold some of them this summer, in the knowledge that some decline in value was inevitable, but they might hold to say 65-70% of their peak value. The reality is they may be at 25-30% of their peak value now. The fact they've had a poor season as well, just makes that worse.
I think they will stick with most, and take the inevitable further decline that comes from players over or approaching 30, over taking fees that have declined further. Thats just my view though. Gamble on them to get them back into the top 4 with a bounce, and not spend much.
As for Arnold, I would have to say giving the ball away is actually quite a big stat is seeing who is most wasteful in possession. I understand the De Bruyne comparison, but he gets 15-20 assists per season from open play. There is a big upside reward for the risk. Arnold gets on average 3 or 4 open play assists per season. He's not giving balls away as he's taking high risk passes, he's giving the ball away lots as he's poor in posssession.
