Jose Mourinho is right, Jurgen Klopp is a hypocrite - but in this market so is he and everyone else

Klopp said in 2016 that he would never pay the transfer fees United were paying for Paul Pogba

For all the debate about how the transfer market has changed in the wake of Virgil van Dijk’s £75m move from Southampton to Liverpool, one core aspect of this will forever remain unchanged: managers will say whatever suits them at any given time, and will spend whatever they feel they need, so long as the money is available.

This is the ultimately the much plainer truth at the root of the by-now tedious tit-for-tat between Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp, although it is hardly limited to them. All top-level managers are ultimately responsible for more than a few instances of deep hypocrisy,

Let’s put it another way. Has any manager in history ever admitted that their club had a financial advantage when they so clearly had one? Has any manager in history ever refused to pay the price required for a player they really wanted out of concern for the rest of the market?

It’s very difficult - if not impossible - to think of examples that even come any way close to either, and it’s why most comments about a competitor’s business should be met with a roll of the eyes rather than rolling around any meaningful debate about their actual words.

Klopp’s words about the Paul Pogba signing have been exposed as empty, but then Mourinho isn’t exactly in the strongest position to comment. He will willingly talk about other club’s transfers, all the while privately pushing for his own to spend as much as they can.

In any case, the real point of such comments is to protect any manager’s own position: for them to be able to put any success down to their own inherent abilities, and any failures down to external factors.

They all do it, and it’s something hardly restricted to football managers, although the very demanding nature of the job probably requires those more prone to such tunnel vision.

The exact position of the market is probably the more interest aspect in any of this.

For all that managers will look to pin it down to any one transfer, too, the true primary contributory factor is the money behind that factor. In this case, it is the vast quantities of broadcasting money flowing and flowing into the Premier League.


 Van Dijk is the world's most expensive defender 
 (Twitter @LFC)

What else was going to happen with those kind of figures?

Fees like £75m for a centre-half are a natural consequence. As Pep Guardiola argued, £50m for John Stones now looks rather cheap, and what of £30m for Rio Ferdinand as long ago as 2002? Real Madrid president Florentino Perez even recently told one Premier League chairman that “we’re probably in the world of a £100m goalkeeper”. There’s money in the market so it will just keep going up and up and up, until something breaks. And the latter doesn’t look like happening any time soon.

This is why foreign leagues look on England in the way that English-based managers look on each other, and how they’re all beginning to look at Paris Saint-Germain. Their sensational signing of Neymar was just another factor in this, even if most Premier League clubs still view it as a “freak”.

It did generally push up prices due to the extra money just being in the market and needing to go somewhere - for example, Barcelona still potentially using it to buy Philippe Coutinho - but the reality is that the English market didn’t need it to keep on pushing it at quite this pace.

Another reality, however, is that managers probably do need to make those comments to push the market further in their own favour. These aren’t just barbs for rivals, after all, but also messages to their own boards.

That is something that will never change, no matter what happens to the market.