Vitaly Janelt: The Key to Unlocking Liverpool’s Midfield

Ask any Liverpool supporter where this squad still feels light and the answer comes back quickly: midfield. Not attackers, not full-backs. The middle of the pitch.

Under Andoni Iraola, that area has become the fault line. His football lives off the press and off control, off a team that can squeeze the game into the centre and then play out with conviction. At the moment, Liverpool can do parts of that. What they can’t do is make it all work together.

Individually, the pieces make sense. Collectively, the balance is off.

A midfield that doesn’t quite fit

Iraola’s biggest problem is profile. He has plenty of energy and quality, but too many players who want to do similar things in similar spaces.

Dominik Szoboszlai is built for this kind of football. He wants to hunt the ball, close down, suffocate opponents. In a properly constructed Iraola midfield, he’s the one who flies forward, knowing there is a partner behind him to knit the game together, drop into spaces, and build from deep.

Ryan Gravenberch is not that partner. He prefers to carry the ball, drive past players, and operate higher up. Asking him to sit, hold, and dictate is like asking a winger to play centre-back. He can fill in, but you’re not getting his best.

Alexis Mac Allister comes closer. He has the passing range and the intelligence to operate deeper, but it still feels like a compromise. He can do the job; he isn’t the specialist.

Some at the club will look at Trey Nyoni and see the long-term answer. The talent is obvious, the profile promising. The question is timing. Throwing a youngster into a chaotic midfield and asking him to fix it is not a development plan, it’s a gamble.

So Liverpool need a bridge. A player who can stabilise the present without blocking the future.

Enter Vitaly Janelt

That’s where Vitaly Janelt comes in.

Jurgen Klopp, now in charge of Germany’s senior side for the first time, has just named his maiden squad. Among the eye-catching selections: Janelt, the Brentford midfielder, rewarded with his first call-up.

The numbers explain why his name is on that list.

This season in the Premier League, Janelt has covered the third-most distance of any player: 58.8 kilometres. He doesn’t just run for the sake of it, either. He ranks fifth in the league for interceptions, with 3.20 per 90 minutes. He reads the game, closes lanes, and then goes again.

That profile screams high-intensity football. It’s exactly the type Klopp has always trusted, and exactly the type Iraola is trying to build around.

Put Janelt into this Liverpool side and the picture changes. He can sit in front of the defence, connect the first pass, and still step up to press when the trigger comes. He allows Szoboszlai to attack with fewer defensive handbrakes. He frees Mac Allister to play where he hurts teams most. He gives structure to the chaos.

The right age, the right moment

Janelt is 28. That matters. He is in his prime, experienced in the Premier League, but not a long-term roadblock.

For Nyoni, that’s crucial. A signing in his early twenties might close the door for years. A 28-year-old, proven and reliable, buys Liverpool time. Time to develop Nyoni properly, to drip-feed him minutes, to let him grow into the role instead of being thrown into it because there is no one else.

Janelt doesn’t arrive as the star name. He arrives as the glue. The player who lets the others shine, who makes an aggressive system sustainable across a season, who turns a disjointed midfield into a functioning unit.

Liverpool don’t need another headline act in the middle. They need someone who does the hard running, the smart covering, the ugly work that makes everything else look pretty.

Right now, that sounds a lot like Vitaly Janelt.