Ben Doak – Liverpool’s Salah successor? Plus: Premier League owners who invest most

Loan star

In August, Doak was sent to Middlesbrough in the Championship for the season. He has thrived, with a goal and three assists in 10 games.

His potential has excited people for a while and Doak owning Gvardiol showed he could be realising it. He is exceptionally precocious and genuinely could be that good. From here, you're going to hear a clamour in Liverpool for two things.

The first is a new contract for Salah, which has to be done . The second is a first-team run for Doak when he returns from Middlesbrough. How you achieve both is another matter, but Friday was a moment of reassurance for the Premier League leaders. The Salah era has to end one day. They might just have a contingency at hand.

News round-up

Confirmed today: Tottenham Hotspur 's Rodrigo Bentancur has been hit with a seven-game ban and £100,000 fine for making derogatory comments about team-mate Son Heung-min .

Disgraceful scenes at Mexico's World Cup qualifier against Honduras, where Mexico head coach Javier Aguirre was hit by a projectile . It left blood streaming down his face (above).

Kosovo's players walked off the pitch in stoppage time and refused to finish a Nations League game in Romania after home fans chanted "Serbia, Serbia, Serbia". The politics behind all this run deep .

Hungary coach Adam Szalai required urgent medical treatment after being taken ill during a clash with the Netherlands on Saturday. The positive news is he's stable and conscious .

Major problems for Lyon in France. Their financial situation is so bad they have been hit with provisional relegation from Ligue 1 and a transfer ban.

He was David Ornstein's pick as signing of the summer , but Wilson Odobert has not got going at Tottenham Hotspur. He'll be missing for a while after hamstring surgery .

We have more details of Ruben Amorim's backroom staff at Manchester United . Unsurprisingly, it involves a massive influx of trusted lieutenants from Sporting Lisbon .

Bayern Munich goalkeeper Mala Grohs is stepping away from the game while she receives treatment for cancer. Fingers crossed for a full and speedy recovery .

Carsley cruise: Caretaker gets England promoted in final act — so what will Tuchel inherit?

Lee Carsley and England are done and in answer to last week's TAFC question — will Carsley go out with a whimper or a bang? — he served up a bang. Yesterday's 5-0 rout of the Republic of Ireland sent England back into the Nations League's top tier. Thomas Tuchel, the floor is yours.

Carsley, broadly, has done a tidy turn as interim head coach. He came across as a short-term stop gap, but the final game under him showed that Tuchel is taking on a rich talent pool.

Jack Pitt-Brooke has highlighted the two biggest dilemmas for the German : how tightly to nail his colours to Harry Kane 's mast and how to deal with the fact England are teeming with excellent attacking midfielders — in reality, too many to field en masse. March will give us the first glimpse of Tuchel's intentions.

A few additional points of note from the international front: Cristiano Ronaldo got another two goals for Portugal against Poland and Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario had another nightmare with set pieces, conceding from a corner and shipping an own goal in a 3-1 defeat to France last night. Plus ca change...

But here's something heart-warming from South America. Remember the talk of Marcelo Bielsa and Uruguay heading for the rocks? Well, a 101st-minute goal from Manchester United's Manuel Ugarte (below) bagged a massive World Cup qualifying win over Colombia, just when the away side looked to have ruined Uruguay's night. Bielsa loved it. Have predictions of an impending meltdown been overstated ?

Show viz

Premier League clubs are like expensive cars. Forget the price of the motor itself. The thing that's going to ruin you is the cost of the upkeep and the constant need for new tyres.

Nothing spells that out as vividly as this from The Athletic's Philip Buckingham , which lays out exactly how much the existing owners of all 20 Premier League clubs have spent on them, via the original purchase price and subsequent funding. I picked out a few nuggets:

Manchester City have been a superb investment (albeit, I'm saying that without any foresight of how their financial battle with the Premier League will end ). City cost £200m to buy. Owner funding totals £1.3bn. Their value if they were sold tomorrow would be way, way above those figures. Wonga.

Everton . What on earth can you say? Farhad Moshiri spent £128m buying them. He has forked out another £750m to take them nowhere. It's an extraordinary waste of money, hence why he's getting out of Dodge .

Liverpool, in contrast, are a frugal project on the part of the Fenway Sports Group. Owner funding is at £136m and none has been recorded since the 2015-16 season. It goes to show that by top-flight standards, success is possible on a relative budget.

Around TAFC

Orlando Pride and Washington Spirit will fight out the NWSL play-off final . Marta got Orlando past Kansas City Current by simultaneously sticking two players on their collective arse (above). Don't miss our Full Time newsletter for deeper coverage.

Footballers love video games and there seems to be a vague train of thought that playing them can enhance their performance — or provide valuable downtime, at any rate. I'll try that line at home.

It has been an interesting spell for midfielder Tanner Tessmann . He went to the Olympics , he moved to Lyon and he made Mauricio Pochettino's first USMNT squad. The call-up forced him to abandon a furniture shopping trip . Bonus.

A documentary of Wayne Rooney's reign at Plymouth Argyle is in the works . Given their creaky results, there's every chance it delivers a video nasty.

We touched on the strange absence of Kylian Mbappe from the France squad last week. Sources close to him are denying reports that he has sought specialist help for mental health issues.

Most clicked in Friday's TAFC: the injury crisis at Mbappe's Real Madrid .

Quiz answer

Friday's teaser wanted you to name the eight current Premier League players with in the competition.

They were: James Milner (637), Ashley Young (462), Kyle Walker (402), James Ward-Prowse (386), Jonny Evans (384), Raheem Sterling (383), Lukasz Fabianski (366) and Seamus Coleman (365).

Catch a match

(Selected games. All 2.45pm ET/7.45pm UK and shown on Viaplay in UK unless stated otherwise)

UEFA Nations League, Group A1: Croatia vs Portugal — ViX, Fubo; Poland vs Scotland — ViX, Fubo; Group A4: Serbia vs Denmark — ViX; Spain vs Switzerland — Vix, Fubo.

CONCACAF Nations League, quarter-finals, second legs: USMNT vs Jamaica (agg. 1-0), 8pm/1am — Fubo, Peacock Premium (only in US); Panama vs Costa Rica (agg. 1-0), 9pm/2am — CBS, Paramount+ (only in US).

And finally...

Lewis Richards is a defender with League Two Bradford City and as such, this might be his first and only mention in TAFC.

It's a shame it comes courtesy of him taking a throw-in in the manner of a player with his ankles tied together, but there's no way we could let this epic fail slide. Nice to see him take it with a smile.

(Top photo: Craig Foy/SNS Group via )