Liverpool had an expensive summer transfer window by signing Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitike on top of Florian Wirtz as their attacking midfielder behind them. Isak and Ekitike will join Mohamed Salah to form Liverpool\'s new front three and Rory Smith believes they will play similarly to Paris Saint-Germain in how they will interchange with each other. Smith
\"A few years ago, when Antonio Conte won the Premier League with Chelsea, I went to see a man called Renzo Ulivieri\" said Smith.
\"And we were talking, and it turned out that Ulivieri, who at that point must have been in his seventies, was still coaching a team. He had like a seventh division team nearby that he coached, and it was what he used as his guinea pigs for all of his ideas. And he told me—this would be 2017—he told me that what he was working on at the moment with these students and doctors and laborers who performed this amateur team was that he thought attacks would soon be three players standing very close to each other in a formation. So not like a wide right winger or a wide left winger—everyone would be inside the eighteen-yard box, effectively that width of the pitch, and interchanging positions constantly. He thought that was the future.
\"And I think if you look at PSG, that\'s what they do. I think Renzo Olivieri was right that the future of attack is not striker, right winger, left winger. It is three forwards who can play anywhere: Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Ousmane Dembele, Desire Doue and/or Bradley Barcola. They change positions constantly. One\'s not the left winger or the right winger—they just move around as they wish, as they\'ve been taught.
\"I think what Liverpool will do is something similar. I think Ekitike and Isak in particular will interchange positions. It might be that Ekitike kind of starts on the left and Isak through the middle, but I don\'t think they will finish there. I don\'t think they\'ll be hidebound by those positions.
\"Wirtz, I think, will end up playing a similar role to [Martin] Odegaard, who\'s kind of a number ten, but he\'s also enough of a presser that he gets involved with the dirty work. And Salah will have that opportunity to hold his position wide on the right and come inside and interchange with Ekitike and Isak. I think that\'s the idea.\"
In 2017, Smith wrote a feature on Ulivieri for the New York Times.