One of the longest-held, most deeply ingrained Premier League traditions is that clubs’ recruitment plans must be utterly indecipherable from the outside looking in. No one must have any clue what they’re thinking, even after the event.

So, for instance, when Tottenham received £85 million for Gareth Bale from Real Madrid two seasons ago it spent that windfall on seven players, none of whom had played in the league before, several of whom would hardly adjust that statistic in the coming years. It made no sense. Or for instance when Liverpool sold Luis Suarez last summer for similarly obscene money, it followed a similarly intriguing pattern, spending £105 million on a collective total of five years of Premier League experience, with 13 years between its oldest and youngest purchase and two target-man strikers bought for a team that didn’t play with any. It also made no sense.

Further back, Manchester United replaced Cristiano Ronaldo with what remained of Michael Owen and the one-track-mind of Antonio Valencia. It managed to win the league, but it still made no sense.

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Watching these transfers play out always feels as though some kind of pact must be in place, whereby all of the clubs involved in the league have agreed that squad-building must be an endlessly frustrating process for anyone watching, avoiding at all costs some satisfying end-point that might see fans switch off. Clubs managed by Jose Mourinho aside, it is absolutely imperative that at no point must anything that could easily be interpreted as progress take place in the transfer market.

This background is what makes Liverpool’s summer so far so difficult to comprehend. It has shifted the paradigm. Out of nowhere, it’s gone ridiculously, incomprehensibly sensible.

Combined, James Milner, Nathaniel Clyne, Danny Ings, Roberto Firmino and Adam Bogdan mark an almost unrecognizable new take on transfers from the club that paid more for Andy Carroll than it did Luis Suarez. They represent an ideology almost unheard of in modern Premier League history. Brace yourselves: they’re moves that everyone can actually understand.

Collectively, despite or perhaps because of being on a low budget, you’ve got a happy balance of risk and highly likely reward. You’ve got some players with loads of Premier League experience, some with less and some with none; you’ve got younger and older players but none outside of their 20s; you’ve got some flair and some reliability. It’s all so tidy.

Individually, these players bring about another rare treat. They all clearly fit into a simple, sensible Liverpool line-up for next season. Give or take a few disagreements around the periphery and the unknown that is Raheem Sterling, everyone can probably feel pretty confident about the kind of team that Brendan Rodgers will be putting out most weeks. I have it as a 4-3-2-1: Mignolet; Clyne, Skrtel, Sakho, Moreno; Milner, Can, Henderson; Coutinho, Firmino; Sturridge. From there, Ings, Origi, Lazar Markovic and Adam Lallana will work as subtle adjustments from the bench. And that’s that. Easy enough. And it’s all in place early enough for pre-season together, too.

Beyond anything else, this clarity is a serious novelty. Where Manchester United and Manchester City fans will spend the next month speculating about what their teams will look like next season (and United fans may never get a definitive answer), Liverpool supporters already know. Having been trained for so long to spend summers working out exactly how someone such as Mario Balotelli might fit into a team built around high-intensity sprinting (eventual answer: he doesn’t), this time around it’s basically been obvious since late June.

More incidentally, though, this new-found clarity could actually make Liverpool better. It will perhaps annoy the Premier League purists (and, in fact, anyone involved in any aspect of English football), but clear planning might just be effective, particularly when matched against a host of clubs that choose to go the other way.

Imagine this. Rather than spending the first six months of the new season contemplating how to arrange the 10 wingers no one’s now willing to admit to signing, Liverpool could spend that time getting a first 11 that knows each other well, develops a cohesive in-game strategy and, even more controversially, wins games. Last season, that initial clarity of thought alone was basically enough to win Chelsea the league. No one else ever closed the gap.

Of course, having some kind of direction in mind already doesn’t mean Liverpool will exactly replicate Chelsea— financially, that’s just not going to happen at this point, and Rodgers still has plenty of problems to occupy him and signing Adam Bogdan on a free transfer in June is not how you win the league. But it could help the Liverpool of next season beat the Liverpool of last season. Rather than underperforming, as many will agree he did last time, Rodgers could maximize his team’s potential by competing at nearer to full strength in all 38 rounds of games, rather than just the bit after January. It’s an easy way to improve without suddenly becoming rich or a genius.

The only obvious downside is that the rest of the league will, of course, want to have a word with the club for having broken with tradition. For the most part, their new signings still only exist in amongst the horrendous world of transfer speculation

Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter