ON Sunday morning, as I readied myself to be put through the wringer of the Merseyside Derby, I allowed my mind to drift to an idea for an article I had been turning over for a few weeks. Next week will mark five years since New England Sports Ventures, now Fenway Sports Group, took over at Liverpool.
Pre-Brendan Rodgers sacking, I had wanted to look back at those years to try to find a way to best measure the success (or otherwise) of John Henry, Tom Werner Mike Gordon and co. I had wanted to talk about sabermetrics, the Curse of the Bambino, the transfer committee and everything in between.
Even after the Derby; a match that followed the standard Liverpool pattern of the season so far of looking good, scoring, conceding and looking a bit shaky, my mind fell back to this idea and how I was fairly sure I could — and should — tease an article out of it.
Then, at 6.30pm, word broke and stayed broken. It spread everywhere, permeating every crack and orifice. Brendan Rodgers had gone. Sacked. No matter how much it was expected, it still came as a surprise. The more tweets and articles I read, the less and less important my FSG idea seemed. Not when this had happened.
This was obviously the story, the only news that really mattered. However, as the surprise wore off a bit, FSG crept back into my mind. Maybe now was not the worst time to think and talk about the owners. Maybe now was (and still is) the exact time we should be discussing them. Because managers are judged by trophies won and league positions attained. Owners, on the other hand, should not be judged by results on the pitch but rather by how they facilitated those achieving (or not achieving) the results. In short, I had found my measurement of FSG; their managers.
On October 15, 2010, FSG agreed a deal to buy Liverpool Football Club and, in effect, saved it from going to the wall. That’s how stark it felt then. It seems odd to even type those words but it was that bleak. Hicks and Gillett had drained the club of cash, enthusiasm and fight. And while it may be true to say that it could have been any consortium to buy the club, it was FSG and any criticism meted out to them must be viewed through the prism that just five years ago, in one of the darkest times in the history of the club, it was they who stepped in.
It would be mawkish and ridiculous to become gooey-eyed about an ownership group that would sell the club tomorrow if the right offer was made but I feel it’s worth remembering. But enough qualifying. To the matter at hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOPyMZxY1Lk
There was much talk when the new owners first arrived about what they had done when taking over the Boston Red Sox and how much of that situation could be applied to Liverpool’s plight. The Red Sox were one of American sport’s most storied and decorated teams, enduring one of the most infamous droughts in baseball history. From 1918 until 2002, when Henry and Tom Werner bought the team, the Red Sox had not won a World Series. Just two years later in 2004, the ‘Curse of the Bambino’ was broken as Boston celebrated their first World Series in 86 years.
The FSG-Liverpool story wrote itself. They already owned one team from a city famous for its wit and passion, steeped in an Irish influence and well known to be unafraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. What is more, that team had endured a long period without success having previously been the most successful team in their sport. It all seemed meant to be. Alas, as we all know only too well, our ‘curse’ has yet to be broken as we still await the Reds’ first league trophy since 1990.
FSG came into Liverpool amidst a disastrous season. Hicks and Gillett had made another one of many, many poor decisions in appointing Roy Hodgson as manager. We all know the sorry story well enough that I need not rake over old ground once more, but it became apparent that FSG’s first major act as owners of the club would be to replace Hodgson.
The axe duly fell — eventually — in January of 2011. Mere months into their ownership, still feeling their way into the unique culture of English football and even more unique culture of Liverpool, Henry and Werner turned to as close as they could find to the soul of the club and asked him for help. Never being one to turn down the club or the city, Kenny Dalglish stepped once more into the breach as Liverpool manager.
It felt almost surreal. For older fans, it was a sight that they surely never imagined seeing again. The club’s greatest servant, who quite literally broke himself in the time of greatest grief in the club’s history, had come back. For younger fans like myself, it was a chance to experience, finally, a living reconstruction of the glory days. That first half a season was fitful to begin with but by the end, the team was purring and the Kop was rocking to the sound of King Kenny’s name once more.
Hindsight is 20:20 and it is so easy to say this now, but perhaps the summer of 2011 brought FSG’s first misstep. Swept up in the tidal wave of emotion surrounding Kenny, they made his position permanent. It was not a misstep because he did not deserve the job. It was a misstep because there was surely no way that this second coming could end with smiles. The football played at the back end of his caretaker season suggested some of the old magic remained in Kenny but to ask him to lead the club on a longer term basis was making oneself a hostage to fortune. There was always the chance that it would not work out.
It ended messily, with it being pitched that Kenny was asked to pick his own successor, or at least be involved in the recruitment process. Fans murmured (and shouted) their displeasure at how a club legend, the club legend, had been foisted from his job.
Kenny had been a steady hand at the tiller — a comforting presence in a disconcerting time for fans and owners alike. The man to follow him could scarcely have had a more different profile.
In a bold move from FSG, Brendan Rodgers came in aged 39 with only one season in the Premier League to his name. Some lamented the lack of ambition in appointing him. I was enthused. He may have been young and inexperienced but he felt like a Liverpool manager. He was ambitious, played an attractive style of football and, from the off, embraced the size of the job. Where Hodgson had talked it down, Rodgers built it up, thriving on the responsibility. He felt like a kindred spirit.
It has been covered in wonderful detail just how intoxicating 2013-14 was under Rodgers. It felt less like a season of football and more akin to one long, unending parade. The team showed up, scored a bagful of goals and carried on to the next stadium, next team, next victim.
In the thrill that it brought, cracks were being papered over and only as the dust settled and the hangover lifted did things become apparent. Recruitment of players appeared to be confused at best. As Rodgers moved further away from the spring of 2014 and more things began to go wrong, the more often the finger was discretely pointed at the fabled transfer committee.
Henry and FSG professed to be disciples of the Church of Sabermetrics — a revolutionary statistical approach to recruitment in baseball pioneered by Billy Beane at the Oakland Athletics. Essentially, sabermetrics attempts to identify an undervalued skill that can be predicted to deliver winning results and from that find a player with this skill (who will be similarly undervalued).
When first taking over at Liverpool, FSG stated that they intended to follow a similar recruitment pattern for Liverpool. What they perhaps failed to see then, but which their current behaviour suggests that they recognise now, is that isolating an under-valued game-changing talent in baseball is easier than in football.
In baseball, a player can have an on-base percentage of 40 per cent and end up contributing greatly to a winning team (I’ve read Moneyball so you can trust me on that one). In football, however, what metric can one use? What skill could be both undervalued and game-changing? Retention of the ball in passing? We already have a player who almost never gives the ball away in passing; Mamadou Sakho, who plays most of his passes short and into midfield or across to his centre half partner. And guess what? It has not yet won us the league.
FSG’s recruitment strategy now reflects the difficulty in imposing sabermetrics on football. The transfer committee, featuring Mike Gordon, Ian Ayre, the manager and scouts, is more akin to the ‘war room’ gathering of scouts before the baseball draft described in Moneyball than Billy Beane and his Harvard graduate with his computer full of statistics.
While it is hard to define a pattern in Liverpool’s recruitment in recent years, it can be broadly said that they are following the generally accepted pattern for clubs in their position of buying young players with potential and, in the worst case scenario, a high sell-on value. It is hard to escape the feeling that perhaps FSG learned the hard way not to be too clever for football.
And so, finally, to the most recent misstep FSG have made. Sunday’s decision has been coming since the final day of last season at least. Losing 6-1 to Stoke should surely have meant Rodgers losing his job. Instead FSG decided to give him one last chance. The only problem is we could all see that this chance would be used up quite early this season. And so it has come to pass.
Now, eight games into the season, after another summer of rebuilding, the man who in theory had final say on all the signings during the transfer window has been sacked before most of the new players had picked a favourite seat in the Melwood canteen. It feels like another season of transition, another year slipping away, wasted again.
The last five years under FSG have not been perfect. Far from it. League finishes of sixth, eighth, seventh, second and sixth, show that. There have been mistakes and growing pains. Kenny was removed when perhaps giving him the full-time job again made that inevitable and Rodgers was kept on when removing him appeared inevitable. Transfer policy has been unclear and uncertain at best.
However, there have been positives as well. Regardless of how it all ended, seeing Kenny back in his tracksuit, bellowing instructions from the Anfield bench again was, at least for a time, a transcendent sight. The 2013-14 season has been the obvious highlight of the FSG era. Whatever else is said about Brendan Rodgers, FSG appointed the man who came closer than anyone else to ending our very own curse by playing the most magical football seen at Anfield for many, many years. That will leave them in credit for a time. And, still there in the background, rattling around in my head is just how close all of this was to something much worse just five years ago. They bought the club and put it on the straight and narrow again. That must count for something.
As for how FSG rate thus far, though it may be a cop-out, their next managerial appointment will be the deciding factor. Be they altruistic thrill-seekers just looking for the glory of trophies or hard-nosed businessmen with one eye on a sale in the coming years, it is pivotal that they make the correct choice.
Hindsight tells us that they did a good job in selecting their first two managers and that it was in their removal that FSG faltered. Pick wisely this time — and most would regard favourite Jurgen Klopp as wise — and they may not come across that problem for quite a while.
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Pic: David Rawcliffe-Propaganda Photo
Excellent article.
Good article Phil, however I think you might just be doing FSG a disservice by criticising them for keeping Rodgers at the end of last season, maybe they’re just being smart. Surely they’d have sounded-out Klopp over the summer (particularly as he was supposed to be their number one target in 2010). Maybe Klopp just told them he needed that mental break and a couple of months wasn’t long enough. So what would you do if you were FSG? Would you waste more money by employing another manager who wasn’t really your first choice (and probably have to pay compensation if he was already at another club)? Or would you carry-on with Brendan still at the helm in the knowledge that Klopp can be persuaded to sign in a few months regardless of what Brendan does? I think Brendan might have lasted a bit longer than the derby but with the turmoil at Chelsea and Wenger hinting at retirement FSG have been forced to get things done a bit earlier.
Like many I’ve been on the fence over FSG. Have they really got the ambition to take us back to the top? If they can seal the deal with Klopp I’m sure many doubters will be won over. Yes they’re in it to make money and use the Liverpool name but who cares if Klopp can get us challenging for the title again.
There aren’t many decent owners in football now. We maybe could do better than FSG but there are a hell of a lot worse out there – just ask Leeds, Portsmouth, Rangers and Birmingham fans to name a few.
Agree with FiftySense. Stupid clubs sack managers, smart clubs replace them. If the question is “Is there a manager available that we are confident will be better than BR”, the answer could quite easily have been no in May and yes now.
If Phil is claiming this as a misstep then how about backing that up by saying who he thinks they should have chosen, given that, from all reports Klopp was not available.
Personally, if we do get Klopp and given I think we did good business in the summer (minus a keeper), I think FSG has played a blinder here.
I don’t want the soul of my club sold, just for success. I don’t want world domination. I don’t want LFC to be a footballing NY yankees.
I’ll settle for that Saturday night feeling when we’ve just murdered arsenal . Monday morning at work hunting down the utd fans, rather than hiding all day.
I want a team I’m proud of, even if we loose 3- 0 at old Trafford, we were the better team, their keeper was man of the match.
I’ll take Europa league and fa cups, as long as next. Year we get closer and when we do win the league we can say we didn’t buy it
Make me dream
Liverpool used to buy titles in the 70s and 80s by virtue of being the biggest in the land. Any player good enough to stand out elsewhere would be poached and integrated into phenomenal “machine”.
Liverpool sold out first, they were first to have shirt sponsorships in the country. Throwing away tradition for a few quid. The deal pretty much paid for Kenny give or take £10k.
Money always been part of the game. The only different is Liverpool built it from being successful, the mancs went 5x better with the big money, and we started to rot and lose ground under Moores,
Not strictly true. Peter Beardsley was our first million pound player. City, United, Forest et al had all splurged the cash in the intervening years. LFC invested prudently and wisely.
Hi Michael, understood ur feeling abt not buying the title.
but i do not think it is possible to make commercial success off field and performance onfield can be mutually exclusive things. We need both to improve continuously in parallel to be able to be successful in a sustainable way in the long run.
back to your point, i am.sure the club will be able to balance a way not to go through obvious ‘sale/discount’ of the soul of the club.:)
Agreed with ur assessment of FSG. and thanks for not picking on them. Being a corporate guy myself in various industries across few continents, i do appreciate the work that FSG are putting in at our club. And easy comparison reference is with our previous owners of course.
“owning” the club is easy as long as one has funds. To “improve and excel” through that ownership needs a whole lot more vision, commitment, drive and ‘balls’. I strongly believe tht FSG’s effort will show in the long run with trophies, good football and success of the brand globally.
yes, the club valuation will be better for them too, but they have been very ethical, open, understanding, and are trying to ‘get it’ and continue to improve the club seriously from. a low baseline of Hicks and Gillette era.
let’s ggive them time, they will make us proud as always.
Why give him another war chest to squander and a new back room unit ( who now will be sacked) if you were testing the waters for his replacement ?
FSG have screwed this up again he should have been shunted straight after the! Britannia fiasco
Shunted out and replaced by who? Indications were that Klopp and Ancelotti weren’t available at that point. You don’t just sack a manager with no one better in mind to replace him.
FSG gave Rodgers another chance and backed him in the transfer market. No excuses. But things haven’t improved and now Klopp’s available.
There is no doubt FSG have made mistakes. Surely no one thought they wouldnt given their zero experience in football. They should have sacked Hodgson sooner. Shouldnt have appointed Kenny full time. Should have installed their preferred model of a DoF. Should have sacked Rodgers sooner. But really the only thing that’s important is what’s next.
What’s next? Top 4, champions league football, a financial windfall, some unknown, underrated serious German footballers and the odd top class player wanting to work with our manager which would never have happened since Rafa left.
I posted this 2 weeks ago:
Michael Pearson
24 September 2015 at 9:43 pm
This gamble talk is infuriating. Its only a few, but how can some people not see that it is a far bigger gamble to keep Rodgers than appoint Klopp or Ancelotti or de Boer etc? What’s that all about?
Gambling is about percentages. Right now we are 4/1 in places to finish top 4 – thats 20%. If we appoint someone like Klopp right away we become more likely to finish top 4, especially given his record for first year massive improvement. The bookies would immediately shave a point off our price, maybe clip it into 5/2. But we’ll take 3/1. Thats a 25% chance. So where is the gamble in sacking Rodgers and appointing a clearly significantly better manager?
http://www.theanfieldwrap.com/2015/09/liverpool-the-air-of-inevitability/
And with the news Jurgen is all but a done deal, guess what odds we are?
https://www.oddschecker.com/football/english/premier-league/top-4-finish
From 4/1 to 5/2, even after more dropped points, simply because we got rid of Rodgers and are about to appoint a champion.
As soon as its official, Im putting 2k down. We’re coming top 4 folks. We’ll be richer. We’ll attract better players. We’ll have a boss who knows what to do in Europe again. We’re only going up. FSG have done what was needed to be done to get us back on track. Wait til you see the pace and intensity we’re going to play with. Expect 4/5/6 years of success before he takes the German job. I genuinely think we can win the title with this man. Not been as giddy since we got Rafa.
Think in terms of FSG ownership over the last 5 years you could say it’s been very cautious.
In terms of commerciality / revenue generating off the pitch you could say that’s had the USA treatment and been very successful and long overdue.
FFP regs don’t apply to infrastructure programs so any lack of investment into training ground facilities and if we take Man U and City as the baseline for any top prem team then that should be what the owners should be aiming for.
Stadium again doesn’t come under FFP and it’s half a job really for me. If they’d of done the Anny Road I’d of said fair enough but leaving it is a bit shithouse for me. The main stand is another cautious approach to redevelopment and is one based around maxing the top end revenue opposed to redeveloping the any road which isn’t. Behind the goal revenue doesn’t add up to maxing out corporate revenue of the main stand.
For all the FSG apologists, FSG are building an EXTENSION on the side of the house. You can dress it up how you like but it’s an extension nothing more. Yep I’m sure it’s going to be a nice extension but they’re not building a new stadium or anything just redeveloping one side of the ground.
In terms of playing staff then the pods on the central league / younger players is of interest to how they approach the playing staff on a whole. The 1st team squad is 70 odd deep with 20 odd out on loan, a similar model to Chelsea. Buy in cheap see if you can make a profit down the line. I think Tony Barrett was getting somewhere the other week where he said it’s an expensive model to run and I’d be interested in seeing some figures of the costs of running the scheme against return.
That methodology now runs into the first team as we are now a selling club. The board showed some stones with Suarez in keeping him an extra year but with Sterling they caved way to easy for me. If in the summer they knew that either Brenden was going to turn it around or sack him within 2 months why not hold onto Sterling for another 6 months.
If the club persist with this idea of buying loads of potential and selling on then we’ll never break the top 4. At some point you have to keep hold of your talent and it’s the internal ambition of the club that helps sell the idea of staying, that alongside being able to push for titles and having decent cup runs.
If the new manager is Klopp then yes that shows ambition but they have to take the shackles off the wage structure and start bringing in a few big name players.
Rodgers went on holiday today whilst his people negotiate his £10M pay off. I’m sure he’s gutted but hey ho, 42 and could retire in the sun tomorrow if he wanted to. Not a bad life is it.
Hi Brian,
just a few points:
~ stadium extension: yes it is not a brand new build. But nontheless a big percentage increase in capacity. I have notseen the numbers to compare the option of building a new one vs the extension, but i certainly do not want our club finances to be overexposed by taking on a big chunk of leverage funding and potentially get stuck in the unending cycle of loan repayment (like Hicks and Gillette era). And by building ie 80,000 brand new facility with 20,000 empty seats, it would be a too hugh a risk to take. I am pleased with step by step expansion model. Most importantly we maintain this historical Anfield location.and.spirit. Classic.
~ Stirling: Not sure keeping him 6 more months would really be good for us or for him. Carra mentioned comparison abt Torres, Suarez and Raheem once. Suarez would be the only one among the three whould would.not sulk but give all on the pitch even if he was to be forced to stay on. Besides, with the ‘terrible’ agent who brainwashed Raheem a great deal, and showed no respect to our club, it was impossible to reconcile the situation amicably in my opinion. Anyway good luck to Raheem. He moved on and seems to be doing really well. Wish he stayed. But at east we got 49m for him and hopefully bew players will step up under the new boss.
~BR’s compensation: I dont know what’s in his contract. But the contract is there for this reason. Both FSG and BR signed based on mutual agreement. No one forced them to. So it is not BR’s fault. (i am.not here to defend BR nor FSG). If he had a choice, i am sure he would have preferred to stay with us till the end of his terms (and win a few things of course). It was not as if he was deliberately trying to under perform to get fired was he? so lets leave BR alone. BR had never said a bad word abt his previous clubs (not that i know of) and unlikely he would do so about us either (unless he needs to sell his book one day). The compensation will hit the club’s books in this financial year, but i do not think it would be material amount (and would be able to be covered by reduced wage from 2014/15 and increased commercial revenue).
Nothing against u, Brian. Just my 2 cents worth. cheers.
no worries you have a point re players who don’t want to be at the club, if they need to be shifted on then so be it. What I would say is that players read the ambition of the club and if we continue to sell on our best talent rather than retain it then it’ll always be an uphill job.
It’ll be Coutinho next, then Strurridge, at the end of the day top players want CL footy and we have to push to be in a position where we can offer that to them.
Re the stadium I agree no one wants an 80k stadium half empty but the net result of 20 years of negotiation, plans, different owners, slum landlord accusations (rightly so) is an extension to the main stand.
Lets not forget this is a multi billion dollar sports management fund. To wrap the main stand design around the anny road and take the capacity to 60K is a drop in the ocean to them.
The redevelopment of the main is about maxing out the revenue of the high end tickets which IMO is short term thinking. As an asset if they’d of spent more on developing the anny road the length of time it’d take to get that return on the build cost would be significantly longer, therefore your overall asset (club) would be worth slightly less as you’d have more debt over a longer period of time.
I suspect once the main stand is complete the owners may well look to sell. Think under FFP they could see a model that might work but once that goes out the window it’ll be every club for themselves again. The current status quo of the PL is not something I agree with where basically a country has been allowed to buy a club, (City)
But IMO the club has to continually invest into the stadium and surrounding (transport) infrastructures along with the council to continually move the club forward.
Chelsea are redeveloping their ground, Spurs the same, West Ham have the Olympic Stadium. That’s 3 brand new, central London Stadia coming to the fore in the next 5 years, along with Utd, City, Arse that’ll be 6 top end stadiums. I imagine Spurs & West Ham will be hoping that the London effect leads to a Man City type investment into their clubs.
If the perception for a buyer that Liverpool as city is a nightmare to deal with to get anything done in terms of stadia and supporting infrastructure then that investment will go elsewhere.
You simply have to look at what Manchester did with the new stadium and subsequent investment into the training complex
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2202858/Manchester-City-training-centre-Plans-revealed-100m-complex.html
compared to what Liverpool has achieved in terms of infrastructure at the same time.
You can argue the toss for the reason of why investment has or hasn’t happened but ultimately if their is the will to do it then it’ll happen. As I’ve said if the owners want to spend another £30M on the anny road they could do it’s buttons to them.
my worries too, regarding Coutinho and Sturridge and even Hendo to be honest. Just hoping that the new manager could make them want to stay at least two more years and fight as a team to win something here.
understood your view on the development of the facility. My hope is once this current phase is done, stadium is pack, performance is 10/10, and FSG sees the need to develop the next phase to make it 65k seater, for example.
cheers.
Good read that, Phil. I just think based on the title challenge alone, Brendan Rodgers was much better at coaching players to be good enough to make Liverpool competitive than the transfer committee were/still are at recruiting players good enough to make Liverpool competitive. Why suits like Ayre and this Gordon fella are on the committee that makes decisions over players is anyone’s guess. All very Purslow, imo. Or Parry when him and Benitez were falling out over Robbie Keane/Gareth Barry. Let’s have just the football men making the football decisions with the businessmen signing the cheques for a little while, please. I hear that’s how we used to conduct ourselves back when we won titles; might be worth another go like.
They had him replace his backroom staff (possibly just putting the ball in his court in the hope he’d walk away? Maybe that’s a bit too cynical and it was just bumbling incompetence) rather than having the bottle to pay him off a year after rewarding him with a big contract, when everyone knew he’d need a near perfect start to keep people off his back. That’s poor enough form but what you can’t excuse is the manner in which they sack people off. They fly over to get shut of Comolli but can’t be bothered to stay and watch the Derby at Wembley, a month or so later they have the living legend fly out to them at the end of the season to find out he’s a goner and now it’s come out a fella who *wasn’t* John Henry rang the manager’s office at Melwood just after the derby to deliver the news. They’re not the last lot but how long is that gonna be trotted out when they still don’t seem to get it and it’s leaving such a bad taste.
But y’know, the strong possibility of Klopp and that. He’s the complete opposite of Rafa personality-wise when it comes to his whacky interviews and mad celebrations but if he rocks up he’ll have a similar status, supporter backing and CV of winning at the elite level to be able to put his foot down. There was a reason the candidates in the running for the job the last time out were Swansea’s Rodgers, Wigan’s Martinez and Villas Boas who’d just came off a nightmare at Chelsea and it wasn’t because they wanted someone in a strong enough position to tell them they know fuck all and that their baseball ideas with regards to football club structure are a load of bollocks.
Great read, Phil. Good perspective piece. I still can’t believe how bad things were five years ago.
As has been said, I’m not sure Klopp was available at the start this season, and don’t think FSG had a “better option” other than to stick by BR until…
However, the amount of money they then gave him, and it appears they let HIM spend it, seems a bit overboard given they were so quick to pull the trigger into the season.
If Klopp is confirmed, it will be helluva interesting to see what happens in the next two transfer windows.
Really good article there.. Nice read
I don’t think the current squad is bad as people say. And importantly, it’s young, with potential. Which is exactly the kind of squad Klopp took control of at Dortmund.
All of the following players strike me as potentially being “Klopp-style” players, who could easily go to another level with that extra push and education:
Ibe
Firmino
Lallana
Coutinho
Can
Rossiter
Markovic (when he comes back)
Ings
Moreno
Sturridge
Clyne
Gomez
Flanagan (when he comes back)
Origi
Milner
Henderson
Lucas
Teiexeira
The ones I’m not so sure about:
Benteke
Mignolet
Sakho
Skrtel
Lovren
Allen
Enrique
Toure
U are writing off all 4 CBs?
in.my opinion, Moreno and Enrique play quite similar style, but Moreno releases the ball faster. Potential wise Moreno has more upside due to his youger age.
I’m not writing off Gomez.
Also bear in mind that Hummels is a converted central midfielder, so perhaps Can and Gomez could work as a centre-back pairing.
excellent read
Willian. Victor Moses. Value.
Sanchez. Bony. Balotelli. Value.
I am hardly one who is going be yelling “Yanks Out!” but here are two massive missteps. Really glaring flaws in the system (there are others, of course).
Willian is hardly going to set the world alight, but he is undeniable class and a real workhorse. A proper Rodgers player. Would he have made the difference? We’ll never know, but it is not hard to imagine.
Sanchez seems even more clear cut. We needed someone with pace, mobility, and a clinical finish to fill in for a Suarez-size hole. Instead, we went for “value” on a player that couldn’t be any less a proper Rodgers player.
If we sign Sanchez, make that happen above and beyond all other goals, does anyone doubt we would be in the CL right now? I don’t even think it would be hard to imagine a challenge for the crown, although perhaps not a successful one.
Think fsg doing all right. I’m old enough to remember great Leeds team and under Hicks and Gillette we were heading the same way as that club. At least fsg have reinvested money from Suarez and sterling xfers in playing staff rather than line their own pockets or have to use it to pay off leveraged debt.
Klopp would be an exciting appointment but think we fool ourselves a bit re comparing ourselves with Dortmund and us being similar will attract him. As hamann said anfield is like a morgue and until there’s a change in policy so younger fans can attend our jurgen will be in for a shock if he thinks the atmosphere and passion will be like his former club he’s in for a shock.
“In baseball, a player can have an on-base percentage of 40 per cent and end up contributing greatly to a winning team (I’ve read Moneyball so you can trust me on that one)…And guess what? It has not yet won us the league.”
Are you sure you’ve read it? One of the underlying principles in Moneyball is that his methods were only good for the regular season because the post-season was too small of a sample size to get around the variance. FSG aren’t a moneytree and thus have to use data to pick out undervalued players in hopes they’ll deveop into worldclass talents that can be sold at a big profit which would then be reinvested. That’s not Moneyballl…it’s just sensible business.