I WAS as glad as everyone else to see the back of Raheem Sterling last summer, writes CHARLIE CHRISTIAN.
After months of distracted performances, shameless attention-seeking and general poor conduct all round, it was time for the club and Sterling to part ways and at close to £50million it can hardly be claimed that Liverpool got a bad deal out of it, especially on the evidence of some of Sterling’s performances for Manchester City this season.
However, there was still much about that saga that we should find troubling.
For the second summer running we lost one of our best players to an established Champions League side and although Sterling never was and never will be another Luis Suarez, his status as one of the most promising young players in Europe is entirely justified. Given the straight choice between a big bag of cash and the European Golden Boy of less than two full years ago, we should be taking the latter every time.
It can’t be denied that letting Sterling go was the right decision, if only because he so blatantly didn’t want to be here and his continued presence at the club would only have served to act as a disruption.
But something I found concerning about that particular saga was the way some within the fanbase seemed positively celebratory about the amount of cash we ended up receiving from City for his services.
Of course nobody wants to see the club get ripped off as according to some we might have been over Suarez (£65m? Really?) but no matter how hard I try, I just can’t get excited about transfer fees. Nor will I ever. You don’t sing about how much cash you’ve got in the bank, you can’t emblazon a ‘historic’ transfer fee alongside a Liverbird on a banner. It just isn’t us.
Now, for the third summer running, it seems possible that we could lose one of our best players for a head-turning sum. With Paris Saint-Germain reportedly interested in Daniel Sturridge, and an alleged fee of £45m bouncing around on the back pages of various papers, the debate is once again underway about whether or not we should cash in on one of our prized assets. And many seem to be in favour.
Given our recent history in the transfer market, shouldn’t we be immensely sceptical of allowing top talent to leave the club without a fight?
Getting £50m for Sterling has hardly inspired us to greater things this season and we all know what our first post-Suarez campaign looked like. Nor can we credibly claim to have benefitted, either short-term or long-term, from the sale of Javier Mascherano. Or Xabi Alonso. Or even Fernando Torres.
There’s a clear pattern here — selling our best players does nothing to improve us as a team. Why would it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7LGSC0DoSs
Our most memorable season in recent years came after a summer when we stubbornly dug our heels in when it came to keeping our most talented player of the time.
Rather than cashing in on the only world-class player we had available to us, we kept hold of Luis Suarez and refused to let him go, least of all to one of our Premier League rivals. The results of our hard-headedness were spectacular as we all know, with Suarez’s 31 league goals the following season taking us the closest we’ve been to the title in my lifetime.
Bill Shankly talked about there being a holy trinity of fans, players and the manager and while football has obviously become infinitely more business oriented in recent decades (we do have an “official donuts partner” after all) isn’t this club still largely about incredible players doing incredible things and us getting behind them accordingly?
And let there be no doubt, when Daniel Sturridge’s body is working he very much exists within that bracket of elite players, arguably behind only Sergio Aguero in the English game.
His Liverpool record of 47 goals in 81 games speaks for itself and even with his injury record this season he’s our third highest overall scorer. Yes, that has as much to do with the utter mediocrity we’ve been subjected to for much of this campaign as it does with Daniel Sturridge’s brilliance as a goalscorer, but his record of four goals in seven league games reminds us of just how lethal he can be.
Players with that sort of conversion rate — which Sturridge has largely maintained throughout his Liverpool career — are not to be let go of lightly. £45m? That’s just under three Mario Balotellis. It’s even less than what we got for Sterling. If we’re getting excited over that sort of cash for a player of such quality, we need to be asking what our priorities really are.
Of course Sturridge’s injury record is a big concern for the club, that much can’t be denied. Every time we’re told he’s close to making a return, another problem seems to surface. Each time he manages to start piecing together another first team run, he’ll get another dead leg, another pulled hamstring.
It’s infuriating to so often be without the most dangerous player we’ve got on our books and if Jürgen Klopp decides he’s too much of a liability to keep hold of then, yes, we should let him go. But only if the manager decides he’s too much of a liability. Not because we can make a profit on him. Not because we could sign two or three half-decent players with whatever we make from his sale.
It has to be a decision based on footballing reasons and footballing reasons alone because, if it’s not, how can we credibly claim to be doing our best to advance as a team? Drawing out a transfer saga to make the most profit possible might make good television and satisfy those of us who think in terms of net spend and ‘Moneyball’ but does anyone believe it’s conducive to a settled, focused squad?
This summer represents a huge opportunity to set the club up in a position to reclaim a Champions League place, pick up some form of silverware and show that we can consistently reach some of the heights we’ve glimpsed throughout Jürgen’s reign so far.
We’ve got one of the best managers in Europe and he should be allowed to realise his vision for the club regardless of whether or not it chimes in with receiving the maximum amount of cash available to us.
If that vision includes Daniel Sturridge, we keep Daniel Sturridge. If it doesn’t then we wave goodbye and move on. Those are the only factors we should be taking into consideration when it comes to Sturridge’s future at Anfield.
Anything else is immaterial.
This may sound harsh but I think it’s probably better we sell him. Especially if there is genuine interest. Yes, he is our best striker but he’s been injured mostly of the last two seasons.
I’m not going to get into that argument about whether it’s because Sturridge is mentally weak or physically brittle.
Bottom line, he won’t accept a role as a backup striker. Sorry, he shouldn’t have to considering how far he has come. But make no mistake, he can’t be our primary and only option like this season. It doesn’t make a difference how good he is if he can only be fit for at most 12 games a season.
At the end of the day it depends what the player wants. If they are in contract and want to stay we can’t move them on if we try. If they want to go then it’s better to let them go (usually…Luis was an exception). What does Studge want…..I wonder?
I’ve been a bit disappointed at the quality of arguments put forward on TAW articles. They seem to be of much lower quality that the main podcast.
I just don’t get what the point of the article is. I hope the author can clarify.
“Getting £50m for Sterling has hardly inspired us to greater things this season and we all know what our first post-Suarez campaign looked like. Nor can we credibly claim to have benefitted, either short-term or long-term, from the sale of Javier Mascherano. Or Xabi Alonso. Or even Fernando Torres.
There’s a clear pattern here — selling our best players does nothing to improve us as a team. Why would it?”
All these examples in the article fall into one or both of the following categories:
1) The player was beginning a fall in quality or was very overrated in quality (Torres, Sterling)
2) The player could not be convinced to stay (Mascherano, Alonso, Suarez, Sterling)
None of these players fall into a third category that would be players who would have benefited the club and not have been held against their will. That is, players who would have been sold for pure financial reasons rather than for football reasons.
The £50m for Sterling helped us land Firmino who is arguably a much better player. In the cases where the money was reinvested and only helped us buy duds then what are you proposing?? Rather than take the risk of investing millions of £’s into the squad, we instead should have forced these players to stay and risk the entire team’s unity??
The reason some people want to take the Sturridge offer (if it’s real) is because he is too injury prone and £45m can potentially buy us a decent striker who is at least not as frequently injured. It’s not because they love seeing the club rake in millions. In the case of Sterling it was because he was only worth maybe £30m, was inconsistent and wanted out. Again, it wasn’t just because of the £.
I just don’t see anyone making the argument you seem to be arguing against.
Couldn’t agree more. Our issue hasn’t been selling, it’s been buying. The best period of my football watching life came when we sold our best player, Rush, because we used the money to buy Barnes and Beardsley. Every player has a price at which selling him makes sense.
The point of the argument is that even if it seems like we’re getting a fair sum for a player (or indeed an inflated sum), recent history tells us that this doesn’t automatically mean we’ve done good business and that this should be considered when it comes to Sturridge.
I explicitly said in the article that it was right to sell Sterling in the end even if there was a lot more the club could have done to keep hold of him. Nor was there much we could have done to keep hold of Alonso or Mascherano given the state of the club during that period, but then I wasn’t saying otherwise.
The point was that some fans seem overjoyed at the prospect of receiving a big sum for Sturridge and as you say that’s understandable in some respects given his injury record and/or the fact he may not fit Klopp’s ideal system. I said as much in the article. I just think we should keep in mind the times we’ve sold proven players and failed to replace them adequately, as has been the case all too often in recent years. Essentially, a club with ambitions of competing at the very top level can’t afford to consistently flog its top level players.
You mention Firmino coming in for Sterling and it’s a good example but I could just as easily point out the absolute shambles that was the summer or 2014 where we spewed the Suarez money away, the time we replaced Fernando Torres with Andy Carroll or even the Alonso/Aquilani saga.
Unless we can say for sure that any top class player we let go of is going to be replaced by a player of the same proven calibre, I think we should be very very wary of getting rid. And given our position right now, I don’t think it’s a guarantee we can make.
Hope that clarified it a bit.
Hang with me because Moneyball is dead. Well not totally but there’s an issue with Moneyball and Sabremetrics and that time Kenny and Damien got all touchy-feely about “chances created” and then we bought Stewart Downing for £20m. But here you go because in America the “national past time” of baseball is also a nerds wet dream. The sheer quantity of numbers generated by baseball was like mana from heaven to many of these kids and the data has been kept for more than 100 years running. From this it’s not surprising that when Damn Yankees had a wage bill that dwarfed even PSGs that wealth of raw information became a powerful tool to try and find a way to win.
But herein lies the problem: Moneyball is dead.
John Henry even said so during MLBs winter meetings when explaining why the Red Sox had suddenly started to spend big again.
Sabremetrics is essentially the pursuit of a holy grail. That fat kid from Pineapple Express was demonstrating the beginning of the search for The Metric. Like I said baseball had all these numbers and lot’s of smarty nerdy fans (and employees) and that meant Moneyball is really only a good description of a particular period of time in the overall evolution of Sabremetrics because what baseball freaks discovered when they started to analyze all this data from a more and more sophisticated perspective Moneyball as we think of it (or at least it’s frequently tossed around by the dimwitted punditry that graces our modern game) has largely come and gone as the weaknesses in its key metrics were revealed.
So here’s where it starts to get really interesting and not just for MLB (and the MLB because of it’s unique collective bargaining rules which guarantee contracts so teams are quite literally buying and selling contracts if not the players themselves) is worth paying attention to for purposes of comparison with footie.
Initially the introduction of Sabremetrics and the extraordinary success of Oakland in particular drove down the average value of contracts in the game since suddenly players seemed far more interchangeable than ever before but this trend stopped rather suddenly and dramatically reversed itself. Why?
Because Moneyball was dead but during it’s heady youth days it began to reveal a value far deeper than initially imagined. That’s the chase. The analysis of the data was peeling away layers of the statistical onion that baseball is and suddenly all these new metrics were popping up out of nowhere. OBS+, OPS, AFEI, wIPS+ and a galaxy of other nonsensical letter mash-ups were revealing more and more about the value traditional statistical measures and how by combining simple concrete indexes (runs scored, wins, hits etc) with other more existential ones (slugging percentage, on base percentage, adjusted fielding percentage) was beginning to provide some insight on not just how a run is scored but WHY it gets scored so the search for correlated data became ever more sophisticated to the point where we have now reached what is considered the Holy Grail…WAR. Wins Above Replacement. It’s an extremely complicated formula that takes into account all the various attributes of a player represented in traditional statistics (home runs, strike outs etc) adjusts them to try and cancel out as much environmental (literally, Colorado plays in the Rocky Mountains in thin air above 3k metres the air is significantly thinner and the ball when hit into the air travels a hell of a lot further creating statistical outliers around a lot of batting data).
There’s no one single standard by which ball parks are designed beyond the distances separating the bases so there’s a lot of variables that need to be adjusted for.
To that point comes OBS/OPS+. OBS represents the amount of time a player gets to base, regardless of means, and is important because in order to contribute to the game you first have to get on base. But then someone had an epiphany – if a player with a high OBS is desirable what about what that player is doing offensively when not on base. Probably the precursor to Moneyball was small-ball which relied on fast players getting on base and the “manufacture” of points by non-traditional means (bunting/walks/steals/sacrifices etc) and run manufacturing has been a proven way to win for many years and when the rules of manufacturing were examined someone came up with OPS+ which was a combination of OBS (how often a player is on base) combined with Slugging Percentage which sounds pretty cool but it’s just a fancy way of measuring how often a player hits the ball far enough into the outfield to advance a runner (tagging up). I don’t remember the exact length a ball must travel to count as a positive “slug” but now OPS+ provided a startlingly new view of the overall offensive contribution of a given player and has proved over time to have a very high correlation to The Biggie…the whole point of this exercise in intellectual wanking…WAR or Wins Above Replacement. The single metric that looks at any individual player from any era and spits out a number revealing how many WINS a given player is worth when compared to the average player at that position.
If you’re still reading this you have my apologies but I’m not trying to half ass this because there seems to me something important about understanding the value FSG now sees in Sabremetrics since John Henry did speak exactly to this point – the Red Sox were no longer going to place the emphasis on Sabremetrics to find “hidden gem” players (as Moneyball in the way it’s used here relates to the Oakland phase where a dirt poor team was picking up scraps – Coutinho/Sturridge for a combined £20m seems like a good example of that version) to using Sabremetrics to identify players worth spending bigger sums of money on (Firmino at £30m) because there are features to their game (3.2 tackles per 90 minutes) that suggest a player could be a bit special.
Moneyball ball is dead but Sabremetrics is very much alive.
Outside of a transfer request I don’t see much of a chance of Daniel Sturridge being moved.
Alternatively I could have probably just written “championship contenders don’t sell world class players”.
I recommend looking at http://www.baseballreference.com to get a slightly better idea of how this all works if you have a questionably large amount of free time on your hands.
We didn’t sell them for Moneyball. They all wanted out of the club.
The thing that baffles me in this article: what makes the author think that after hiring Klopp, some unknown cabal of FSG insiders would decide to sell a player without the input of Klopp? Is there a shred, a mere scintilla of evidence that such a decision would be reached on the basis of agent led speculation?
Good that international break is over. TAW’s neuroses are starting to show. Soon, they’ll think Klopp wants to keep Skrtel.
The thing that baffles me is that you think there’s some huge collective thought process where we will make a decision on opinion about Skrtel. An unknown cabal of TAW insiders deciding to have a set in stone viewpoint on a Liverpool defender.
I agree with Matt above. I don’t believe an ambitious club would sell someone as good as Sturridge regardless of the fee. Has Lfc ever done that? Yeah, money talks but a players ambition comes first (in all the top players we let go). Yes, Aidy Ward said Sterling would have signed but that in the summer after we were good. By November, Sterling had completely different idea’s. He didn’t sign the 100k because deep down he thought we were shit. Couldn’t get out the CL group, all over the place in the league and absolutely no idea in the transfer market. A few month later 900k wouldn’t have made him stay. He wanted to leave for City.
Suarez was desperate to leave. So desperate he almost sacrificed his dream move just to get out the door. Torres was shot to pieces. He wanted out so badly it he forgot how to even play football. Mascherano was happy to go on strike to get his move. Alonso was slightly different (at first) but then in the same way you can’t ask Josef Fritzl what makes good parenting you can’t judge Alonso leaving in relation to the club’s strategy over the years. The club was so dysfunctional it was a one off case. But yeah, left they all have for one reason or another but it’s not strictly true to say we keep selling our top players because it implies a choice.
My point is, we wouldn’t sell because you get lots of money. We know that gets wasted anyway. If he goes it’s because Klopp doesn’t want him which also seems unlikely but not impossible. As you say, their is an argument from the other side. It’s nothing to worry about. Klopp and Klopp alone will make the decision and it’ll be on footballing merits only. I’d be gobsmacked if he did but I trust him 100%.
One thing the experiences of the past have recently highlighted to me is the importance of the manager. From the signings under Hodgson to the (with hindsight, what I now see as) the disaster under Rodgers (yes, it was down to Suarez (see Barca who had the same team the season before he signed and yes, we also had some top players alongside him). Klopp is going to transform Liverpool completely because of the respect he commands in the market. What he does will be right.
My fear is not for Sturridge (who I believe will be here next season) but Coutinho. I’ve argued with my mates to the point where they hate me that Suarez didn’t come to Liverpool in his 3 day break to see his mates or because he missed the city. He came to twist Phil’s arm because a phone call isn’t enough with a man as complex as Coutinho. Neymar started it 6 months ago with his stories to the press. I look at Barca’s attack and then their midfield and it’s crying out for him. If I was president he’d be my number 1 target globally. He’s the worry though there’s no certainty he’d go. It just worried me when Klopp said (a fortnight ago, and a couple of weeks after Suarez’s visit) if a player wants to leave he can whether he’s our top player or not. I don’t want them if their not committed. Who did he mean? Sturridge? Coutinho? What’s been said?
Either way, whatever happens I’m not worried. Under Hodgson, even Kenny, or Rodgers we couldn’t possibly replace our top talent. Under Klopp we can. Whatever will be will be.
Koolhand/TAW
Exactly. This is what sets TAW aside from most shithouse media ‘peers’ who hunt in spineless packs. A lot of hacks will sit down and decide on a manager they don’t like and together make a concerted effort to get him sacked, eg Rafa and get someone they approve of installed, eg Hodgson (with predictable results!) The UK football media are largely a joke, laughed at by their European counterparts.
This is why TAW stands out – it is an eclectic mix of opinions and ideas with no overall pre-determined editorial direction everyone has to obey. Just listen to any of the podcasts and you will hear plenty of differing views, or even the series of articles at the start of the season as to whether Rodgers should stay, where opinion was roughly 50/50.
As for the article above, I think it’s too simplistic to say ‘we shouldn’t sell’ Often we should, either cos they’re not happy to stay or simply that selling someone as limited as Sterling for £50m is just great fuckin business! The point about blowing the money is moot. Sometimes the reinvestment money is well spent (buying Kenny with the Keegan money; Barnes and Beardsley with the Rush money, etc) and sometimes not (Carroll with the Torres money) but that’s the nature of the transfer market, it’s very volatile.
The problem I have with the selling is we are not trying to replace like-with-like. When we sold Torres we should have gone for a Benzema or a Higuain, not a Carroll. Similarly when we sold Suarez we should have gone for a Lewadoski or a Higuain (and yes, they WILL come if we offer competitive wages!) and not a Lambert!
Keep Sturridge. I still think Benteke might have a future. And we’ve got Ings to come back. Even if Sturridge plays 15/20 games a season – if he can score 10-15 goals in those games, then that’s better than having a Balotelli/Lambert/Borini who probably wouldn’t score more than 10 between them in a whole season. If those three (Sturridge/Benteke/Ings) can get 30-40 goals between them and you then add the goals from Coutinho, Firmino and Lallana (25 maybe), we’re looking at maybe 60 goals. And that’s before anyone else comes into the squad who could maybe add to that. Sturridge pretty much guarantees you goals – you need to keep that, even if his is missing 50% of the season.
Deffo, keep Sturridge.
Yes the lad is injury prone but as a few have already pointed out he scores goals with a lot of regularity. In his instance I really am not interested in the money argument – he cost us relative peanuts, we are about to receive a huge wedge via the TV money which will easily cover his wages.
Any potential transfer fee is just that – you potentially buy a player who might be better or worse than the one you are selling. He isnt potential he is goals!
Makes no football sense other than if the manager wants him gone.
I can’t see anyone coming in for Sturbridge given the injury risk and advancing age.
And that hideous white Rolls Royce.
Liking forward I see Sturridge, Firminho, Origi, Ings, Benteke as the forward pecking order. Never understood buying Benteke when we had Origi coming off his loan – pure panic buy by BR.
Klopp only likes to really play 1 up front so a lot of egos to sooth. Firminho can play behind the striker so flexibility there but I’d say keeping Benteke as a 3 rd choice sub is wasteful all around.
With sturridge injury record he might not play 40 games next year so if we think a combination of ings, origi & firminho can get 50 goals then we should cash in on ppt Daniel and his woeful injury list. But would anyone really pay£45M for such a record.
One thing I have noticed is that since this story has floated his form and ability to hit the back of the net has dropped. Coincidence?