One thing I’m always fascinated by is the way the #FSGOUT crowd always write off anything Klopp says as ‘towing the line’ or somesuch, until he says something a bit grumpy, at which point they all go ‘LOOK! SEE! HE IS BEING BACKED!!!’
The fact remains that since winning the CL Liverpool have spent something like £300m on players, and only 10% of that has gone into midfield. That isn’t on FSG. That’s on Klopp and his recruitment team.
Not just the playing staff need a refresh but the coaching as well.
This isn’t a finger pointing exercise but the club top to bottom has become complacent and stale.
The one person I’d be retaining above all is Klopp, so that’s my starting point alongside a class sporting director who will challenge Klopp daily. Then look to bring in some new ideas as the ones our current set up keep trying just don’t work.
And on a related note, they always talk about how he obviously is unhappy and would love more funding so he can spend like City, but ignore the fact that he signed a new long-term contract despite knowing the conditions that he works with.
Probably got conned into believing they were selling up and funds would be available. 
Yup the comments from Robertson sort of attest that.
It is, but much like with Salah’s new contract they were playing well enough at the time to warrant those new deals & everyone was calling for it…it’s all about timing, he might’ve already made his mind up for himself his future lied elsewhere had we not renewed when we did and waited until the last 6 months (which lets face it nobody really wants)…it’s very easy now to look at it in hindsight and say we shouldv’e done it this way or that way…we can all say “oh look how shit Salah’s been since signing the new deal, should’ve pushed him out and looked for a buyer because you know look how stupid we look now for not accepting that 200m offer from PSG that never arrived” Imagine someone like me who gets slated for every other thing he says anyway coming up with the idea 12 months ago we’d be better of cashing in on Salah. Back to Hendo that’s 1 we’ll have to accept didn’t work out…it’s hardly a matter of life and death is it?
Until we know we’re definitely not getting Bellingham, I think giving Hendo a new contract was the right call.
Mind you I’d have let Milner leave, put Hendo in that role and signed a midfielder in summer.
I have zero problems with Hendo’s new deal, could name some other weirder extensions that were possibly just to protect their market value.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, how many times has Millie been written off here? Okay, not exactly the top tier importance of player, but in general.
We cannot give everyone new deals but we cannot also just change the whole team in one short space of time. Nobody does that, not even clubs who have a higher net spend than we do.
We’re Liverpool, this is not Wigan or something when your captain hits his 30’s and you offer him some sort of a pay as you play deal like he’s a cripple.
Yes, our wages are among the highest in world football, that’s what’s called building a winning side and keeping it together (or with time at least parts of it). It costs.
Now, this summer, we’ll make a bit of room (with at least Ox and Keita leaving) for further reinforcements. Deeper than our midfield, we have to get our collective principles right again and that includes both our attack and defence.
Well it still might.
It’s not the Henderson contract as the root cause of the problems but a part of the wider poor long term planning over the last couple of years.
Extending Milner and Henderson, whilst retaining Oxlade and Keita for example was the wrong call (hindsight is great)… 2 older players clearly on the decline and 2 players who have lost a lot of what made them great through continually injuries.
The midfield needed refreshing starting last summer, it’s a failured by FSG and Klopp… now the task is far bigger than it needed to be.
You cannot control everything.
There’s us and our plans/wishes in the long term and short term with players of different importance/contribution and also the other side, the market and (un)interested parties.
Plus, players being at the top of the foodchain being at this latest Liverpool side, winning trophies and being on quality deals.
We did a lot of good selling to be fair, while we still had players to raise money from. Our focus perhaps went a bit too much on one area of the team, but it’s also not the only/main issue.
If something terrible doesn’t happen between now and the end of the season, give them this free summer to repair things, replace a few key positions leaving or that are already empty, have a better pre-season, do a few ins and outs.
Then we’ll see next season if the problem is still there or deeper than now.
Literally thousands of times! 
True, hindsight is the gift that always arrives after it is needed. But a four year extension for a 29 year old with a lot of miles in the legs, with two years still to run on his current deal was something that saw some push back at the time and it’s proved to be right.
Maybe if we’d got rid of Milner and Henderson was playing a lesser role then we could manage it. As it is, Milner is still here and we’ve not brought anyone else in of note as so he’s not being transitioned out to a squad role. If you’d held on a year would he have started looking elsewhere? Would he have had suitors banging down his door? Probably not.
Yup, all of this. Nail on the head.
The succession planning has gone wrong in a big way. The focus was on how we replace Mane, Salah and Firmino with their contracts also all inexplicably up in the same summer. Meanwhile the midfield has deteriorated and seen little investment.
We should have been able to anticipate some of the physical drop off. Always better to let players go one year too early than one year too late. If we didn’t see that then you question why. If we did and didn’t do anything about it then even bigger questions need asking.
And that’s something we’ll just have to take on the chin, hasn’t worked out let’s move on and ensure history doesn’t repeat itself twice this summer but like I said it’s hardly some irriversible bank breaking mistake. We’ll just have to work with it the best way we can, many now are saying we move Milner on and we transition Hendo into Milner’s role now, which makes sense it’s the logical thing to do at this point…I wouldn’t be upset to see both depart truth be told, I don’t think Hendo would be short of suitors but wages likely to be the stumbling block for most if not all those clubs.
Good to see you back btw.
No you can’t control everything but you can plan effectively, and challenge the manager when he says he wants to go again with the same midfield group which is showing signs of decline (it was there end of last season).
It appears to me a perfect storm happened for the worse in the summer just gone. For whatever reason there is a huge lack of respect/joined up thinking between Klopp and the coaches and the rest of the back room teams…
Klopp wanted Touchameni, so clearly he knew the midfield needed a refresh… Yet when that deal feel through (around June time) we didn’t actively persue an alternative. Looks like our alternative is Bellingham, and Klopp declined multiple other midfielders. We then started to pick up injuries (this can’t have been a suprise) and we then scrabbled around at the end of the window and got Melo.
How do we go from throwing in bids for Caicedo with 3 days of the window left, to arriving at Jan in a worse position and not sign a midfielder?
For me that’s a distinct lack of joined up working between Klopp and the scouting set up… This is the same set up which went from Draxler to Mane and Goetze to Salah (or vice versa) and convinced Klopp they would be perfect… What has happened? Why have we moved the club away from a model which worked so well?
Now the root cause? Not a single “this is it” but death by a thousand cuts…
Do I think we needed a specific midfield signing after Gini left to go together with someone like Thiago? Yes. Maybe not exactly that summer (even if I already then thought we should do it), but then in one of the following ones. Yeah, maybe we expected more from the likes of Jones and Elliott and made a mistake doing so (so far, because they remain good talents who might kick on). Do I think it’s the main problem of this team? No.
After the Touchameni fiasco we are now putting all our eggs in the Bellingham basket so it seems.
What could possibly go wrong …
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Who knows if we would’ve signed Virgil had City not pull back because of the money. They thought it was too much and moved onto Laporte.
The main thing, as always, is to have alternatives “ready” if we don’t get our primary target.
The loss of confidence is secondary to how badly we are playing. All of a suddent the things we have done to give us so much success have stopped working, and that is devastating to the psyche. My read on the situation is we started the season physically off the boil causing the primary problems. That has caused a loss of confidence which has compounded the primary problem. We are now off the boil in part because of physical issues, but also because we’re not punch shy, affected by the number of times we’ve been exposed by doing what we think we’re supposed to do. That form of second guessing is a critical liability when trying to play in this aggressive front foot fashion, but it’s entirely understandable that it would be there given how badly we performed our game plan early in the season.
I agree to a degree that if it gets better the confidence will come back, but where is that primary improvement going to come from? I dont see the route to it getting better without a clean slate or several new faces who have the legs to implement it and are unaffected by the malaise. That was what I hoped the world cup break would be but it hasnt been. We’re left now with the only options of new faces and waiting until next season.
This is what does my head in, we had the very best back office for everything… How the fuck have they all overseen such a horrific lack of any sort of mitigation planning. I can’t for one second believe we didn’t have any sort of notion this was going to happen, we pay £millions for a worldclass analytics set up.
If this happened in my line of work people would be getting the sack.