Sure it was two years ago and the players are older now, but our squad was stretched much thinner in 2020/2021, both in defence and midfield. We were losing unlosable games that year. We eventually dug ourselves out. I see far more similarities to that season than dissimilarities, which is why I won’t give up hope. Of course I think top 4 is well out of the question, simply because we are miles away from turning this around, but for me the table is no longer important. Whereas you can’t see it happening in-season, I really do think there is fight in this squad still and they’ll fight it out and improve through matches. I want to see improvements in key areas such as goals conceded and goal conversion rates etc. Results would be a bonus.
You are looking at this the wrong way. You spend big when you have big problems. When you are making CL finals and challenging for the league, you want squad harmony and the idea is the ‘miles’ you put in (£ wise) building a squad to challenge means you neither need to spend big nor want to disrupt the squad with multiple mega signings.
I’m not criticising the owner. Not Klopp. I don’t think it’s right to kick either when they are down. We need confidence. Not £500m investment.
And who would that be? Answers on a postcard please.
With all due respect, until this season – when both Liverpool and City have been far below their usual standards – Arsenal have been in the wilderness. They pissed away eye watering amounts of money on flop after flop, and then spent another €430m correcting those mistakes. We’ll see if they really throw down a 100 point season, as they are currently on pace for. Maybe you say this means you have to keep spending until you get it correct, but the other lesson is that you have to spend your money wisely.
City, despite spending more money than god for years now, have really only turned that into dominance under Guardiola. The peak Liverpool side was evidence that it’s possible to compete – and win – at the very top level without using the transfer market as the first port of call. Newcastle have done nothing yet, and were starting from a totally incomparable position to us. United are by no means out of the woods yet, and appear to have hit their own spending limit.
All that said, I’m absolutely very disappointed that we didn’t make moves this last summer to address the problems in our squad, which are not new ones. For me the biggest issue is how long we’ve kept the likes of Keïta, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Nat Phillips, and Joe Gomez around. The question then is whose decision that was. My understanding is that we were quietly open to the sale of such players but were too stubborn about trying to extract maximum “value” from the sales. As a result, we’re waiting around to lose the first two on free transfers while they consume squad spots and wages. I accept that there is a limit on how high the ownership can allow wage commitments to run; it’s possible not everyone agrees with that.
So where does the buck stop? Has the commandment come down from on high within FSG that they will not sanction sales at a discount? Was that philosophy implemented by Edwards? Is it Klopp digging in his heels because of his inherent trust in his players? Who decided the squad was acceptable as it was? Is it the owners being cheap and gambling with CL revenue? If so, why? Is it the lack of a voice in the room with similar influence to Klopp? The lack of details over the Ward situation make it difficult to assess. I don’t think it is as straightforward to point at the ownership, who have been very much in the background during their time at Liverpool, and say that they simply won’t let the cash flow.
Very likely this was a collective gamble that unfortunately coincided with the shock disruption to the decision making apparatus in the form of the departures of Ward and Gordon. In isolation, I don’t think holding out for Bellingham is a bad idea. But we’ve failed to act decisively in other ways while waiting for that to materialize. It seems to me that everyone deserves some of the blame.
This is brilliantly put.
Starting that list at 2019 conveniently cuts off the big investment in players like Van Dijk, Alisson, Keita etc who formed the bedrock of the CL and Title winning side.
A lot of the investment that other teams have spent has been a result of getting their recruitment badly wrong, and trying to shortcut success by throwing money at the problem.
Devers is signed to 11 years. Salah to three. Their salaries per game actually favor Salah over Devers. but don’t let a good fact get in the way.
There is truth to this, but you also have to have the foresight to anticipate when big problems are on the horizon.
The club has shown that foresight in some areas, namely in the front line (Jota, Diaz, Nunez, Gakpo) and the back line (Konate, Tsimikas, and hopefully Ramsay).
The club has not shown that foresight when it comes to the midfield, and we’re suffering the consequences as a result.
You can spend big or small whenever you have problems. But the only effective solution is when you spend right. When has spending big become the right or only path to success? I want us to win but obviously our club, from the owners to Klopp believe in a certain principle of running a club, not just a football team, then it’s either we see the reasons for doing it or else we just gonna frustrate ourselves for no reason. If it’s down to me, I would have bought midfielders last season but for good or for bad, they did not. So we gotta live with it and get behind our boss, even if we are all frustrated.
I think there is a really good argument that we should have spent more money in that period, but not because we needed more players, but as a way to fund moving on players whose continued presence on the outskirts of the squad had created a sense of staleness.
I loved Divok, but he knew that no matter what he did during any game he might have got he was going to give the shirt up the moment whomever he came in for was available again. Since 2019 or so we have had an unhealthy number of players for whom that applies. Lovren I think is the only one we moved on at the right time and I think the reason we ended up with this backlog is because we were unrealistic about fees. You can argue the rationale, but I think we needed a more holistic view. Our imperative was to freshen on the edges of the squad. If we could fund that with good fees for Ox, Divok etc then great, but if those fees were not available then we had to bite the bullet. It was a cost for us worth paying.
Yes you feel Mane forced our hand allowing us to refresh the forward line… I’d imagine if he didn’t ask to leave he’d still be here and we’d be discussing an aging forward line firing blanks…
Regardless of how much we’ve spent I think it’s fair to say our recruitment has lost its way.
The Arthur loan was a terrible bit of business. He wasn’t fit at the time of signing and has a poor injury record as it is. There must have been many better options on the market than that, there were probably 2 or 3 at Juventus alone.
Signing Gakpo and renewing Firmino’s contract doesn’t seem to be a good use of resources either. I don’t get what the idea is, and my faith that there’s some masterplan has greatly diminished. We seem to be just making it up as we go along, we’re not making carefully considered moves in the market anymore.
I don’t see it as losing our way, but more our success averaging out. I think our recruitment team have been held in too high a regard. A string of successes will do that, but good luck and everything clicking can’t continue on indefinitely. There is more to a signing working than just the statistics. Us as a club being very selective with the attitude of a player - certainly more than any other club in the world - still allows too many other variables that could mean a signing could go wrong, like Kabak. I really think its also incredibly difficult to integrate new players and them reaching an expected standard when the form of the team as a whole is in the pits, rather than when it is on the rise.
While I agree with the rest of your post, I disagree with this one. We’ve played 19 league games. At a similar point in 2020-21, we had 34 points, while we have 29 now.
That season, we went on to lose 6 of our next 8 games (having already lost the game before), for 7 losses in 10 games. 9 points in 10 games it was we picked up.
We hadn’t even reached our nadir yet that season, and yet we managed to get back into shape. Not to mention, we have already seen signs of improvement in our play.
Now, the question is, do you see the other teams in contention under-performing, performing as expected, or over-performing? If your view is either one of the latter two, then it’s only logical that as we improve, we should quite easily overtake them. If your view is the former, then obviously it would be a lot harder. What evidence do we have of how the other teams are doing?
I would say that City are a lot harder to catch, considering that they’ve been performing about on par as we are right now and yet they’re ahead in the table. Unless we’re ahead of the curve and we expect them to weaken further, we’re probably not catching them.
Next down, the two Uniteds. I group them together because this season would be seen to be a remarkable improvement by the both of them. However, Eriksen has been vital to one of them, and is now expected to be out for a long time, while the other I really have no information about, because I haven’t paid any attention to them. From what I can tell, they made an improvement after the January transfer window last season, so this may be a more permanent change in where they would expect to end up, but my impression is that they’re rather reliant on Guimarães and Trippier, so if there were injuries to either one we can expect quite a solid hit to their prospects.
Next up is Spurs. I’d argue that they’re in a little bit of an illusory position. They are 2 games ahead of us, and if we take our season’s average so far we’d expect to get 3 points out of those 2 games in hand, putting us just 4 points behind them. The question is, are they in the position they’re expected to be in given a fully fit squad? Again I have little information on this, but they’re trailing behind their points per game from last season. A recovery in our prospects should see us overtake this gap.
Finally, we have Brighton, Fulham, and Brentford. In my mind, all 3 belong to the categories either of teams that overperform after getting promoted (Fulham), or teams that are in the ascendancy but are clear works in progress (Brentford, Brighton). I group these teams together for a couple of reasons: (a) they don’t ever actually get into the top 4, so it’d be quite a rare event if they did; and (b) in our dilapidated state they’re still around our points, without half the number of injuries that we do have. So if we can turn ourselves around, they are not a problem for us.
That brings me to Chelsea. The only other team in contention who are in similar straits in that we both have had injury-ravaged squads. However, I’m not sure when their issues started, and whether it has been as persistent as ours. They’ve taken a very different approach to ours, and have splashed the cash. Obviously, it’s the most attention-grabbing, and yet despite that, they’re still in a similar position to us. A lot of their spending was done over summer, so it’s not even the case that the impact of their signings wouldn’t be able to be seen yet. Another question is also whether their signings can even integrate well enough to see a sustained uptick in form.
And finally, back to us. Jürgen has overseen thus far this season, an evolution in the system and the way we play. Arguably the changes started last season (especially the tweaks to Henderson going wide and Alexander-Arnold coming central), but Núñez is quite a different player from Mané. If we take Jürgen at face value, a lot of the problems in our play is not just isolated to midfield or defence, but starts right from the front. Just recall the early season complaints about Salah staying too wide, for example. Changing systems and integrating new signings is hard enough, but then we’ve also had to deal with the disruptions due to injuries. While I don’t discount the impact of long-term injuries (for example, Jota would have been a really useful option this season to help manage the changes), I think it’s quite hard to work with even in training if you keep having players drop out due to more minor injuries, missing a couple of weeks at a go. I think one prominent example is Keïta missing out just the day before United, when he was meant to be starting.
I do think the signs are promising because we have already seen the improvements. We’re vulnerable obviously to further injuries, like the rumoured one to Konaté, and especially considering that our improvements came with Bajcetic replacing Fabinho, and Keïta coming back in. An injury to either one of them would quite possibly set us back a lot, particularly with the former, given how large the drop-off is between the two at the moment. Keïta is valuable, but part of that value is also in reducing Henderson’s minutes so he can actually hopefully return to his best for us.
I have confidence because we’ve seen Jürgen manage worse situations with us before, and I’m sure we can do that again. Our main downside risk is really just niggling injuries. Our problems can’t really be solved in the transfer market as Jürgen has alluded to, because you can bring in one player, maybe more, but you can’t solve the team being off-kilter by introducing more variability. Gakpo and Núñez should be cautionary examples. Good players, but they’re quite obviously playing more than we would have preferred otherwise. Not everyone can be like Diaz or Salah with their instant impact, fitting in perfectly with how we want to play. Given more time however, I’m confident that our team can get back into shape. Not to mention, the kids like Elliott and Carvalho should also see improvements as our coaching team works with them. Jones especially I think will surprise many, because Jürgen seems to rate him quite highly. He’s often put into high-pressure situations, so we can see that the trust is there. He’s only just turned 22, having had a disrupted season last season thanks to all the freak injuries which we will hopefully, barring some bad luck, not see again. At the age of 20 he was already a vital player in a team that qualified for the Champions League, so I think we would do well to not underrate him.
I’m not entirely sure about that.
Keïta when fit, plays. It’s quite obvious. Our fans underrate him ridiculously. There were rumours of us looking to extend his contract, and I don’t think it’s about value preservation or even sentiment. I’m thinking it’s twofold, that our medical team think that his injuries are just bad luck, and that more importantly, the cost of replacing his minutes is just not worth it. It’s therefore not so much “value preservation” but rather that this is the option that offers us the maximum value. Jürgen quite clearly thinks he’s a vital player.
Oxlade-Chamberlain, I think there’s not even been a whiff of a transfer rumour around him. In this case I think it’s fans being overly optimistic over the prospects of selling him. To put it another way, if fans want rid because they think that either he’s not good enough or he’s injured too much, why would other clubs want him? Just look at Sturridge for a cautionary tale. I think Jürgen made a similar point last season about Origi, that no clubs even came in for him, not so much that we valued him too highly.
Phillips has only ever been kept out of necessity. I think Jürgen mentioned that he would have moved on in the summer but we chose to not let him go because of injuries.
Gomez was given a new contract in the summer. I think he’s still very much valued by Jürgen. Fans want to get rid of him, but I don’t think it’s the same with Jürgen. Sure there are mistakes, but I think Jürgen is betting that he (and we) can do better.
Klopp is a huge fan of multi-faceted players. Gomez has demonstrated that this season. Milner will be going. Gomez will allow cover at RB and CB. Its really a no-brainer.
How Millie plays lately compared to some of those players, I don’t want him gone.
That might be less a sign of how well a 48yo Millie has been and more about just how far the rest have fallen.
Thing is you can play him sparsely and get a performance. His levels haven’t dropped where others have.
I’d be against him solely being a player but if he was to join the coaching staff or end up doing some coaching aspects I’d be happy to keep him. He isn’t an excuse to not buy though.