Post match: Man City v Liverpool (EPL 1/4/23 12.30pm)

If FSG was running a normal business, they will be fantastic administrators as they have increased the value of the club on paper by a few folds while keeping the books very healthy with a very organic way of generating revenue.

However, Football (or Soccer as they call it in the States) is a very different game altogether. Business in football are usually very hard to be self-sustainable if you want success continuously. Time in Football is actually an enemy to businessman due to the very short shelf life of footballers. If LFC have an academy that can produce 1-2 top talent every other year for LFC to use and a few average PL player every year that LFC can sell, this club will be very sustainable with profits made every year with the club still being competitive as LFC need not source from elsewhere for top talents and sell unwanted players to raise funds to get those players that the academy cannot produce.

However, that is the ideal scenario that happens once in a very blue moon with the huge assumption the academy is churning out players to sell for a decent profit every other year. Unfortunately, the academy’s conveyor belt has stopped quite a far bit as the last top talent to come out is TAA, leading us having to buy top talent elsewhere for quite a fair bit of money.

However, this means we need to balance the books somehow by selling players. Sacrifices have to be made every season. This time round, the sacrifice is a complete meltdown of the most important part on the pitch, the Midfield.

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So what you are telling me is that my bank account forked out a 350k to buy a house while receiving 200k for selling my house and I effectively spent 350k to buy a house to live in?

Please let me know what profession are you in, I need you to work in my local tax office! You could help my company save on corporate taxes!

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In hindsight, I should have slept through the game got drunk and watched John Wick. Got that the wrong way round…….

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:100: I would rather get rid of all the players who can’t be ar*sed before we we get rid of Klopp. I will never forgive them if he is forced to leave. I think he should ruthless with them. I am especially disappointed with TAA, he’s a scouser, he knows how how big and an honour it is to wear that red shirt
We still have another 10 games to get through. How do you lift the players if they just feel sorry for themselves, every time a opposition goal goes in and they walk around like
like ’ woe is me for 80 minutes’?

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I get emotional when we lose big and especially against our rivals.:slightly_frowning_face:

FSG have owned LFC for 13 years now, they should know how football works in the UK and Europe. Sometimes, you have to take risks and spend more on players, even though you sold a few players which have been less, every year is not going to be the same, winning the league and getting top 4 all the time. Klopp managed to get the maximum of eac player last year, as we were competing for all four trophies. They should have bought players last summer, they didn’t now, they are paying the price for this dismal results. We are not going to make top 4, losing money even more now with the way things are at the moment

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LFC needs a whole new midfield but LFC needs to stop giving aging players new contracts if they are not the club top scorers and/or top assists.

The Hendo’s contract extension is a huge farce for someone who has no idea how and when to press effectively when he was younger. The milner’s extension just boggles the mind when the people starting ahead of him at CM isn’t any better defensively…

Let’s put it this way. Would you consider FSG knowledgeable in the football business and culture when FSG is a huge proponent of the ESL that serves to protect the money of the old famous clubs??? Clearly, they didn’t understand the culture well.

As for the risk-taking by FSG, I believe Klopp has alluded to it during an interview.

As for the part on losing money, as long as LFC’s Balance sheet and P&L looks healthy, for a normal objective admininistrator, it is a-okay! Remember FSG bar for Mike Gordon aren’t fans of football/soccer in the first place so the lenses they are looking through is ok in terms of finance.

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And thats ok, its a natural reaction to get emotionally frustrated/disappointed/angry after a loss, especially when that loss comes in the manner it has done for us this season…some are able to keep it in better than others. Those fans who are desperate for the club to succeed will feel it worst than the casuals who are like “yeah well we lost we were 4 points off 4th but not to worry next week we’ll only be 8 points blah blah blah oh and let me indulge myself by making a joke out of it by responding to all those perceived as overreacting”

Hopefully, FSG’s PR team comes out with something positive this coming week!

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Did you know how to type when you were younger? Relevance?

I am just saying Hendo is a player who relies a lot of his physical abilities like having good stamina to outlast the opposition. It has been like that since he was at the club. All good when you are in your 20s but when you hit that big 30, you gotta learn how to do things slightly differently.

He still doesn’t have good positioning and defensive awareness to cut out dangerous situations despite being in the top level for so many years.

I have no idea how many interceptions, blocks and successful tackles he have for this season so far!

I am not finding it funny to be honest :slightly_frowning_face: It is worrying tbh. Our Sporting Director post is still up for grabs with no credible candidate in sight.
Next season is going to be even tougher, Arsenal seem to on par at winning this year’s league, we have Newcastle emerging as top 4 contenders with bottomless pit owners and Man Utd are doing better than us, so top 4 places are very hard to come by, if we don’t invest now.

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Liverpool have picked up a pitiful 12 points out of a possible 42 on their travels this season — less than lowly Southampton or Leicester City

Eight away defeats in the Premier League is their most since 2014-15 when Brendan Rodgers’ reign lurched alarmingly off the rails.

Mentality whoppers.

Two home grown players that we don’t have money to replace.

If you hadn’t given the other occupants of the house 350k would you still move in. The point you and a lot
of others are obsessed with is net spend which is a totally different metric. But in the 6 windows quoted before the club spent 270m on new arrivals or are you saying we didn’t.

The only way to stop these chants is to deduct points, simple as

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The worst thing about this performance and many others this season, I can’t see any patterns of play or tactical astuteness.

We just seem inept and get caught trying to play possession football but don’t seem to have the players to beat the opponents press or a strategy to play through it and end up hoofing it.

This isn’t just the players it also comes down to the management team.

We have lost our identity.

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Took my time to respond to this thread. We were awful in that second half. A complete rout. It’s now a habit.
It’s been painful to watch us this season. We are damaged, every one of us can see that. The damaged was undoubtably caused last year after rising to the biggest challenge any PL club has had to face on modern times - 4 competitions taken to the wire. Ridiculous considering how little it cost to gather this team together under such a mercurial genius of a manager.
We believed we could achieve it. We thought we could but didn’t. We fell to heavy gunfire just as victory was in sight. Glory turned to defeat but we didn’t give in, we kept going until the end, our legs heart and brains were all still connected. The magic was still alive but we found out that we were just human after all.
It wasn’t just the teams we faced, it felt like the world was against us. Best demonstrated with the way our fans were treated when we went to Paris…who would have thought after all the disasters that football served up that we would be treated like prisoners of war…the common enemy of French police and UEFA. Rounded up and penned in for hours then gassed and assaulted and insulted by these thugs and arrogant foreign officials. They didn’t like us, so they treated us like shit, that’s how it felt. I was there. Human nature corrects the balance and determines the way others behave towards you. They all wanted us to fail or worse.
Our Manager and players are just human. They were on the same journey as us fans. They gave everything they had last season and for some it broke their belief. Not just in their ability but their faith in football being fair and equal. It isn’t. Life isn’t.
I think in a few years people will look back on our 22/23 campaign and the aftermath and conclude that if teams reach such a level (and fail) that they need help to cope with the phycological down side. They should be given time off, rest, support and for some less pressure. Instead they got the World Cup and another PL season.
We as fans also have to adjust and realise that this team and this Manager may never recover.
It’s now a test for our owners who have been seriously distracted by their attempt to sell the club (or part of it).
The owners and management now need to sit down together, analyse the situation and come up with a coherent and sustainable plan to sort out the future of our football club. As it is, it can only get worse. This is the time for serious discussion and a huge plan, not just tinkering around the team and management, to get us back to being the club that can and wants to win again.
We are not City. We don’t have a sea of cash to throw at it. We are Liverpool. Sometime world beaters, average financial status, plenty of potential providing common sense and good management are applied. Come on FSG do your job and sort it. You don’t have 4 competitions to win just one. Reset and go again. We are waiting

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I liked our structure early on.

Obviously if we played 4-3-3 with that XI, we would’ve had probably Elliott at RCM and Henderson at LCM. It didn’t look great the few times we did it this season.

So we flipped the structure and played 4-4-1-1. The game plan wasn’t to press, but more retreat deeper to a mid or low block, seek for counter attacks.

Thought we were solid, but that first half certain wasn’t something I’d call great. It can be in certain context because this season’s City side (and their recent mojo) is much better than this season’s Liverpool side. Despite us beating them twice.

Shame for a few counter attacks. I thought we struggled to get out properly against their press. Connect with Gakpo, etc. Jota managed to bring the ball out a few times down the left.

The goals and chances we conceded were a bit too easy, but they’re also so good at that. I don’t think I’ve seen in my following of football a side that gets to the byline for a cut back so many times during a game. It’s their bread and butter.

But Virgil’s reaction on Mahrez was poor, we were just too far away from everything, even defending more deep.

That goal right at the start of the second half was a killer blow. We didn’t recover from that anymore. Yeah, the reaction was shit, but this game at this point of this season didn’t look like two teams of the same level.

It’s a tough week, maybe we can beat Chelsea, but with this performance yesterday I certainly don’t see us beating or getting anything against Arsenal. Very hard at the moment to see us getting top 4, I just don’t see where it’s gonna come from. The crazy finish in 20/21 doesn’t happen very often and now we actually have more in-form sides around/above us.

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Agree with most things but I think we will need (and get) a reaction - if there isn’t then we maybe have bigger problems. The issue is whether we can sustain or build on any reaction we get.

Chelsea away is a tricky one - on the one hand they are rubbish atm but on the the other we have a talent with poo and glitter, i.e. they’re crap but they’ll sparkle against us…

Arsenal are at least at Anfield, so we will have a fighting chance!

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