We made a loss. We should be clear about that. The positivity around the results is merely that they were not as bad as some other clubs who chose to (or rather, needed to) continue chasing signings.
We’re in a relatively strong position now to kick on, but that is largely because of the restraint shown.
And you say that others have odd takes.
It’s worth remembering that the hindsight-ism you show was not available to the club at the time those decisions were taken. The pandemic did not have a fixed end date. When the club were deciding replacing Lovren was a step too far, we didn’t know when fans were going to be allowed back in or when football, and the economy that props it up, was going to return to something like normal. Liverpool lost something like £100m in revenue through the stadium closures. But beyond that, it was interesting to note that the Nike deal did not uplift commercial revenue beyond what New Balance provided. The analysis I have read suggests that is mostly down to the fact that economies were effectively closed and people were simply unable or unwilling to buy a shirt due to the pandemic.
The other thing to remember is that the centre back injuries that turn a slight gamble into an outright crisis are incredible unfortunate. To lose all our centre backs, and all the lads who could cover centre back, at the same time is not something that can be reasonably planned for.
While we can look back and say we probably should have got a Centre Back, the information that allows us to make that hindsight analysis simply wasn’t there at the time. We don’t know we are going to suffer the worst injury crisis anyone can remember. We don’t know there is an end in sight to the pandemic.
And the other contextual information you are missing is that we’d just won the league by twenty fucking points. If there is anything that says we can afford to delay investment until things pick up, it’s that.
As for Klopp’s public tantrum? Hardly.
Firstly, shithouse pluralisation of his comment. One player. Not ‘players’. Let’s get this stuff right.
So there are two ways to take Klopp’s comment. At face value, or like so often in football, with a view to longer game.
At face value, he said that he would have like to get a centre back, but he could understand the financial situation. That’s hardly tipping over tables, is it? It’s a manager who fully understands that there are bigger concerns that the football side of things, and the middle of a pandemic, with no certainty around revenue, is not the time to have a strop about money.
Thinking about the wider context, what was the end result of Klopp’s comments about the clubs poverty? We got a centre back on loan that we’d been quoted £30m for in the summer. I think that’s a result, personally. I still believe that what managers say in press conferences are usually designed to serve an agenda.
*~ Jurgen, are you planning to get a CB before the end of the window. *
~ Yeah, we’ve got some money to spend, but the lad we really want isn’t available until the summer. We’re hoping some chump club can be persuade to let us have someone on loan until then.
We can be pretty sure the club were always planning to get Konate when they did. We’ve been over this before, but we know the club line up targets years in advance, and the decision to not move for a centre back in the summer of 2020 is just as likely to be a case of having to wait for the lad they want as it is being tight arsed.
Maybe not silly, but you should have the self-awareness to understand that criticising them on the basis of what you know now versus what they knew then, is hardly fair.
From where we are now, I think it looks like FSG handled things really well and have got us in a brilliant position to push on.
