This will be the winter/summer transfer window under Klopp that we have to invest far more than we will receive on player sales.
Let’s see fit Henry is interested in doing so.
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Fuck, message board is over
As always, when comparing finances of football clubs it is best to look at more than one metric, then consider the impact over different time periods. This thread has shown that people can use a single statistic to “prove their point”, but the full story is often more nuanced.
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How dare you talk about context and nuance! That’s heresy!
I like Swiss Ramble. In a world of spin and misinformation, he usually has solid info on football finances that gives a decent starting point for discussion.
At first glance, the info he shows is a bit surprising, as it shows the spending of Man City and Liverpool to be closer than I would have expected.
Two comments come to mind for me:
First, Man City spent a massive fortune to build up their football enterprise, after inheriting a Commonwealth Games stadium for a song too. They spent and spent and spent, well over a billion, in order to give themselves a base on which to move forward. (And that was when a billion was probably worth three billion, in todays football spending). They were caught bang to rights for cheating, and were… fined! So to spell it out as simply as I know how, they had unlimited cash on hand, deep nation-state pockets, and what did the authorities do? Here… have a modest fine!
It’s absurd.
Anyway, the point being since they invested massively in the early years after Abu Dhabi came in, they almost instantly got themselves a permanent seat at the top table. Any financial analysis that doesn’t take into account the massive initial distortion is lacking. They can argue all they like about being honest citizens now, and being self-sustaining and so on. It’s a sham.
The second main point is the lack of trust in any numbers that City report. They have bogus companies without any real presence, or business, sponsoring them for millions. And Der Spiegel opened up a real can of worms that did not end with the sort of censure for them it should have done. They have back channel systems for payments, and various means to keep things off the books.
When they were caught out, their Chairman - a senior government official of a nation State - threatened UEFA, basically telling them we have more money, and we have more lawyers, and we will grind you down and bankrupt you in the process, and win in the end.
Whatever sense of fair play that might have existed in the corridors of power at the time ended up wilting in the face of the threat. Essentially, Man City bought the game. And the same can be said for PSG (their Chairman is even worse than Man City’s) and Newcastle will be coming on strong soon enough. As an aside, Newcastle have spent more between January and August of this year than we have spent since 2018. Not bad for plucky underdogs, who recently just managed to stave off relegation.
Anyway, back to Man City - nobody in the game is big enough to hold them to account. That’s what we have seen. Not UEFA, not CAS, not the Prem, not the FA.
I absolutely do not trust any numbers that City report. There’s a whole industry of spin off payments, and back channels, whether it is agents, transfer fees, intra-club dealings within their network, youth signings, youth sales, and so on.
It’s a River of sewage.
Since the thread is supposed to be about our owners, what can they do?
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I would like to see them take up the case that Klopp started to bring, when he was called xenophobic for commenting on Man City’s finances. Our owners should get stuck in and have a real fight. Arguably the soul of the game is at stake.
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Related to that, they should talk about the financial reform that is needed for the good of the game. FFP looks to have failed, but the intent was right. It can’t be beyond savvy owners to talk about what needs to happen to tighten this up, so nation states can’t just buy the game for their own dubious aims.
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So is the bottom line we are shit, but it’s not because of money spent?
Our problem is not moving on players at the right time.
How the likes of Ox and Nabby are still here is beyond me. They should’ve been moved on last summer. Those 2 wages must be close to £100k a week and they hardly play.
We also have to get out of this well if player A) is unavailable then it’s no one.
Surely we don’t draw up a list of 1 player? Must be 2nd or 3rd choices.
FSG need to have a spend up. They are lucky Klopp has worked miracles. But eventually those miracles stop so far have this season.
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The problem is that FFP wasn’t brought in to rein in clubs like City and PSG, it was brought in to stop clubs doing to themselves what Leeds did. The concern was over clubs bankrupting themselves with spending they couldn’t afford rather than over outside money being spent that the clubs clearly were willing and able to cover. Of course cost increases trickle down so you cannot completely divorce the two, but it’s important to understand that the established big clubs weren’t that upset that City and PSG spending the money they did because they viewed it as a source of revenue for themselves.
Moving forward the challenges for the game are two fold - 1) how do you bring in effective spending limits now one of the spenders is head of the organization of European clubs whose role is to liaise between them and UEFA? 2) How do you ensure transparency and enforce compliance.
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That is a fan fabrication. It doesn’t remotely reflect how we’ve approached things.
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Then how would you explain going for Tchouameni and then nobody else as an alternative?
Midfield wasn’t identified as a priority for this last summer. The club has a list of targets - the work to bring these in doesn’t happen in one window. They would have been working with players, agents and clubs to bring in some of these next summer, while giving priorty to those positions they had been planning for this summer (forwards).
The club has a preference for bringing forward transfers where it can, rather than bringing in an alternative. Tchoumani was apparently a player who came onto the market and the club suddenly felt it had a chance to snag (perhaps because Real Madrid were focusing on Mbappe?)
Also, he wasn’t the only midfielder we supposedly approached.
One data point is not a trend.
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Fair point, but didn’t we do that with Virgil and Naby as well? Identified them and didn’t give up until we secured them?
We clearly know midfield is an area where sooner or later we needed to evolve even if only because of the age of our current players. The point of contention was how immediately. It was clear that Tchouameni was leaving Monaco last summer so even if we didn’t feel we needed someone new, if he was our top priority that was the moment to pursue him if we were ever going to do it. Doing that does not mean we felt we needed to be in the market for a CM at that time.
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Not really. Virgil was available and pretty much nailed on coming to us. The move just got delayed by a window due to Southampton being upset at our handling of it, particularly when Werner got caught talking about it to the media.
Likewise we planned around Naby coming here. We’d already had him on trial before he went to Redbull but baulked at giving him the seniority in pay/ squad role that he was seeking.
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we have 9 midfielders on the books. if anything is to blame, it’s our training and medical departments who cannot keep the players healthy. we are currently without a club doctor from what I understand.
That falls on the people running the club who FSG employ. The Board.
Werner, Hughes, Gordon, Hogan, Dalglish, Egan.
how the owners can be blamed because our players keep getting injured is beyond me. They’ve spent the money… 1.1B over the past 10 years.
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Virgil was a weird situation that I don’t think elucidates very much about how we operate (other than Werner now being gagged). Naby is an example of us planning over a multi year timescale. The year we closed the deal we already had plenty of midfielders, and it was getting that deal done that allowed us to take the path we did with Can playing out his contract. The calculus was allegedly pay more to bring in Naby immediately balanced against being able to get a fee for Can vs getting a cheaper deal on Naby while letting Can go for nothing.
So it’s not an example of picking 1 player and myopically doing noting else until you can land that guy, it’s example of the a holistic view that balances who we like and how available they are against where we feel we need to make changes and how urgently. If we’ve messed up it is seemingly less in not being able to identify more than 1 or 2 players, but in under appreciating the need to make moves that has allowed us to be more patient.
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I agree 100% with this, between Klopp and FSG this plan a or nobody approach has proper fucked us and is so far away from what made this team great.
I think any rebuild needs us to skip a step. The first thing I’d look at after potential is injury record.
19 players have been injured so far in a squad of 24-25 that’s a mess and will always impact on what is left regardless.