Aye,there’s got to be a point in time where the game isn’t all in the players favour,regarding wages,there has to be a cap at some point.
I’m surprised after covid where clubs around the world lost matchday incomes,tv revenue’s and took on massive levels of debt,just to keep paying astronomical wages,that there wasn’t some kind of FA,UEFA,FIFA type meeting on the matter,to help stop clubs from going through from it.
Nothings happened at all and it seems like they’ve turned a blind eye to it and relaxed FFP rules even more,it’s madness.
Owners John W. Henry and Tom Werner were said to be committed to only passing Liverpool on to a buyer that would share the values of the club, which would not align with a state-funded group from, say, Qatar or Saudi Arabia.
Exactly what a good business does. They had a few stumbles but otherwise excellent. Stormy times ahead me thinks. I suspect the more vocal and “active” fans will not be happy with oil money and that might cause trouble.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a fan say they’re happy with the owners, the progress, the success, the squad and starting 11 and the manager. City fans want the CL more than anything, PSG too. Imagine having all the money in the world but you can’t buy class.
As I’ve said before, if you won the Euro lottery tomorrow after multiple roll overs and put it on a 40-1 horse that won, you still wouldn’t be able to buy us and compete with “real” money. It’s frightening.
For me, fsg’s approach to LFC has been the same over the whole of their tenure: how can we improve the club’s revenues while becoming increasingly competitive?
I’m sure that as we speak, their approach on this hasn’t changed (the article is from 2021). Given the insane inflation in football, there is no reason to think that the revenue stream won’t improve further yet. There is a caveat to it though:
That’s the crux, and why I also think that people are a bit quick to condemn fsg for their ‘lack of spending’. With revenue inflation, there is also a correspondent inflation in costs, and since Newcastle have been taken over by the Arabs, this tendency only gets stronger.
Higher wages. That is the crux for any club trying to live from it’s self-generated revenues, even a massive one like ours. Only solution: stay smart, appoint the best possible people, play the long-term game. From what I can see, fsg’s (and Klopp’s) approach hasn’t changed in the slightest when compared to ten, five or one year ago. It’s always exactly the same model, and I for one can only applaud them for it, because it’s the right one.
Finally, Swiss Ramble’s take on how it is exactly with our spending (article from late 2022). Are fsg really unwilling to spend the club’s revenues?
The part I don’t understand is why fans are so surprised at the need for a cyclical rebuild that could take a season or two. This is the reality for clubs who cannot afford to spend ludicrous amounts each window. We only pick up those who are part of our long-term plan. Thus there may be an inevitable rebuilding period while a new team is prepared to compete for titles.
Moreover:
A) We don’t want to ruthlessly cut players who we owe our success to. It it a completely different story to give them their chances and phasing them out as they decline.
B) We can’t waste money on stop gaps. The worst thing we could do is to overspend and fill the team with Plan B and C’s who may be able to push us back to Top 4 every year but then become a problem rather than the solution.
I think it’s a case of just bad luck, if covid hadn’t happened I think we’d have seen much higher investments in the team… The money we lost during that period was astronomical for a “self sufficient” club.
It looks like all our infrastructure projects are complete and primarily paid off so that huge revenue can now be spread further into the squad.
I think it’s also worth saying that the opportunity to invest in the playing squad were also limited by the fact that that the club were already carrying debt for the stadium and the training ground, and FSG were naturally cautious about taking on more debt to fund improvements, especially at the start of a period of great uncertainty.
Edit:
Thanks for the Swiss Ramble info. He’s always a good read. Well researched and informative. We are in good health, financially speaking, for a top level football club.
So…
If the case is made that we can continue to financially compete in order to stay at the highest level, and do it from our own self sustaining proceeds, why are FSG looking to sell, in whole or part?
My answer to that question is two-fold, and I’d be interested to hear other viewpoints.
The timing is good for a sale, if that’s what they do, having taken a £300M asset to a £3Billion+ valuation. Moving forward from this point, the gains are unlikely to be as much, so that is why they may want out.
The other part of it is the changing landscape. They were happy to operate within a rules based order, but the custodians of the game have not upheld their side, so costs have spiraled out of control. Perhaps FSG only see that getting worse, as competition for top four places increases?
It looks to me like they are concluding we’ve made our money, now is a good time to sell. Moving forward you need deeper pockets and a greater willingness to take risks than we’d prefer, and we do not see the same sort of gains in the next ten years as the last ten, so it is time to sell.
Just financially speaking, they could simply be looking to free up some capital for some other acquisition, and/or to realise a gain on their investment since our valuation has reached a point where even selling a minority stake at the valuation would mean they could recoup their investment.
If we’ve reached a point where we’ve paid off the infrastructure debt and our financial future looks better than it did before, it would naturally mean that the valuation would be higher. It could be that they see this period as the top of the market for a while, which means it would be a good time to realise those gains.
Not very complicated as to what their motivations might be.
Good post. That part of their motivation to sell isn’t so complicated, I agree.
In addition, do you think there is any tacit admission, on the part of FSG, that they can no longer compete at the highest level? That’s the part I think I see too. The game has changed, rules aren’t being enforced, competition is higher than before to stay at and near the top, costs are going up, and they would need to take more risks moving forward to stay where they’ve got us to.
I don’t see a binary yes we can compete/no we can’t compete. We are a huge club and it isn’t that simple, but on a sliding scale, I see competing at the top end, in a self sustaining model, as being more and more difficult to do, and before too long probably unlikely, not just difficult.
Hence that’s a big part of why I think they want to sell.
(In addition to timing, pursuing other ventures, and taking a tidy profit now).
Maybe, maybe not. I think the macro environment is probably the bigger driver for them. I might buy that whole argument if they made a complete sale, but it could equally just be that they view their money as being better invested in something else.
I do think the whole money aspect is way overblown by fans and football media. I like that we’re run as a business simply because all these decisions are taken with the potential financial impact in mind, leaving us more robust than certain other oligarch clubs. We’re not dependent on the largesse of some benefactor, and we are driven to extract maximum value from our investments, and not make some ego-based decision like the “marquee signings” so many fans crave, which as @Mascot points out at least for midfielders in the Who Would You Sell thread, doesn’t work out more often than not.
Yet after 2 decades of mismanagement by owners very well grounded in the responsibilities and challenges of running a professional sports team, it took these guys coming in to actually run us like the club the older of us here remember it to be. The fact there was an opportunity for someone to make good by running it correctly, doesnt negate the credit they should be given for being able to actually do that. The fact there were not really any other good bids is indicative of the difficulty of the challenge anyone would be facing in buying us at that time. Downplaying the credit they deserve for it is a classic case of perceptual bias of people not being to see that path that actually was taken was not only not inevitable but even the most likely one.
Some form of spending limitation will still exist going forward. What seems to be the case though is that the avenues FSG saw for increasing revenue sufficient for us to keep up (changes to how TV rights are negotiated) are being blocked. In contrast, the corrupt avenues the these state owned companies have used to book revenue they can spend should be illegal, but the authorities have been blocked from effectively overseeing the practices and enforcing the regulations.