It was the summer before when we didn’t build from a position of strength. The back up LB, creativity in midfield and 4th genuinely good attacker had been wanted and predicted to be needed for several seasons. It wasn’t that we only needed them last summer. What we did last summer was admirable in difficult circumstances showing even more that we could have addressed those needs far easier earlier on if we had tried. That’s how you build from a position of strength, when you’re at your strongest you address any deficiencies that might exist BEFORE you have to. We waited a year and did it when we had to. If we’d done that recruitment the year before this summer just gone could have been spent looking at the next deficiency in the squad which I’d say is how many injury plagued players and how many ineffective players we have. That way CB would have probably been addressed in this summer just gone due to Lovren, Matip and Gomez along with attacking midfield/forward due to Ox, Keita, Shaqiri and Origi. Now we are looking at next summer (which yet again will be difficult circumstances) now addressing those issues AFTER they’ve become an issue. Reactive instead of proactive.
This feels a bit ‘Well we can’t have a pop for them not strengthening in the summer, because they did. So let’s have a pop for not strengthening the year before. Despite absolutely annihilating the league”.
The club chose not the strength in the summer after winning the champions league. And we went on the win the premier league (and the super cup, and the World Club Cup).
And here is the problem with fans. ‘Strengthen’ in your worldview means buy new players. That’s it. That’s as far as your scope goes.
Strengthen to the club also means build a new training complex, expand the stadium etc.
Ask Klopp whether he wants a new left back, or whether he wants a new state of art training complex, I think we both know what the answer will be.
Yeah… because he bought the left back.
It’s not just about buying players but let’s not over egg things. Klopp is the best manager in the world full stop but he’s head and shoulders ahead of anyone else when it comes to improving players and getting the best out of what he has. But he still buys players. 90% of the squad is players he has bought. Bringing players in is a huge part of strengthening a squad. Even under Klopp.
You were talking about last summer, And Klopp bought the left back this summer.
Buying players is part of the strengthening process, but not the only thing Klopp values, and probably not even the most important.
Personally I think calling out FSG for not strengthen when they built a new world class training facility is a bit, well, spoilt.
Come on Mascot, FSG dont do anything. None of that training ground is to do with them.
i 100% understand ARDs position…im not sure if i agree with it, but unfortunately we seem to have fallen into the trap of not even wanting to try and understand, just resorting to mocking him.
the point is, maybe if its a bit clumsy made, that what happened in this summer should have started the season before, and this is to do with what i look at to see Klopps strengths.
some players do go straight in, but it seems the majority (or the majority of the ones under any transfer premium) seem to need a good 6 months assimilation into the squad.
i know there’s variables, and not all is straight forward as hitting a green button…but
the point is, you buy a Jota and a greek full back dude the season before and they dont even have to play (i know they will want to, but the point is, they dont HAVE to) then you’ve bought a Centre half this past summer and hes assimilated into the squad before Lovren leaves…
it makes Klopps job a lot easier to navigate if his squad bubbles along and a few players get a bit of time to bed in in each window.(opinion only obviously)
i get it…i 100% get it…i doesnt really matter where you are in the cycle to be honest, you just have to keep the squad turnover ticking along…being proactive with the roster, not reactive.
i know we can point to all manner of issues, but really, scrambling for two centre halves on Jan 31st 2021 is not a positive, no matter how we want to spin mickey edwards ability to pull a rabbit out of the hat.it leaves Klopp too much to do. ARDS point is it should never have got to that…its a valid point too.
im probably not all onboard with his point as yes, there are too many variables, but at a very base level, any summer we dont strengthen does make me feel like we’ve missed an oppurtunity
Are you trying to pretend the fabled back up left back discussions of TIA never actually existed? You’ve spent at least 3 summers explaining to us how no specialist LB would ever come to be pure back up to Robertson till one eventually did. That move was well overdue by a few years as was the 4th choice attacker in Jota which has been a bone of contention since Coutinho left. I don’t see how people can say anything other than the moves from this summer were ones we had needed to make for quite some time.
I’d argue buying is the most important thing otherwise Klopp would largely have the squad he inherited and would have retrained those personnel. But there has to be a foundation of core skills and attributes to base his coaching on. There’s a reason Salah, Wijnaldum and Matip are here instead of Ibe, Allen and Skrtel.
The training facility is organised to be paid for by LFC revenue no? And I’ve said earlier on that 80-90% of the work FSG has done with us is fine. But FSG bought this club for £300m and apart from a few loans with little or no interest haven’t put any money in since. That purchase is now worth more than 6 times what they paid for it. They’ve had more people invest in it since.
Read this about just how much our increase in value has meant to LeBron James;
FSG haven’t had to put equity into the club once. We’ve not ran at a loss for few years one year making massive profits. The value of the club has gone up and up exponentially. However, when we’ve needed, it hasn’t been forthcoming. They’ve not put equity in or let us run at a loss on the few years when we really needed to. I’m not even sure spending reasonable money in summer 2019 would have led to a loss. But that was when we needed to do some squad building that was already over a year overdue at that stage.
It’s like an F1 driver. The perfect time to change the tyres is when you’ve got a lead that is the same or more than the time the change takes and just before the tyres are worn enough to start slowing you down. You don’t wait till they’ve shown you down, you’ve lost your lead, then you fix it, change the tyres and say “look we helped you win the race by changing the tyres like you needed”! It’s too late when the problem materialises you fix what is going to become a problem before it does when you’re strong enough for it not to harm you.
Since we won the champions league we’ve spent something like £8m net in the transfer market. It’s like we said “oh the squads fine” and waited till things went wrong before starting to fix them. Everything we’ve done or now need to do has been discussed by fans on TIA for several seasons. How long have me and you been saying we need to trade in Matip and Lovren for a solid, dependable CB or too because them two (and to a lesser extent Gomez) kept leaving us short and a CB crisis was predictable.
The funny thing is that FSG have the perfect recruitment team working for them and manager appointed to keep costs down anyway. Klopp and co aren’t going to go out spending stupid money on big name primadonnas that are no better than regular Joe types. This winter showed that. After the injury to Matip we clearly went looking for a CB we weren’t prepared to buy before it and there was clearly money now available that Klopp had said wasn’t when asked 2 weeks earlier when he said he’d recommended buying a CB but it wasn’t his decision. In the end the one we got in was on loan anyway so FSG got what they wanted/needed anyway in the end by giving the recruitment team the tools and backing they needed to do the job as they saw fit.
You blame FSG for not investing but how do you know it wasn’t (A) Klopp who didn’t want to buy major first team players in 2019/20 OR (B) the clubs over all plan with Klopp/Edwards involved was to save money for last summer/this summer to make big moves?? (obviously not knowing covid was around the corner to scupper our plans)
After winning the CL we pretty much had our nailed on 1st 11 sorted,Klopp probably knew he had enough within the squad to push us on for the following season (which he would have been right,as we went on to win the league).Maybe that summer was all about keeping that squad together and giving our best players new contracts,tying them to the club and securing them and us financially,we offloaded 12 players (4 1st team squad ones) and brought in 2 keepers,Taki and 2 youth players.
We all know Klopp likes to keep his squad small for one,these are players that just won us the CL,you know aswell as me,that Klopp wont throw people under the bus and just get rid of them, he looks at our problems differently to us,you say we should have sold/replaced Lovren,Matip and Gomez,but Klopp see’s 3 guys he has a personal connection with on a daily basis and wants to work with them to make them better players,he’ll also know that the club are run on a tight budget and to replace them would take away funds that he could probably use at a later date (if any big spending plans were set in place for a year or so later).
As for the bigger picture,if that season was to save cash for a future spending spree (covid being non-excistent) we’d have had a lot more money last summer or a massive war chest this summer to go out and rejuvinate the team,be it a top CB,Midfielders,forward and say a swap plus cash deal for Mbappe or just buy a Haaland/Sancho type outright.It’s not always about what you spend or how much you can spend,timing in the market is just as much important,maybe they’ve worked out player contracts from other clubs and seen a gap in the market to leave it one year and go big the next.
Although i get what you’re saying,I just feel that the club may have plans from season to season,but they also have a 2 or 3 year plan aswell,i reckon 2019/20 season was just a window to tactically manouver a small amount of squad players in and out of the club,causing as little issues to the first team as possible,banking the cash from sales to make a bigger splash in future transfer windows,but like i said,covid has kicked us in the bollox and whatever money we did save and didn’t spend has probably been spent to keep our heads above water and stopped us having to take out a bank loan,putting debt on the club like other teams have.
Well there is that.
Maybe klopp was the driver, but I’ll always just revisit the Shakiri transfer and klopp said it was a ‘ no brainer’
I do take a bit of a leap here, but it’s a logical one, and that is that klopp was presented with the opportunity and went for it…
So if klopp has a choice two windows ago to upgrade on Lovren, I think that’s be in the ‘no brainer’ category
Maybe klopps hand in this is about stronger than what I think personally, but that doesn’t change the opinion, just changes the ownership of the issue.
I still find it hard to reconcile that klopp, on being presented with a better player, would say ‘thanks, but no thanks’
24 months ago we were a very attractive proposition ( still are), I find it hard to believe there was no one we could have bought to upgrade on Lovren, and to back up Robertson, or to rotate through with the front three…
I find it a bit strange to blame fsg for what happened 18 months ago, when we were on an absolute high and everything was going well, and not to look at what happens right now, when we experience problems.
Yeah, at the time we could have done better in strengthening, it’s always possible to do better. I get that point. But in the whole, the club played a blinder on all levels, while strengthening our financial position as a club, and making us one of the most powerful sporting organisations in the world again, at all levels.
However, I look at all that know-how, that financial prudence, which was designed to give the club a strong standing, also for the moments when eventual problems could occur. Now we are in such a moment. A pandemics has weakened football beyond all imagination, and at the same time, we have been hit by an injury-wave like never before.
It’s a moment of difficulty, and another acid test for fsg: how will they react? As many have said, the best would be to be proactive now, use the financial wealth the club has amassed over the years. Hell, we have a super-duper sponsoring deal with Nike, haven’t we? That’s what we have been told at least.
So, it will be really interesting to see how things go next summer. On the basis of evidence, fsg have been absolutely brilliant owners before the pandemics hit. We really couldn’t have asked for better custodians. They proved all their doubters wrong.
But now, it’s a completely changed landscape we are facing. The times during which football was an ever-expanding market is over, at least for the time being, maybe forever. How will they manage under these massively changed circumstances? Time will tell. They are smart and savvy as we know, and that should help them to steer the club through these difficult times, but it’s new territory for them as well.
How will they manage?
The mistake I think you are making is to separate the owners from Klopp, and then assuming that Klopp is of the same mind as you. That way you can put the boot into the easy target, and not be seen to be going against the revered one.
They are one operation, and everything we know about them suggests they are very tight knit. Klopp is very close to Mike Gordon, and they talk about the squad every day.
Put it this way, I don’t think that if Klopp feels the squad really needs a £10m back up left back in summer 2019 and there is one available, FSG don’t tell him to fuck off.
If you think Liverpool should be buying more players, that’s your opinion. But don’t then let Klopp off the hook about this - he’s just as to blame as FSG for that.
And before you call me out about how I said there wasn’t a a pure back up for Robbo available, shall we see how Tsimikas does first. I don’t think he’s given Andy one game off yet.
They won’t find a buyer ready to plunge a billion into it. Not now.
So, looking at it from their point of view, it’s worth holding on their asset, and doing what needs to be done in order to get over this crisis, and place the club into the best possible position for when football truly resumes.
But looking into the future is a bit of an ink bottle. For how long will this continue, at which cost, and which effect will it have on revenues? It’s really hard for anyone to see what’s going to happen.
This article is very misleading. Lebron James has not “made” over $40 million, he hasn’t made a thing.
He cannot sell his shares (without the express permission of FSG, which will have first option to buy them back) so they are effectively worthless until such time as the club is sold.
As for Forbes valuing the club at $2.183 billion, Forbes valuation of football clubs is notoriously unreliable. For example, in April 2010 Forbes valued Liverpool at $822 million. However, in October that year, the club was actually sold for $364 million (£230.351 million).
An asset is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it. Nothing more, irrespective of anyone’s estimated valuation.
And, in any case, just because the estimated value of an asset increases, it doesn’t mean that you have that additional value as cash in hand. For example, if your house doubles in value, you don’t realize that additional value unless you sell your house.
All you have to do is find someone, with the necessary wherewithal, and desire to own your house, and you’re quids in. (In FSG’s case, a willing buyer with $2.183 billion to spare.)
This is simply not true.
On the 29th October 2014, UKSV Holding Co Ltd, converted an inter-company loan of £69 million into equity (2 additional shares in Liverpool Football Club and Athletic Grounds Limited)
FSG have not taken any dividends during the period of its ownership. It’s loans to the club have, on the whole, been interest free.
If you add in the opportunity cost of investing £300 million with no return for 11 years, you are looking at FSG foregoing about £90 million.
It would be nice if FSG were to bung the club the odd £30 million, but you can see why they might not be in a position to do so.
See I think you’re missing the problem.
Klopp and the recruitment team may well have sat down and said “well with our limited resources the best thing is to not spend in 2019 and spend more for bigger impact in 2020” as you and @Mascot say.
But why do they need to do that? FSG have the best manager in the world, a truly world class recruitment team that is very frugal and efficient with its spending. The team has just got over 90 points in the league and won the champions league. Why in all that is holy are there even any considerations about not having money in both seasons.
If a big splash was considered as desirable for 2020 then the business people should have been backing the recruitment people and saying “look you do anything you need in 2019 and we will make sure the money is there for 2020 for a one of splurge if that’s what you tell us is needed, let’s make a fucking sporting dynasty here whilst we’ve got Klopp, the best manager in the world, one of a kind, to do it with”!
Klopp, Edwards and the recruitment team might well be the ones deciding how to cut their clothes accordingly. But they are doing it because they are made aware of how much free reign they will have with spending.
FSG will never have such a perfect set up ever again. No manager will ever be able to achieve on the levels Klopp is with the amount of backing provided. When Klopp goes they’ve either got to accept an end to us challenging and bring a top team. Or they’ve got to rip up their operating manual and how they operate under Klopp for a new manager to back when required and enjoy periods when they don’t need to. If they do go down that route the question will be why not under Klopp when it mattered?
A cash injection every few seasons would take this side under Klopp to the levels of success and standing in the sport of the Real Madrid or Barcelona style clubs and then the incoming revenue from that more than funds keeping us there and repaying what they’ve invested to get there.
This is someone who has bought a house on a mortgage and not willing to spend any money doing it up even though they want a really expensive house worth far more than they paid for. Instead of spending a little here and there and investing into their property they just want to wait for the housing market to increase the value. But they’ve got a world class interior designer lodging in the house whose famous for how cheap their projects are. Its frustrating and illogical.
So they’ve put less than £500m in all in all you’d say? Do you really think LFC would sell for less than £1b? So they’ve easily doubled their investment and its cost them nothing since 2014? How much would the club be valued at if it got to the kind of revenues as Madrid and Barca after a sustained period of success under Klopp? I just feel FSG are missing an opportunity at something special and being short sighted.
I think you’re missing some of the issues here. They were limited in spending for the summer of 2019 due to the rolling three-year reporting window for FFP. So even with the best will in the world unless they were to sell some players for reasonable fees their purchases in that summer window were always going to be limited if they wanted to have any sort of room for manoeuvre in 2020 and 2021.
Sorry but the only people thinking this would be over in the Summer were probably those who helped it continue.
I don’t think at any point since Everton have the club had less than 4 first team players out, that’s been constant now for 5 months. I think they did all they could last summer to be honest and in any other season the injuries wouldn’t have piled up to the magnitude they have.
Last summer or this would have been the years to build on their success (Problem is all that’s been postponed by one or two years), all these talking heads seemed to think Thiago and Jota would be enough, they were still spouting rubbish two weeks ago about the transfer window.
It’s a global pandemic, that has hit the global economy like a battering ram, these fuckers would stand around and wonder why no one had spent after an asteroid hit.
Youre allowed to put equity in under FFP rules.
That ability is restricted under UEFA FFP. Perhaps you care to set out the club’s FFP position as at summer 2019? Knock yourself out.
Are you sure? I thought owners were allowed to put equity into their clubs as part of FFP rules?