This season shows why there’s valid concern with FSG. Klopp has done wonders for the club, turning it around but FSG have not properly backed him. Injuries haven’t been kind but the biggest problem though has been not dealing with them. Starting the season with only 3 recognised centre backs in a congested season with a number of games and competitions all to play for wasn’t smart.
Failure to act in the January window was more than a mistake and really irresponsible. The likelihood is the club only moved after Matip was declared unfit for the season. The club was gambling. Kabak so far doesn’t look great and Davies hasn’t played a game coming from the Championship. Hardly setting your stool out.
While the pandemic undoubtedly has affected revenue and constraints around spending could be argued. It’s the broader point where this is lost. The club just doesn’t spend a great deal full stop under FSG. Net spend compared to similar clubs or even clubs further down the league is just not on par. FSG needs to take a lot of responsibility for this season with how its played out. Despite the injuries, bad luck, refereeing and performances in general not up to scratch. Sorting the centre back situation would have alleviated a lot of this.
I’ve had this twat down as a cheat for a long time but it had actually escaped me that he was the referee in this match.
I well remember the constant time wasting and general bullshit that went on.
The game that did it for me was the 1-1 with Leicester the season before we won the title. It ultimately cost us the title. 3 decisions that night that massively affected the result.
He should have sent off Maguire for a foul on Mane(?) when he was the last man. Maguire scored the equaliser 5 minutes later.
The equaliser was in stoppage time at the end of the 1st half, we cleared the ball out of the area and time was up but he allowed them to play it back into the box and they scored. I’ve watched this same scenario countless times since and without fail the referee (Atkinson included) will blow as soon as the ball is cleared out of the box. This is literally the only occasion I recall where the ref allowed a second phase even though time was up.
Finally, he waved away a clear penalty on Keita at the Kop end towards the end of the game.
He’s a fucking cheat.
A perfect storm has hit us, and threatens our future success. Fail to get top four and it will set us back years.
I’ve stayed away from FSG stuff in the main since coming on here. I respect them, they have built the club commercially, employed the best manager we could have hoped for, and have deployed a fantastic transfer operation that trades players to generate revenue and spends what it spends generally very well.
We can never compete with City on spending, and you can only spend so much each year.
But there is no doubt that there have been clear issues that the club has been prepared to live with during periods when we’ve spent little, that in the end have hurt us.
The centre back situation has been entirely foreseeable for two years. All three of Matip, Gomez, Lovren had significant injury issues. We did run with a tight squad that offered only limited rotation possibilities and this has burnt out players who had to be used week in week out as a result. Whether that will be temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. We’ve lived with a squad containing too many injury prone players generally speaking, and this intense season exposed that even more.
I hope we come through this, sneak into top four, fans are allowed back next season, and we address a few issues and kick on.
Hopefully everyone at the club will have noted the above issues and address them.
On the Centre Back point, I don’t really think you can point the finger at FSG. We prioritised a Left Back, a midfielder, and an attacker over a CB this summer. I don’t think that was FSGs choice.
It’s FSGs fault we are in the position the recruitment team have to prioritise. We never get everything sorted, we always have to keep putting off till another year. The CB issue may not have been able to be sorted this summer due to the pandemic situation but it was a long standing issue fans had been asking to be fixed for several years, just like LB, creativity in midfield and an attacker which were just problems from other past seasons pushed on each year till eventually they got sorted. The FFP argument keeps getting used as an excuse but the two years before we recorded pre tax profits. That’s before you take out the things FFP let’s you ignore like academy costs and stadium expansion costs (wouldn’t imagine that’d be insignificant in our case). Truth is Klopp has been massively underfunded on what this club could have spent for a few years now. Because he’s amazing and was still able to succeed. Now enough outside influences have come about that not even Klopp can keep us going because he’s having to rely on those elements of the squad that should have been fixed and upgraded years ago.
If we are as broke as we think we are, should FSG allow the club to go into further debt to buy players? If they have decided to be very cautious until the income streams have recovered, I support that. We structured the summer deals in such a way that we only spent money that we had coming in. We’re obviously broke.
We are not struggling to qualify for top four because we didn’t buy a centre back. We are struggling because lost all our centre backs and loads more players as well. One player (who probably isn’t that good if they are coming in a fourth choice anyway) isn’t going to address that.
Fans always want a signing. Had FSG sanctioned the club borrowing £20m against its credit facility to get in a centre back, fans would want another attacker, or a right back, or a new back up goalie. There is always something else. There is always another need to address.
This is the most important one. How do you know Klopp was ‘denied’ a player in the summer? There is an assumption that Klopp wants new players and FSG are shouting ‘no’ from inside their Scrooge McDuck money pit, but we know Klopp wants to work with a small squad and we know that he does not like to make signings if there is a solution within the squad already.
You are I were both advocating in summer that Fabinho should be the fourth choice centre back for tactical reason. I’ll stand by that, even though you’ve obviously changed your mind.
But before all our four of our centre backs get injured (the three + Fab) it’s isn’t mad to think we’ve we’ve got enough. The CB injury situation is freakish, and although it’s fine now to think actually we probably should have replaced Lovren, you can’t foresee an injury crisis like this.
In a lot of ways we still haven’t moved on from Hicks and Gillette, and Rafa having open warfare about signing. It was a deeply scarring time, but we have to move on from the idea that the manager always wants new players, and the owner are there to deny him them.
FSG and Klopp aren’t on different teams. They decide things collectively and they work together. They get along and are very tights, largely because they are football in the same way.
In the summer Klopp spoke about Fabinho being able to play Centre Back. Let’s not automatically point the finger at FSG. It’s equally likely that the decision to not bring in a new CB was Klopp’s.
I wasn’t talking about this summer just gone. The recruitment we did and the recruitment we needed was way over due by several years, years we ran at a profit during, before we got to the pandemic.
There was always predictable problems at CB for several years relying on Matip, Lovren and Gomez. This has been talked about for years and it’s been pointed out numerous times how much trouble we’d be in if VvD got injured.
There’s always another need to address because as a club over the last decade (just talking under these owners) we put things off. Also in any sport you do constantly have to freshen up a side to stop it getting stale. This isn’t a simulation. A club is never finished building its team. Contracts run down, players evolve, players get older, opposition get sharper. It’s constant flux you don’t get to stand still and say “there we’re done”!
No manager is going to turn around and say no to open resources to get better players in. Nobody is actually asking for increased squad sizes. But if Klopp is told “don’t worry about what happens to Shaqiri, if we can’t sell him we will loam him out, but we want to replace him with Kevin De Bruyne for you, is that OK?” are you seriously arguing that Klopp doesn’t want that? He’d say no? Klopp is not the type to complain, he’s got it better here than Dortmund and never complained there, he’s going to get on with it and work as well as he can within the constraints. So yes it might be Klopp who improves on his LB one year and his CB the following year but its the constraints that mean he can’t do both in that first year.
I haven’t changed my mind. My opinion was always that we needed to move Lovren and Matip on for a CB with better availability and THEN use Fabinho as 4th choice. To also use Hoever as Fabinho understudy (DM/CB option) and Phillips as emergency cover.
Klopp also said, in the Summer, that he wanted 4 senior CBs.
Matches missed by Liverpool first team players: 66
Matches missed by City squad players: 93
Matches missed by Liverpool squad players: 165
Games where multiple first team players missing (City v Liverpool):
6 or more first team players missing: 0 v 1
5 or more first team players missing: 0 v 2
4 or more first team players missing: 1 v 5
3 or more first team players missing: 4 v 16
2 or more first team players missing: 9 v 22
1 or more first team player missing: 21 v 24
0 first team player missing: 4 v 1
The first team I’ve identified for each is:
City: Ederson, Walker, Stones, Dias, Cancello, De Bruyne, Rodri, Gundogan, Sterling, Aguero, Foden
Liverpool: Alisson, Trent, Gomez, VvD, Robertson, Thiago, Fabinho, Henderson, Salah, Firmino, Mane
We need to finish top 4 or it will severely damage our short term (long term?) future! We are currently behind West Ham and Leicester. City isn’t the measure we are competing against right now.
The owners came in and promised to win things…
They have done that…
They never promised to win things year after year after year…
They want to take a pause in this uncertain season… Who are we to complain so loudly!
Lets rest, recuperate and reset to see what we can do next term…!
They did actually explain how they wanted to build so they could consistently compete and not just win as a one off. They paused long before this season I think that’s the problem.
The injuries that are affecting us are CB. A problem that was largely predictable and partially avoidable. If Lovren and Matip had been replaced by a more consistently available CB before the start of this season then losing Gomez and VvD wouldn’t have been such a blow. If Hoever hadn’t been sacrificed to balance the books he would have been a better option than Williams and Phillips. Most importantly we should have been prepared to bring at least one CB in at the start of January to acclimatise and get bedded in over those easier games ready by the time Matip and Fabinho got injured. I was saying before January 1st Fabinho would end up injured as he was needing to play too much I’m a nobody on the Internet. If the problems are obvious enough I can predict them it’s negligence to have not tried to do something about them. Even with injuries though I’d still take our squad over what Moyes has available to him at West Ham, Ancellotti at Everton or Rodgers at Leicester.
