So the signings of Jota, Thiago and Tskimatas didn’t happen?
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Feels like we only signed Jota.
Nevertheless I don’t blame FSG for this seasons plight.
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Yeah I reckon the summer just gone was all good, should have worked on paper and probably still does.
I think the reference is to the two or three windows prior and especially this past one just now…
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Anyone laying all the blame at FSGs feet just have an agenda.
They fucked up this Jan, otherwise I think they have done what Klopp has asked for.
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I wonder if there would have been significantly less injuries had the team had a proper pre-season and had Jota and Alcantara arrived a bit earlier. From what I’ve read, Gomez’ injury was probably several years in the making, though Van Dijk and Alcantara were plainly unlucky. FSG gambled, the gamble backfired in the worst of manners. It happens, the reaction is what matters. If they manage to pull the team out of this rut, under COVID-induced circumstances, and make it successfull again, they should have a stand named after them.
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Why do you say FSG gambled? Why isn’t it a joint decision between FSG and Klopp?
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Considering what everyone else did last summer our summer was on par with most teams.
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Just a hunch, nothing else. Reading between the lines of Klopp’s interviews over the past two months, I got the feeling that finances influence the deals much stronger than I imagined.
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I think that’s about Jan which yes was dictated by Finances for the first time. Understandably, despite me not agreeing with the stance. I agree FSG failed us here, but again I do understand why they did.
People are going back 3 windows to find the most tenuous reasons to blame FSG.
Its time for you all to act!
There are 300 pounds raised so far.
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What was that gamble??? Not signing a CB???
Indeed. The arrival of Jota was supposed to take the burden off the front three, off the bench and in rotation, giving us proper impact forward substitutions, fresh legs, competition for places and reduce long term overuse fatigue in the forward group.
Unfortunately Jota got injured for half the season so far, and this royally fucked us, particularly as our fragile defence and reduced midfield meant we needed to keep scoring.
The Jota injury, in my view, was when the season turned.
This directly links to a major question mark - did we chase 2.7m prize money for a win in the final CL group game, at the risk of injuries in a dead rubber in an injury plagued season? If so, whoever pushed for that upstairs played a part in us potentially missing £100m in CL money next season.
Personally, I think this summer necessitates a complete rethink on and off the pitch.
The current situation will not correct itself without change. Yes we might put together a decent run of results in the nice weather when the pressure is off a bit, but we’ve seen the issues loud and clear.
Firstly, were we always really just a side that was greater than the sum of the parts, driven to higher heights than our natural level by the fans? If so, the return of fans will help, but if the better parts are damaged physically and mentally by this season will it be enough?
In fact, it can be argued that our success relied on the intense training and playing style that led to our injury and fatigue crisis. The current squad have maybe reached their tolerances for being trained and flogged in this way. Either you change the players, or you change the style, or you move to a model that relies more on quality of depth than overuse of a small group.
Even if it’s the playing style and training, we clearly have too many injury prone players, particularly in central defence and amongst back up midfielders/forwards. This, and the fact than many of the backup midfielders/forwards are not good enough to rotate in without results being risked, means the best players are being, and have been, flogged to career threatening and career shortening levels.
Thirdly, if your results depend wholly on one system being deployed perfectly due to availability of all the key components, you’re at risk of being worked out, and found out, especially if injuries and fatigue get added to the mix.
We’ve been through a crisis, but as we sit here today, we could bounce back if we do the right things.
This pandemic will create great opportunities for the biggest businesses and richest people to buy up distressed assets on the cheap, so much so that many think it’s why the economic crisis was engineered out of a health pandemic in the first place.
Our owners need to decide which side of that they wish to sit on. Do they see it is an opportunity to act decisively, raising capital to invest in the squad of a club that has been built to one of the biggest in the world, or are they going to just let the club find its natural level within its short term reduced means, having its best players picked off at reduced prices and going back into a two to three year rebuilding process.
Personally, I don’t expect a Mbappe or Haaland. They are players that go to places like City, Chelsea, and United, clubs that have shown year in year out that they will spend/invest what it takes to stay competitive short term. They are not project players.
Our club has achieved what it has due to Klopp’s management, good recruitment, and - if we’re honest - us having a top player to sell (Coutinho) in order to reinvest in the purchase of the missing pieces that we wouldn’t have bought without that sale (Alisson and VVD).
This summer, what FSG should do is invest, because even if selling prices are reduced, the buying prices will be.
What we should do is recognise that Matip and Gomez will never be reliable, that VVD might not be the same player, and sign a new top class first choice centre back around whom the rest of the central defensive unit can be planned.
However many of Salah, Mane or Bobby go, we need to replace them with immediately like for like players, not go back to having only three (including Jota) with the likes of Origi, Shaqiri and Minimino as the back ups.
In midfield, we need to let Gini go (albeit ironically that he’s the only midfielder we have of the right level who can stay fit), get rid of Oxlade, decide on what Milner can offer next season, decide whether Thiago is a right fit, then see who needs to be bought to add to Fab, Hendo, Jones and Keita. I am presuming Keita will be given another season given his age and that he is a good player when fit. Personally, I think Jones also has some way to go, looks great against lesser sides, less so against top sides.
I’ve stayed away from FSG mainly on this site. I believe they’ve done a great job on the club, although my view remains that we’d have won more had our net spend been higher than 13th in the PL under Klopp, even if I rarely say it. I understand the evolution argument, bettering players and so forth, especially as we’ve seen steady year on year progress.
But once you regress, as we have this season, it’s fair to ask whether they are the owners who will now take advantage of prior prudence to invest in getting us back quickly, or will allow us to stay on what will remain a slippery slope.
No way can LFC go back to being mere challengers for top 4 after the taste of trophies and our better players remain happy and motivated.
In my view, we get back into the title mix next season, especially if we’ve no European football to distract us, or we’ll find this project unravels in a way that will mean Klopp eventually departs with less achieved than should have been the case, and he’ll leave the next guy with more of a rebuilding job than was necessary.
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Excellent post IMO. Personally I feel the owners have made a big mistake by not improving the squad early in January. A big part of the game is psychological and I get the impression that some of our squad seem to think the owners do not care enough. They seem to be more interested in saving a few million today than investing to earn more in the future. We will lose more money by not being in the CL next season than they will have saved by not spending in January. Admittedly we would have had to over pay but throwing away that CL spot was a bad mistake. Another reason for spending is that it would have improved team morale which in turn would have also led to more points won.
I think FSG have been good owners but I feel they have made a big mistake that could be with us for a long time .
I accept that we do not have a bottomless pit of money but our net spend in recent years has been very low and we are constantly being told the club is in a sound financial position .
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Talking of which I’m going to be very interested in this years accounts. Arsenal have posted theirs with a loss of less than £50m. We are supposed to be better run, more of our revenue coming from commercial instead of match day revenue, they had the big cost of a manager change and they had much bigger transfer expenditure. I know net spend isn’t how it works but the had over £100m net spend whilst we made a profit. If we make as large or larger a loss there is something wrong with that.
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Thing is no deals were going happen at the beginning and at the end we got two deals over the line for the total sum of about a million
We made bids of £20m plus but the clubs involved couldn’t bring in replacements in time. If we’d had that money at the start of the window we could have had one or two better CBs here, settled into the squad during the easier January schedule whilst we still had Matip and Fabinho along with the boost and reassurance of reinforcements and backing from the owners the deals would have given. It is incredibly hard to persuade people to go all out and give everything when the people running the place don’t seem that motivated. I agree completely on the psychological impact that this January had. We’d clearly limped through to January needing reinforcements but managing to stay near the top. That lack of required, emergency, investment into the squad would have felt like a kick in the teeth. The mood in the squad at the start of Jan was so much better we could have recovered and been competing with City now. And with more CBs to rotate with Fabinho and Matip and less pressure on CMs to play at the back creating more rest opportunity for CMs… I don’t think people fully grasp how damaging that delay was.
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Wow that’s really surprising, less than £50m, total all in? Yeah, I’m going to be really interested to see ours. I’ve seen some guess our losses would be in the £100-200m range.
I’m with you, ARD, seeing Arsenal’s figure I don’t know how ours could possibly be much more than that.
EDIT: @RedForever outstanding post, start to finish absolutely spot on. Well done.
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Important to remember this is last season we are talking about which lost a third of match day revenue and a third of TV revenue would show in the next years accounts because of the project restart happening in the following years accounts. I think when people talk £100-200m they are talking both years combined (for the most part, a few hysterical types around too) which includes this year with no fans whatsoever. I’ve always been more cautious than that. The year before we spent a lot and posted a profit and the year before that we posted a massive profit despite spending a lot. Our running costs for last year, particularly player trading, must have been rock bottom and not gone up much this year (when we add a 3rd of TV revenue plus any increases from the Nike sales). I would not be surprised if 2019/20 is even a break even year with a small loss in 2020/21. If fans are going to be back for 2021/22 and we somehow still make it into CL for that season we really may be in nowhere near as bad a shape as made out. Missing out on CL for next year will potentially cost us more in lost revenue for next season as the pandemic has for this season.
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I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Liverpool signing players close to the deadline day isn’t something that is a regular occurrence with FSG (AOC was the last, I think, Lemar could have been one as well), I found that pretty strange, to be honest, especially with half of the side out some time around the New Year. Those moves should have been made sooner, even Klopp was suggesting he needed reinforcements.
Selling Lovren, while making Fabinho the fourth choice centre back, with Alcantara coming in and Wijnaldum staying, became my preference at some point last summer - but I shouldn’t have had faith in Gomez and Matip staying fit. I now wonder if FSG and Klopp had the same faith in them. I doubt that Lovren staying wouldn’t have made any difference, in my opinion, countless times has he let the team down with both his errors of judgement and his susceptibility to injuries.
Club is winning the top eight net spend league at a canter and, while I have absolutely no expertise in finances, this makes me wonder if there was enough manoeuvring space over the last two years to squeeze in a centre back who would have genuinely pushed Gomez for the starting spot. It’s only now that the likes of Carra, James Pearce, Melissa Reddy etc. have started asking questions as to why FSG failed to strengthen the side after winning the CL - though I think that when it comes to 2019 in particular, it was largely Klopp’s decision.
I’m probably too bitter about the fact that Klopp wasn’t able to defend the title and from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to win another one with Liverpool unless some serious strengthening is done (or Guardiola quits before Klopp leaves the club). It’s not realistic to build a “dynasty” these days unless majority of your rivals are underachieving but CL qualification should be the least this team is capable of, even in these wretched circumstances.
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Deadline Day signing in winter window. I don’t think FSG meant those to be so dramatic. My guess is, negotiations (not just for Ben and Ozan) were going behind the scene and materialized only on the Deadline Day. If PNE didn’t agree, they wouldn’t have gotten that 500K which I think is substantial for them. Similarly, if Schalke didn’t agree, they might have lost Ozan in a fire sale.
Not signing a CB in summer. I have professed it before, I think FSG/Klopp was intent on signing a CB in summer, we had some credible rumors too. But that depended on balancing the book as COVID had punched a pretty big hole by then. But we didn’t manage to offload any of the fringe players (Grujic, Wilson, Origi) and it didn’t materialize.
As for the third paragraph, I guess hindsight is 20/20. Yeah, everyone can (at this point) say that the squad should have been refreshed starting from 2019. But which areas! Which players? The players (Firmino) who are struggling or the areas (defense) that are vulnerable today were as indomitable rest of the squad. None (pundits) dared to question even the fringe players like Origi, AOC etc.
I think the only thing that may hinder our return to trophy winning days, is losing our head. This season has been a disaster. There’s no reason or explanation for that. Our foundations are strong, very strong. If we keep our cool, we will thrive next season.
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