And that decision not to risk maybe £30m tops (which they eventually back tracked on anyway and made available, just too late to make a difference) may end up costing over £100m in lost CL revenue and set the sporting project, therefore value, of their asset back several years. They have Klopp for a finite amount of time. They won’t get the same results under any other manager without learning how to free up more finances. And if they can do that for whoever follows Klopp why not do it for Klopp? Klopp could turn this club into a dynasty club with the kind of revenue they could have only dreamed about. Or at least he could have. Now there’ll probably end up being another slow and steady rebuild with restrained spending over the last few years he’s here.
Very happy with how the club is managed. This team… in a normal year… with normal levels of injuries would be top 4.
I’m not worried about one year outside the Champions League. We will be back soon and the long game is more important.
Rather, if we had spent what we didn’t have, suffered more injuries, and still failed to reach top 4, we would be in a very poor position now.
Hopefully we still make top 4. It is always better to be in a much financial state than other clubs when it is a buyer’s market in a depressed market.
This season is a bit painful to watch but I’m very confident of the future.
Apologies if I haven’t explained myself properly but hindsight and COVID have nothing to do with my point
Maybe that’s the problem… COVID is the biggest factor affecting us… it has been for 12months. To ignore that seems a little strange.
What people? No-one has any information.
I’ve criticised FSG in the past, but I don’t think it’s fair to criticise them during a season in when revenues have collapsed. It’s going to be a while before we have any information to suggest if more could have been done.
What gets me is the idea that they done know what they are doing, or have been just sitting around doing fuck all. Whatever they did will have been a decision with thought and logic behind it.
I also think we need to get past the idea of Owners and Manager locked in an eternal battle. I don’t think it works like this anymore
The figures are from the published accounts - the press get to see them before they become available to the general public via Companies House.
I don’t know if you read the whole article, but one item that stood out for me was the £19 million savings from the voluntary reduction in player wages. Had that not happened the club’s losses would obviously have been much greater.
As far as I’m aware our players have not made a similar sacrifice, so it would be unwise to draw too many inferences from Arsenal’s results, and project them onto ours.
I believe our coaches and directors have made sacrifices, well they did early on. not sure about the players. Didn’t Hendo set up the players providing donations to charities instead?
I don’t know if the coaches and directors gave up a portion of their remuneration, but even if they had it would have minimal impact upon our results.
As for the players making charitable donations, while this is commendable in and of itself, it won’t impact on the club’s finances in the same way a wage reduction would.
Yes understood, I’m sure they decided to do it this way to make sure the people needing the money got it… (without going into the political reasons why this should never be needed),
If FSG keep up the sell to buy policy I simply don’t see us challenging for title for very long. Klopp has worked miracles like he did at Dortmund but at the end of the day you can’t stay ahead of teams spending hundreds of millions every season.
Yeah but even then there are multiple reasons why their accounts should be much worse than ours. The manager change costs, the player purchases of £145m compared to £10m, the player sales of £48m compared to £,40m so not a huge amount more, a higher percentage of their usual revenue being from match day revenue, being less successful. Their losses taking all that into account are less than £70m even if their players didn’t take a wage cut (something we don’t actually know didn’t happen here). They also ran at a loss of £27m the year before we ran at £42m profit. That’s despite their net spend of £65m being a lot lower the year before and our £130m being much higher the year before. Before the covid impact they should have been heading for a loss and we should have been heading for a massive profit.
Is that really the case??? All the major sales during FSG era; Torres, Sterling, Suarez, Coutinho, were pushing to leave the club. Beyond them whatever players we sold, no matter what windfall we enjoyed, were clearly not the quality required for an upwardly mobile club.
No bodies ignoring it
Don’t read too much into the profit/loss after player trading. The crunch number is the operating profit. The arse made an operating profit of £50.7 million compared to our much more modest £572 thousand.
Other factors to consider are that their wage bill was much smaller than ours (£230 million vs £309 million) and they had substantially higher cash reserves (£107 million vs £37 million).
Anyway, both sets of figures should be available in the next few days so we will be in a better position to complete our financial analyses.
O right…
Would say the complete opposite.
For me, it’s not so much what has been done to date, it’s what is done going forward. This summer is the big test of FSG.
What FSG have done to date is fine if you’re moving forwards, but the test comes when you stall or regress.
You can argue that we should have also signed this player or that player in previous windows, and you’ll never know what other trophies might have been won had we done so.
I personally believe that our net spend should have been higher under Klopp, because there were clear issues in the squad that weren’t addressed, upgrading centre backs being one of them. Not due to their level, but because of their injury record.
But having regressed as we have this season, it’s possible that if we don’t now do some squad re-modelling, we won’t get back to being title contenders, and that will seriously affect morale.
People can stick their heads in the sand, but we’ve been inconsistent, and often poor, for 12 months. The results prove that.
The better players are knackered from three years of overuse, due to injury prone and inferior squad players not being able to be used in rotation enough. Some players are clearly stale or declining, like Bobby. Some are now so injury prone they’ll never change, like Gomez/Matip/Shaqiri. Some are getting too old and have maybe a year left, like Milner.
Some are not good enough and have now settled into comfortable positions of earning a great living as a footballer without playing very much, and delivering nothing when they do, like Oxlade and Origi.
Add those who want to leave, like Gini, and either we make changes this summer, or we’ll have similar challenges next season.
Like or not, this might be a business, it might be an investment, but it’s not like a normal business or investment, it’s a sports business/investment. The performance of the business relies on the performance and motivation of what are in the end just a few people. How many billion dollar businesses have so much of their revenue and value linked to how 10 or 11 employees perform?
For all the stats and analysis used in sport, it remains a people business. Success on the pitch is driven by the mindset of the players.
The club needs to consider very carefully, how motivated our best players will be next season, if we don’t address key issues this summer.
The whole point of being owned by people like FSG, is that they have the means to step in and invest when it’s necessary, to stop the whole project unravelling.
The whole point of being owned by people like FSG, is that they have the means to step in and invest when it’s necessary, to stop the whole project unravelling.
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Good post RF…
However, it may be Jurgen that does not want to spend…!
Sort of another yardstick he can personally measure himself by, without doing a Pep or Maureen and buying success…
Don’t forget, he has the embarrassment of £55m Keita outlay hanging over his head… not exactly proving value for money to date is he. Maybe he is wary of repeating the error when money seems tighter than ever.
Possibly, but one other thing to consider is that FSG’s other sports investments have been run in the same way as we appear to be, so unless the general manager of the Redsox is also one who wants to be seen to be a magician who can win things on the back of limited investment, it points to the ownership model.
As I said, although I’ve been critical of FSG in the past, and although I believe our net spend should have allowed for some clear and obvious issues to have been sorted before now, I am fine with the running of the club to this point.
But this season has exposed issues that need addressing, and if owners who have been prudent, who have a billion dollar asset at stake, and who have the means, or access to the means, to step in and sort things to stop the slide, do not do so, it would be disappointing.
We need to sign a top quality centre back, we probably need a new top quality forward, and we do need to make changes in midfield.
Origi, Shaqiri, Oxlade, probably Matip, maybe Gomez, possibly Milner, as well as Gini, are all candidates to leave, and the squad will need incomings as a result.
Love this sentence, never seen it before, thanks. 
Bionic VvD?
“We can rebuild him.”
What about investment in cloning or the merging of DNA?
A merging of Fowler, Rush and Torres (no Owen) along with several clones of Gerrard and Dalglish. Throw in a Keegan as well.
An integration of Souness and McMahon would probably get sent off every week but what an animal. As would a mix of Thiago, Molby and the Ginger Beard.
As the honourany LFC accountant it is your duty to sanction this immediately.