I don’t think so. If the footballing environment has changed so much that it makes no sense to buy another club then I’m not sure Edwards has a role here any longer, so it would be natural for him to move on.
Hughes for his part seems to have relatively well so far. I’m not sure why he would be interested in going to SA and assume that is just paper talk. We’re not having a great season, it’s not yet clear how much of that falls on him - and in his role, you are probably only one or two bad transfer window or seasons from being asked to move on anyway - so probably has to see how things pan out in the summer and across (at least the first half of) next season to be judged properly.
Don’t worry it’s Nikola, he thinks the skies falling in every other week.
It’s been 8 months, in that time Hughes has attracted one of the best talents in European football, we made our own mistakes to be fair rather than being forced to.
If Edwards pulled the idea of secondary club then let’s see what his role is. If they see the same 2 months of the previous 7 and expect Slot to turn it around then we probably will. I would expect if they all go then they will go.
The sporting department is in a precarious position. You have the entire leadership structure left with only one year deals, and it’s very possible that all of them will leave this summer. No matter how you spin that, that would be an earth-shattering development, and would be very difficult to rectify in short order.
If they all leave, the most likely scenario would be that we’d hire a manager and empower him with a lot of influence over the sporting department - just as much as Klopp had after Edwards left, but without the cachet that comes from being, well, one of the greatest managers of all time.
That could be very attractive to someone like Xabi, who would undoubtedly want that kind of power to essentially pick his SD. But I’m opposed to that kind of structure for a variety of reasons, and FSG apparently shared that perspective as well when they appointed Slot as Head Coach.
My sense is that Hughes is the least likely of the three to leave, though. All the Saudi stuff seems to be trying to build leverage towards a new deal. Edwards might leave because he came back with a specific purpose (multi-club model) and absent that, he doesn’t want to be a defacto SD again. Slot is the most likely to go because of the team’s performance this year.
Remember when they did the ‘no flags at the Kop End thing’ against Atalanta in 2024. We were favorites to win the Europa League but lost 3-0 that night. That ‘shock’ was still to be felt three days later against Palace at Anfield. We lost 0-1 which was a huge blow in the title race.
The protests are important but I really hope the supporter groups don’t plan to do something like that during the match against Fulham. We need Anfield at its best if we want to keep the hope for a Top5 finish alive.
I maybe wrong, and times are hard for everyone, but ticket prices have to go up at sometime to maintain some type of parity.
We all want a successful team and to do that it costs money for wages, transfers and facilities.
Match day costs will be increasing on all sides and the rises are in line with inflation, which is reasonable especially with there being no ticket price rises in 8 years?
At some stage ‘supporters groups’ have to understand that prices increase and then decide what is reasonable.
Maybe the club should point out that the matchday costs include the wages for stewards, concessions staff, groundsmen and so on. Essentially, people on very modest wages.
I expect that most people are like me in having far more sympathy for working class staff than millionaire footballers or billionaire owners.
I doubt we would see much difference in performance this time around. They did reverse it last time but I don’t expect it this time.
I have a bit more sympathy for the paying fans even if it’s a small increase if the players act as they have done. Some of the excuses have been Trump level of garbage.
Have to say they’ve seriously pissed me off this year, Slot included.
Whatever ideas you want to create about the league being strong.
SoS are gearing up for ongoing protests and are urging fans to curtail spending inside the stadium due to the ticket raises.
I am not a match goer and it’s understandable why there is blowback, but to me this is going too far. Supporters have always been the main, if not the only source of revenue, so SoS’ claim that the club wants more and has decided that it is the supporters that will be paying for it seems like faux outrage.
At the end of the day, SoS should decide if they want a successful and self-sufficient club, or not. They can’t have both success and affordable tickets, unless what they really want is a sugar daddy.
This is the price for it and I didn’t see them protesting last summer when the club broke its transfer record twice.
There’s a legitimate wider case to be brought about the cost of Premier League football, for the match going fan. If fans of clubs came together there might possibly be some sort of progress to be made. The ideal would be moving in the direction of the match going experience they have in Germany. While that is likely not possible, due to ownership structures, there is still a lot of ground between the Premier League and the Bundesliga match-going experience to explore for the benefit of the match going fan.
Apart from something like that, LFC owners have been fair, or even more than fair - given the Premier League context, for the match going fan. Prices have been frozen for years, and this increase is only an inflation related increase, as costs are going up everywhere. And while I have very little financial sympathy for multi-millionaire players, the thousands of hourly workers who are essential to putting on a match at Anfield need to be paid. And I’d rather they received a fair rate for their efforts.
This is the sort of thing where owners will never look good, when there’s an increase, but the response that SOS are calling for seems misplaced to me.