The Owners - FSG

The Albert
1031

Yes, but that’s sort of my point.

Klopp fully appreciates that there isn’t an unlimited pot of money. In fact he thrives on that.

You have to make a judgement and cut your cloth accordingly. All clubs do this, and very few are exempt from this restraint.

In Summer it was very clear money was extremely tight, and the club would be Limited in what it could do, and given the global pandemic, collapse of football income streams etc, it’s hard to argue with that.

The decision was made to prioritise LB, a quality forward option, and Thiago. The club decided that Virgil, Gomez, Matip, and Fabinho was enough to be getting along with.

In hindsight, that was the wrong decision. Tsimikas has hardly played, and the centre back situation has only increased this. But in summer I know what I wanted to do. And that was a left back, a quality forward and that Thiago lad everyone raves about. If we can’t stretch to a Centre Back, Fabinho can cover it.

There is an alternative universe where we buy CB instead of Tsimikas, and Andy Robbo fucks his knee on opening day.

It’s always a gamble. The club have done very well in having them pay off. But undoubtedly they did the wrong business in Summer, and that’s just the way it goes sometimes. No-one should be blamed for that.

No I’m not. I’m saying either just stop throwing blame around altogether, as not one of us has got a fucking clue what is actually going on; or share the blame around fairly and sensibly, given Klopp and the Owners work incredibly closely and share responsibility.

I’ve said before that the decision to not invest after the CL win had Klopp’s fingerprints all over it. He wants to show loyalty to his players and he will have been fully on board with going again with his boys. Klopp has said before that his ideal summer is to do nothing in the market. He is incredibly reluctant to turn to the market in general.

We keep ignoring this, and reverting back to the same cliche of Manager wants to but players, Owners want to save cash. If you can’t even get this basic thing right about our manager and his relationship with FSG, why should anyone listen to anything else you say?

At the end of the day, and this really should be the argument killer on this, we did bounce out of that CL winning, no investment summer, and utterly fucking annihilate the league. We could have not bothered coming back after lockdown and still won it.

Another sliding doors moment has Klopp buying two or three new players, upsetting the rhythm as we try to integrate them, and dropping a few points early on. We don’t put the early distance between us and City, and never quite get the momentum that carries us to the title. It becomes more of a scrap, and we maybe don’t win it.

The good thing about hindsight management is that your theories are absolutely bulletproof as you can’t test them or subject them to scrutiny.

Personally if you could offer me the chance to go back in time and change that summer, I wouldn’t do a thing. Because you start pissing around with the squad after the Champions League, and that League Title is no longer in the bag.

4 Likes
1032

Well, this thread is a load of fun, eh? And I’ve barely been involved! Klopp’s going to be diplomatic about things, of course, but what if he’s able to give an answer that is an honest depiction of the situation? Do we start second guessing him simply because he’s perfectly capable of being diplomatic?

Ah, yeah, well he said that he’d like to sign a CB this winter but the situation means that it’s difficult/unlikely. Is this diplomatic Klopp speaking and behind the scenes he’s said “give me £4m to sign any CB” and the club have said “NO!!” or is it, just maybe, Klopp telling it how it is. “Give me a CB, please” and the club saying, “we’d love to Jurgen but we’ve got 2 packets of wotsits and an old werther’s original we found when moving out of Melwood and Michael seems to think he’s going to struggle to get in anyone who’s any good unless someone gets desperate towards the end of the transfer window”.

Maybe there isn’t any hidden message behind Klopp’s otherwise understandable frustrations? Maybe he perfectly understands the limitations. Wishes it weren’t so (don’t we all) but nevertheless accepts these are unusual times and there’s a much broader picture to think about…

Alternatively we can, you know, extrapolate the situation to absolute shit and conclude that the triumvirate of Owners, Edwards and Klopp, who have worked so bloody effectively together up to this point, always within the understanding that the club is self-sustainable, are now pointing fingers at each other and it’s all falling apart behind the scenes. Are we seriously wanting to turn LFC into an Arsenal-style banter bus?

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1033

We all assume a good defender in January would have stopped the rot, even the likes of Botman and Carr would have taken time and they would still be playing along side Nat Phillips or Fabinho or Hendo.

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1034

Lets face it they would have got injured climbing out of the taxi or something.

4 Likes
1035

maybe, but that can only really lead to the one obvious conclusion…FSG really need to invest better in player transport services

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1036

So you’re telling me the reason Klopp is fucking fuming is because we don’t use Alpha cabs any more?

5 Likes
1037

Either Fabinho or Hendo would have returned to the midfield.

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1038

Hendo is out though.

Don’t think it would have changed much sadly.

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1040

Would Hendo (and Fabinho) have got the injuries they got if they hadn’t been needed for every game and them and the other CMs been rotated and kept fresher, getting rests?

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1041

Wouldn’t they have played anyhow though? I would have hoped both would have played in midfield if available.

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1042

We would have been able to rotate the midfield with Henderson, Wijnaldum, Thiago, Milner, Keita, Jones, Ox and maybe even Fabinho giving plenty of options. January had some nice games to introduce a new CB in gently. We also still had Matip and could have used Fabinho a bit for rests. Phillips and Williams could have appeared in Cup games. Oh well what could have been.

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1043

Where’s that €10.5 million, John :crazy_face:

1044

So what’s FSG’s model for success going to be when Klopp leaves?

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1045

Round and round we go on this.

I’m confident that the club and Klopp continue to have a solid working relationship. Klopp came to Liverpool to work in a specific way, and turned down the opportunities to go at clubs that had an endless supply.

Just because he advised the club to invest in a CB, and he may not have got the CB he wanted, it doesn’t mean that he lays the blame on FSG for not digging deeper. He knows how the club is run, he’s a pragmatic man, and he probably knew exactly how things were going. If he was the type of cry baby manager to go and moan about spending, then he would have left a while ago having fallen out with FSG.

Finally, if Klopp is disappointed that his preferred target was not attainable, I don’t think Henry in that moment was raising a toast to Edwards for screwing him over. I suspect they were equally as disappointed that they couldn’t give him the player he wanted. Sometimes it feels like there’s a need to assume that Klopp and FSG are at loggerheads when things aren’t going as planned.

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1046

They might decide to sell at that point.

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1047

Dunno. Going to be interesting to find out, innit.

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1048

I’m sure they will figure something out. They have turned a bankruptcy threatened club into a $2 billion asset.

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1049

With Klopp in that driving seat.

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1050

FSG’s defintion of success is to make the club self-sustaining, grow the asset and not expose themselves to too much financial risk in the process. The way they’ve run the club since they took over hasn’t really changed regardless of the level of success and it won’t change when JK leaves. I thought this from an article in the Guardian summed up the approach pretty accurately;

This is hard-nosed financial management. Assets will be sweated. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. There will be no waste, no sop to chasing glory. If the team burn themselves out while creating one glorious, low-cost brand-burnishing mini-era, well, so be it.

If we fall out of the CL next season it won’t be the financial disaster that it would be for a lot of clubs because we won’t have over spent on fees and wages. Even if the club falls out of Europe completely the asset will still grow, just as it has year on year since they took over. This is the way they run the club. Success on the pitch will continue to be determined by how good their next appointment of manager is. No manager in the world could have achieved what Klopp has done here on the resources he’s had regardless of how clever the transfer strategy might be. Finding someone else who can deliver the same level of footballing success is going to be hard for them, maybe completely impossible.

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1051

Are you absolutely sure about that?

1 Like