Vulnerable Liverpool are mediocre - and they know it
Tony Barrett
Last updated at 10:53AM, May 19 2015
Not since buying Liverpool in October 2010 has Fenway Sports Group (FSG) endured such a chastening 72 hours. On Saturday, supporters at Anfield reacted with derision to the suggestion that the club are heading in the right direction. Then yesterday there was a vicious double whammy as Michel Platini confirmed that the Financial Fair Play rules which attracted John W. Henry to purchase the club are to be relaxed and Raheem Sterling’s camp made it known that the winger wishes to leave.
Liverpool are vulnerable right now. They are mediocre and everyone knows it. The reality is that those at the top end of the football industry have known it for some time, hence senior scouts from Manchester City and Chelsea becoming Anfield regulars this season in the knowledge that Liverpool’s best players are there for the taking in a way that they haven’t been for half a century.
For all the opprobrium – some of it just, some of it not – that will inevitably be showered on Sterling and his representative, Aidy Ward, following yesterday’s events, the reality is that it is Liverpool’s weakness that allows players and agents to act in the way that they are. One of the club’s first and most important responsibilities is to make it a place that players find difficult to leave and it would be absurd to claim that is the case.
With no Champions League football to offer, only one trophy (the League Cup) won in the past nine seasons, just three title challenges since 1991, a transfer policy that prioritises the future over the present and an inability to compete for top players, Liverpool are failing to keep their end of the bargain in terms of how a big club are supposed to behave. Expectations have been lowered, almost dumbed down, and if the supporters can recognise that so too can the players.
Thus far, the strongest argument that Liverpool have been able to muster in their attempts to convince Sterling to remain at the club is that it is the best place for his development at this stage of his career; not that if he remains at Anfield he can fulfil his ambitions, that success is around the corner or that they will pay him as much as others are willing to. It is an argument rooted in weakness and lacking in conviction.
It could also be argued that it is flawed given that Sterling, a creative player, has spent the past 12 months playing in a team without a forward. It is all well and good playing regular first-team football but doing so in a dysfunctional team that stymies your best qualities is hardly developmental.
The reality is that Liverpool’s problems – their failure to finish in the top four, their struggle to hold on to their best players, the lack of supporters’ faith in the club’s direction and the pressure that is building on the Anfield hierarchy – are symptoms of the same cause: a flawed transfer strategy that it is causing untold damage. Signing potential rather than proven talent is undermining everything that Liverpool are supposed to stand for. It has reached the stage where one of their better young players is not prepared to hang around to see if their inferior young players will improve.
For all the accusations that Sterling is going the wrong way about forcing a move (and many of these are wholly legitimate), Liverpool are at the mercy of the ambition of others because they are either unwilling or unable to match their rivals’ ambition. That situation is only likely to become more severe now that FFP is about to be watered down. As Henry himself conceded recently, without FFP it becomes “very difficult” for Liverpool to compete. The established football food chain, ordered according to owners’ wealth, leaves them exposed. Rival clubs, avaricious agents and even their own supporters know this only too well.
FSG’s model is failing. Whether that is because it is fundamentally flawed or poorly executed is a moot point but what is not in question is that Liverpool’s entire football operation is in need of urgent evaluation. Until the things that are going wrong are put right, then Raheem Sterling won’t be the last to believe the grass is greener elsewhere, he’ll just be one of a number in an ever lengthening line who view Liverpool Football Club as a stepping stone rather than a final destination.