Whether we love it or hate it, use it wisely or recklessly; money makes the world go around. It’s near impossible to do anything nowadays with some cash at your disposal, and although football exists in an almost parallel universe, the same applies there, too.Liverpool, although by no means paupers, have been operating at a level below their true ambition: trying to spend low and win big has provided the expected results. One Champions League appearance since the 2009/10 season and a solitary true title challenge in 2013/14 are about all the Reds have to show from the Fenway Sports Group era, and while issues off the pitch have been cleared up, leaving the club in an immeasurably better position than the latter days of George Gillett and Tom Hicks, fans are getting restless.And why shouldn’t they be? This season promised a genuine pursuit of the prize that has eluded the trophy cabinet on Merseyside since 1990: the English league title. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but one that sticks out is a lack of quality players when they were most needed. Injuries hit hard and teams like Chelsea have had a little more fortune, but can Liverpool really expect to be title winners with huge issues surrounding who is actually the No.1, a converted 30+ midfielder at left-back and no recognised centre-forward? Their record in the top six mini-league shows how high their ceiling is, but each three points is worth as much as any other, and it’s home games against the likes of Swansea that really expose square pegs in round holes.
Alas, this summer will be different, according to The Times. Jurgen Klopp is set to be handed the biggest transfer ‘war chest’ in Liverpool’s history, with the buying potential policy of recent years set to be altered, with proven talent seen as ideal. We’re unlikely to see the club spending big sums on 28-year-olds, instead they will aim to compete with their rivals for talent such as Virgil van Dijk. Cynics, and there are plenty of them, have heard it all before, though.
It’s all well and good promising funds. Throwing money at the situation has worked – look at Manchester City’s rise or the first few years of Roman Abramovich at Chelsea. It’s just that there can be no half-measures. Neither of the aforementioned clubs were worried when zeroes were added to the ends of sums, with transfer fees and wages put to a level so as to blow rivals with more illustrious names out of the water. City bought Yaya Toure while they were in the Europa League with no discernable history of success – money shouted louder in a room full of more attractive voices, it seems.
It’s hard to see Liverpool doing something like that, though. Philippe Coutinho recently became the club’s highest earner on a salary of £150,000-per-week, but to attract the calibre of player needed to compete with Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United and even Arsenal, the Reds will need to break the £200,000 mark. Will they risk upsetting the apple cart with their current players? Will FSG deem it feasible to have four or five players earning north of £150,000-per-week, all while spending, potentially, £150m in a single transfer window? It would be a bold change of approach, that’s for sure.
But they will have to in order to compete. There’s no getting away from it, Liverpool’s appeal to the cream of European talent is waning. There may be ambition on the part of the club and the owners, but Champions League football is by no means a guarantee in a Premier League that’s more competitive at the top end than ever before, while the players now being looked at are children of the 1990s and 2000s, an era in which Liverpool declined. Sure, they’ll remember isolated successes like Istanbul 2005 and the UEFA Cup, FA Cup and League Cup treble of 2000/01, but it would have been Arsenal and Man United players adorning posters on the walls of youngsters across the planet during this time, not the Kopites’ Spice Boys.
Half-measures are how Liverpool have operated in recent times, and the summer of 2014 sums that up. Luis Suarez departed for £70m or so and Liverpool quickly went from having arguably the best striker on the planet leading their line to Rickie Lambert, a player bought based on sentiment rather than logic. There are caveats such as Daniel Sturridge’s injury – he was the heir apparent after shining alongside his Uruguayan team-mate – but the purchase of Mario Balotelli smelt like a Las Vegas poker table in the early hours of the morning. The gamble, as we all know, didn’t pay off, but the half-measure sense was there – a player with real potential yet to be unlocked for a reasonable £16m fee late on in a transfer window. It could have worked, it really could have. Other business in that summer had the same feel, with Lazar Markovic a highly-rated yet unproven star and Emre Can much the same. The latter is a deal that seems to have paid off, as did the 2012 purchases of Coutinho and Sturridge, but for every success story there’s a Fabio Borini or an Alberto Moreno.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while hoping for a different result, so Liverpool need to buck their trend this summer. If that means paying over the odds for one or two players they really want, then that’s what they will have to do. The basis of a good squad is in place, so one or two superstars might be just what’s needed, with a Van Dijk at the back potentially enough to solve a long-standing problem, or an Alexandre Lacazette sufficient to get the 30 goals-a-season elite teams have from one player. What cannot be done is looking down the list of targets when the pound signs cause panic in the boardroom.
Will this happen? We’ll have to wait and see…
