STAND IN HOST Andy Heaton was joined by Tony Barrett, Rob Gutmann and John Gibbons to discuss dirty back room deals, Bournemouth’s bargaining position, Sanchez and Suarez’s big switch, and life with a single striker and and too much money.
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selling Suarez. It’s a bummer definitely.
But this is FSG’s model and I think we’re going to see a lot more of it. Players are either good enough to go to their preferred destinations – eg if Can really excels he may want to go back to Bayern ultimately or even the big 2 in Spain, and that’s going to be something most [foreign] players will want to do. Even domestic players, if they’re good enough, will go like Bale did.
Liverpool are an important stepping stone for many of the players we’ll buy [young] but we’re not paying the wages to keep the top talents in the way Chelski, Utd, Citeh will.
Suarez happened to be bought a little later in his career and is leaving a bit later than he would ideally like to for a dream Spanish team.
We will I think take another couple of windows to really stuff the squad with young, low wage talent and have the youth system producing. So we’ll have players that cost from zero to £10m that we’re hoping will be stars by the time they’re mid twenties. It enables us to compete but may be not to dominate again.
FSG realise that a good bunch of them will likely leave for some big destination clubs but if the strategy works out they’ll all be £30m-£50m players by then, with perhaps the odd mega player like Suarez.
So we’re big enough to be a stepping stone club to the mega clubs, which means we should beable to attract good young players, but even with major growth in the club I’m not sure we’ll ever compete on wages with the oil money of the others. FSG just don’t want to pay £150K+ / week unless it’s SaS quality, and then are actually not resistant to selling them if circumstances dictate. I don’t think they mind selling Suarez given his age. The bite gives them a blanket to work under and get the mega money coming back from his sale for further investment.
Clubs like chelski will attract less of those younger players now because there’s little room for them. They have 30 players on loan plus their youth system plus their illegal rights ownership via Peter Kenyon.
They’re sent out on loan or to Vitesse Arnheim so may not be an attractive destination for a young player’s development. However they are sweeping up a lot of talent making it harder for clubs like us to make an impact with this strategy.
It’s partly deliberate but partly accepting the lack of real loyalty in most big business / players and the fickle nature of who will be a major talent and just how short that talent lasts at the top level.
Of course the question is how successful can we be in the league and the CL when your best players are being sold. The loss of Suarez puts HUGE pressure on the forwards left to produce next season, and that will likely re-occur as good players get sold.
Suarez affects so much of the play as you see in his stats and now the other players really have to step up, though I think the one forward plus buzzing midfielders (sterling, lallana, Coutinho, henderson) is actually what Rodgers wants to play.
SaS was a one off, we won’t play like that anymore. This year was an outlier due to the talent of Suarez and the ability of Sturridge to perform in that setup. Going forwards the midfielders really have to step up – Henderson has to kick on from his “safety first” central midfield role and actively support the forwards the way Coutinho does.
If Rodgers gets this to work then he really will be a genius. To be top 4 without Suarez is massively difficult, especially with Utd sorting out their managerial faux pas, the new managers with a year under their belt and Arsenal with less fitness issues than they had last season. The task is a massive one.
Nobody’s mentioning Joe Allen : ) I was left with the impression that Rodgers would like to see him play in the attacking midfield role.