well - we might as well have a thread about it (especially since their spies will report back to them)... but damn if they don't talk a big game, and deliver as much as H&G.... however - they are still spending money without the true asset stripping of H&G, and with no CL revenue to boot. I'm so confused - I kind of hate them, but I kind of get it.
They've spent quite a bit this summer. £7m for Rodgers, £10m for Borini, £15m for Allen, £2m for Sahin, £2.5m for Assiadi and £1m for Yesil all while paying some players to leave. Thats a pretty big outlay for a non CL team.
I'd love to believe that Henry has some big master "moneyball" plan but the colossal f'ck up of this transfer window makes me believe otherwise. Seems to me we're owned by football Luddites.
Everyone's overreacting to today's deadline. If we beat Arsenal on Sunday this will all be forgotten. If we don't, it will be because "we didn't have Carroll to turn to and it's all FSG's fault." I'm gonna wait until we see Assaidi play before I judge the window, because as of right now, that 2.5 we paid for him was the difference in us not getting Dempsey.
Oh as I said in another thread - our window was really good for everything we did. Today just felt like Charlie Brown getting the ball pulled away as always as he goes to score.....
Some valid observations. I'm going to hold fire against the owners for the moment because I think we're in a worse financial state than is being let on. And I'm not entirely sure that the coaching and scouting ought to be absolved of blame.
It'll depend what happens at the end of the season. If we finish between 6th and 9th and Rodgers is still in a job then it shows that they hired him for the long haul to implement signing talented young players on lower wages to eventually deliver success in future seasons than they have made the right choice. However if he's sacked then they made a poor football choice and should of hired someone who thought they could have succeeded with the squad we have plus £2oish million in tweaks. Saying that Suarez discovers his international and Ajax scoring touch and Gerrard has one last great season 4th is ours for the taking with or without Dempsey/Carroll.
If we finish between 6th and 9th, with the clean-up of playing staff we've made, I'd call that progress. My view is that the real problem Liverpool has had since we let Alonso go has been the lack of goals from other sources other than Torres/Gerrard or Suarez/Gerrard. The worst about last year is that when Suarez dropped deep, very few of our players, except Kuijt and Rodriguez when they played, ran beyond. And while I still think Dempsey wouldn't definitely have addressed our glaring needs, he'd have added to the presence in the danger areas. Talking about the transfer window, have we really written off Henderson? It's obvious Shelvey is already ahead of him but to be offered [plus cash] for Dempsey? The mind boggles.
I have said before their model is Arsenal. Compete toward the top with young players bought on the cheap. Don't over pay on wages and sell those players at the peak. Owners don't lose money and maybe even make a little. When they get this in place a few years, maximize revenues through endorsements and name placements, then they will be able to sell for twice what they paid. As to the idea that we are in worse financial shape than we know, how can that be with an audited financial statement released every year? Their actions so far are consistent with the plan above. Now I do think they arrived with the idea that they would just outsmart those Brits. But they were quickly disabused of that. Now they are enamored of the formula. The formula said don't spend more than a certain amount on an older player. But they got taken by the Brits again. The real question is why was Dempsey the only option? And why let Carroll go without cover?
That sir, is a very good question for which Rodgers and his staff are partly responsible for answering. I find it difficult to argue with your general point about their overall strategy. Sigh ...
It makes sense why they'd emulate Arsenal from the financial/business side, they are in the best financial shape of any of the top teams in England. When the FIFA Fair Play rules are put in place Arsenal will be in good shape while Citeh, United, Liverpool, Spurs etc will be grimacing. The problem is Arsenal's model has proven to be successful in terms of making the CL and gaining that revenue but not as far as winning any trophies. What bothered me about Dempsey is neither Arsenal nor Liverpool would shell out for him, pointing to both being fiscally conservative. Here in Boston Henry and Werner (Henry especially) are despised by many red sox fans for allowing this disaster of a year and the decision to hire our caricature of a manager Bobby V. The sox are around .500 and just sold off many of their biggest assets in Beckett, Crawford and Gonzalez, pointing to the re-emergence of moneyball (there's that damn word again!). Over the past 10 years they've done a lot of good by rejuvenating Fenway, winning 2 titles, but they've also milked the fan base for every last penny through any and every revenue source they can think of and the most expensive tickets in baseball. We've been introduced to Fenway Park bricks for sale? Fenway grass seeds? Red Sox nation membership dues? Yes, these exist and people pay for them. Some of this is the red sox brass thinking of new ways to make money rather than the owners, but it's not inconceivable they had a hand in some of it. I fear their model will be the same with Liverpool: put together a winning team early on (now), win some trophies and consistently make the CL. Winning yields trust. Then when the fans trust you, milk them for every last penny by raising ticket prices and building in new, ridiculous revenue streams like Anfield grass or a Kop seat, when/if the Stanley Park stadium happens. Then focus attention on your next business venture, letting your current one go to hell. But I'm just a skeptic.
agreed....wasn't able to keep up with the ins and outs due to work and when I finally sat down last night to check it out I was totally deflated. Guess we have to move on and work with the squad we have. My ulcer tells me we are in for another up and down filled season. YNWA
my main qualm for the owners is the question of who exactly is running the show. If it's Ian Ayre, then they're buffoons.
I posted this in the transfer thread but it seems more appropriate here. So far I haven't seen anything that gives me any confidence in the owners. They have invested very little net spend on the club and appear to just be tidying it up. Reduce the op ex, increase brand, trim the management, make it pay for itself immediately with minimal cash outlay, and blame everyone else for every mistake. Despite saying that the club wouldn't be required to sell in order to buy it seems clear that is the rule. I honestly don't believe we'll ever be more than a mid table club with FSG. Unfortunately the possibility of going lower is there. They have talked the talk since they bought us, and not once have the followed through with anything. They are not investing money in anything they own right now, they are cutting costs everywhere. I think we know what happens with that scenario, we get left behind.
That being said, with no debts it'll be a hell of a lot easier to sell the club this time if they have to. And since they bought it for so little I doubt they would ever hold out for the Forbes valuation. I'm not giving up on these owners yet though. They don't have oil money and their baseball team is in just as rough a shape as Liverpool is, and you can't fault them for wanting to fix the baseball team as well.
Yea, they may have invested minimally (what, £50 million net in players...?), but I don't think that was the plan from the get go. We're in a much better position financially than we have been for a long time. Being responsible like this will allow the owners to dump cash in the future on players more worth it than a backup/depth striker. Besides, if we had purchased Dempsey for £6 million yesterday, would we all feel differently? Would that one player and £6 million make a world of difference? I agree that yesterday was frustrating and puzzling because of how things were handled and what we were expecting. But whatever happened yesterday doesn't mean that no money will be spent in January. I understand being frustrated with the way things went down yesterday, but I don't think it's justifiable to lose all hope that the owners are going to spend any money on us. Those are two separate things in my mind.
The more I think about yesterday and Dempsey, the more I'm convinced that ayre is the culprit here. I think that he thought that he had fulham by the short and curlies and then spurs lost out on moutinho and swooped in and caught us with our pants down. I think ayre was really trying to stick it to them because of the tapping up charge and maybe it became personal. 1.5 mil should be nothing to us. I cant believe FSG wouldn't release the money because that would be made up by shirt sales and great publicity for the club right before the TV special airs. It would have made sense in a business sense, so I don't think FSG is culprit in this situation. I could be wrong, of course. As for other targets, I think Walcott was the first choice, but we had to wait on his contract talks. Then, it seems we moved onto a sturridge loan, but it may have been too late as he was in Monaco. I don't know why we left it to the last day to try all of this stuff, but it seems that is how it goes. Seems this is ayre's call, too, as rodgers lamented many times in the media about wanting players in sooner. And I don't think FSg had anything to do with that either.
I did say this earlier in the transfer threads that they might say to Rodgers - show us what you can do with the talent you have and if you do reasonably well - we will spend some more in January.
The word this morning is Ayre's being greased to take the bullet for yesterday's episode. More of the same from our dear owners.
For all we know, it could have actually been all Ayre. There are so many other scenarios people have overlooked because they just want to trash the owners over the Dempsey thing. For all we know the owners just wanted to put an end to the spending to get a better and more significant player in January. We don't know.
I love how when we're in for Dempsey, fans (not necessarily here, mind) are up in arms about how our Yank owners are only in for Dempsey because he's American. Then we miss out on him and it's cuz we're skint. Obviously Rodgers wanted him. I can't really imagine Henry/FSG wouldn't budge on a trivial amount of money. Fulham were pissed at us for supposedly unsettling Dempsey and were asking more money from us than they did from Villa or Spurs. That's bullshit. That's personal. In the end, we should have had backup targets or closed the deal earlier; I'm not too upset if we stood our ground on the principle that we won't pay more than they're asking from other clubs.
I understand the position they were in, high op ex, low revenues. The problem is that if one buys a business and reduces all the costs and then doesn't invest in the product the value of the business goes down as the quality and usefulness of the product diminishes. The responsibility of a buyer who purchases a 'turnaround' business is to put money into the business to get it onto an even keel, whilst at the same take growing the market position so the revenues can actually shift as quickly as the downward op ex. They are certainly reducing the op ex, increasing the revenues but they are not growing the product, they are actually hurting it. I don't like the job Arye has been doing and I think if anyone looks at my posts they'll see that I have never believed he was right for the job. But this isn't down to him alone; there is a lack of leadership from Werner and Henry, the three of them together are a terrible leadership team. I like the article on TAW about this very issue. Bottom line for me is that they haven't done what they said they would, they are in financial trouble, the team and club lack vision and leadership, and they are not investing in the team. Just exactly how much time do we think we have before this is going to take a decade or longer to fix?
I'm happy with the ownership. Two years ago we were debt ridden and they swooped in and saved us from an uncertain future. A bank was going to own Liverpool FC. Sure it was opportunistic. They're not saints, but businessmen. They fired Roy Hodgson and hired a club legend to to guide us through the initial phase of the transition. In their first January of ownership a stale-looking, pouty, striker was sold for 50mil (a club record) and they used that money to purchase Luis Suarez (our best player) and Andy Carroll - who was attracting the interest of Man City the month before we purchased him on deadline day. Out of nowhere. We went on to dominate Chelsea and Suarez terrorized Man Utd. They threw a lot of money down to support KD and new signings came in. The signings were unquestionable failures - not their fault. The owners aren't also scouts. The Suarez-Evra affair derailed an already unconfident team and, to be honest, KD lost control of the situation. All of this amounted to a failed season. It wasn't a failure because we finished outside the top four, it was a failure because we didn't make any progress towards rebuilding, mostly because the players were awful. Either way, KD was there to oversee us during a transitional year and we've transitioned. In the past year the owners have cleaned house in administrative and performance positions. They've hired a promising manager who has a vision and set out on their long-term plan. After such a period of change the team starts this season with positive signs and everything right again. We may not finish top four this year, but there's confidence that we're at least moving in a good direction. Then in one day there's immediate panic from fans because we didn't panic buy at the deadline like Tottenham does every year and the owners are called into question. We are largely the same we were last week when we played Man City. Addition by subtraction.