Quote:
Originally Posted by BertieWooster
Has anyone bothered to look at whether or not the sum of transfer dealings carried out under Rodgers' reign are any worse than comparable clubs? Notwithstanding the fact that you can't even really judge whether a transfer was a success or failure until the player leaves the club - hopefully we'll be able to categorically label Lovren a total failure in the not too distant future
If one were to defend the transfer record of the past few years the only hope would be to point to the policy of investing in developmental talent, which might eventually bear fruit. The idea in a perfect world would be for players like Markovic, Origi, Moreno, Gomez and Can (£40M right there) to spend a 1-2 years developing, 4-5 years performing well for the club, and then recoup the investment or turn a profit when sold around their peak.
I don't buy it though.
As unhelpful as a net spend analysis is here (crediting Rodgers for cashing in on talent he didn't identify or recruit, then debiting him for investments that will ultimately pay dividends for someone else) the eye test is sufficient here. And the simplest eye test is to look at the mature players who were brought in to contribute immediately: there's a range of course, but overall the group of highly priced veterans (Lovren, Lallana, Allen, Balotelli, Sturridge, Sakho) have performed very poorly relative to the price tag.
While I think it's dumb to blame BR for "choosing" not to spend the Suarez money on one world class replacement (it's not like he didn't want players like Sanchez and Willian, he simply failed to sign them), and I also think the inability to offer competitive wages was a much bigger road block than people acknowledge, the fact is that he overpaid for a lot of players who weren't that good. I understand WHY he did it -- Lallana is a safer bet than, say, Tadic, and the extra money wasn't coming out of his salary. But he still did it.
I'm sure BR feels hard-done. But panic-buying upper mid-table talent is not an acceptable solution to losing Suarez and getting snubbed by Sanchez. The hope with Klopp is twofold: (1) he will lose the battles for Suarez, Sterling, Sanchez, Willian a little less, and (2) when he does lose those battles he will have the wisdom and self-confidence to fall back on tactics, coaching and bargain shopping over buying a mid-table all-star team.