The Path Ahead: Why Liverpool’s Reascent Could Be a Lengthy Journey
By David Rice @davidjrice83
Following one of several bad results for Liverpool this season, I walked away from the TV and muttered “fuck this.”
My wife, sitting in the next room, asked “fuck what?”
I thought about how to respond for a moment, looked at my work computer barraged with missed messages about inane project details and minor mistakes, an article on it detailing the events of yet another police shooting while behind my wife was a screen where we were tabulating an unreasonably hefty tax bill. There was only one answer I could provide…. *gesturing broadly* “This. All of this.”
I love hiking. It’s part of what has kept me sane in this god-awful year of football and of life in general. When you’re hiking long distances, there’s often a point where you think that you’ve gone further than you actually have. If you’re going up a mountain there’s an illusion where you think you’re going to reach the summit after you get over any hill above the treeline. And usually, it turns out there’s more, there’s yet another hill to climb. It’s no different when going through the flat winding trails of Florida, where after a certain point you think just around the next corner, there will be your car, your refuge from heat or bugs or sun. And then you turn it, only to see more path ahead.
That is what this season has been. The amount of times I have begged it to end long ago surpassed the amount of times I got to relish the Reds title with friends. This season has felt like Cercei Lannister’s walk of atonement. You want to hold your head high, sing about Champions and the glory of the recent past, but you’re surrounded by everyone ranging from VAR officials to rival fans, pundits and even the football gods themselves shouting that you’re the devil, ready to spit a fresh wad of cud into your eyes.
To say this season has been Murphy’s Law has been putting it lightly. We won’t be able to view it through any other lens than all the things that went wrong. From the pandemic going from bad to worse to the injuries, the lack of fans, the fixture congestion, Super League stupidity and the consistent inconsistency of the boys on the pitch.
You can cite any number of reasons why things went wrong this season. Write them down, stick them on a wall and hurl darts at them. Hit one and it’s the right answer to the question of why this season has been so dreadful. From Jurgen’s tactical stubbornness leaving us in a state of suspended stagnation to key players’ absences disintegrating team chemistry and mental fortitude.
All of those things are accurate, but there is a problem that we as fans want so desperately to ignore. We’ll give anything for it to not actually be a problem. We’ll happily shrug off the season that has gone and cling to hope on the grounds of “everything will be fine when the injured lads are back.”
Reality Check
Reality is a miserable wretch. While we want to believe those things, the reality is that Virgil Van Dijk has suffered an injury that changes most people’s lives and will not return to proper training until after his 30th birthday. To expect that he will come back as the pre-injury all world athlete and colossus of man that was cut down in his prime last October is likely a bit too optimistic. Given the nature of his injury and the length of his layoff, it is entirely possible that it will be October/November of 2021 before he gets near the form that we associate him with.
Earlier this week, photos of Joe Gomez’s scar from the surgery to repair his patellar tendon were ever present on the internet. While it’s not unlikely that Gomez returns to his pre-injury form, the data suggests it will be some time before he does so consistently. Data around patellar injuries in sports of similar intensity show that athletes typically take about a year to get back to previous levels after returning and that during that first season back there is a need to decrease their amount of minutes and games played from previous seasons.
Joel Matip and Jordan Henderson make up the other key players to suffer from injury this season and in truth it’s difficult to see a future for either that doesn’t see them on the sidelines quite a bit. Henderson’s injury history is extensive and incredibly costly to Liverpool as they are nowhere near as good without him on the pitch as they are with him. Turning 31 before next season starts, Henderson’s body isn’t likely to do him more favors in the next three seasons.
Hopefully Joel Matip is fit and ready to start next season just after his 30th birthday, but if we’re to keep him healthy, it’s become fairly obvious that his minutes must be managed and demands on a body that has consistently let the player down decreased.
The situation is more complex than meets the eye. Decisions are not binary and context will cloud any decision that is made around playing time, contracts, futures of more than a few players in the squad. And these are not players you simply replace. As we’ve seen, there quality is difficult to match and took us some time to amass. How we rebuild around them could become an iterative process as much as anything.
An Overhaul of Sorts
The uncomfortable truth is that the squad is in need of more of a rebuild than many of us would have imagined back in August. While I’ve discussed the problematic age profile of the squad in the past, there is now likely to be a summer of such significant turnover that we have no idea what that age profile will look like come September.
The list of potential/likely outgoings is lengthy:
- Divock Origi
- Gini Wijnauldum
- Xherdan Shaqiri
- Nat Phillips
- Naby Keita
- Alex Oxlade Chamberlain
- Marko Grujic
- Harry Wilson
- James Milner
- Ben Davies
- Kostas Tsimikas
While not all of those players will leave, it isn’t hard to make a case that any or all of them should. The problem with having to sell to buy right now is that, put simply, it’s not a seller’s market. The transfer economy is likely going to be slow going. The usual big spenders in Real Madrid and Barcelona are all but bankrupt, hence the reason they’re clinging to the Super League idea and the JP Morgan Chase bailout that would allow them to move forward.
The dire nature of their financial situations has been laid bare following the release of most club accounts in the wake of the Super League debacle. Italian clubs continue to struggle as well, while French clubs face a grim future if the League can’t manage to negotiate a reasonable television deal in the near future.
In addition, the big six clubs in England may yet be fined for their participation in forming the Super League idea, further limiting the amount of funds that will be pumped into the market from a Tottenham, Arsenal or Manchester United. In United’s case, finances are somewhat of a hot button issue at the moment and whether the Glazer’s look to quell the criticism against them with spending or sit tight and potentially prepare for the sale of the club remains to be seen.
In the end, the oil clubs that wildly stupid people now dubbed the saviors of football are going to be the key to keeping this fragile, broken system going. Manchester City, PSG and Chelsea making a few key purchases early in the window could get funds flowing, but even then, those funds are more likely going to be used by smaller clubs to relieve debt incurred during the pandemic than passed on in the form of further transfers.
The Market
This is not to say business will not get done. As one super-agent said recently, the rest will have to “get creative” in how they construct deals. Perhaps we see an increase in player swap deals. What it all looks like we don’t know.
It seems, at least on the surface, that Liverpool have weathered the storm better than most. They will have some money to spend to address glaring needs and hopefully are able to offload dead weight to raise more and fuel more purchases.
There is another universe, however, where Liverpool largely sit still on the back of failing to qualify for Europe, get one or two new faces in and tell the boys to go again. From a financial perspective, there is an argument for this in the wake of failing to qualify for the Champions League, which now seems likely.
Given the lack of achievements this season, bonus pay on current contracts will be lower than the last two years. Transfer debt installments have mostly been paid off following this season given the lack of transfer activity in recent windows and the club could use this period to recover and let the squad focus solely on the league next season.
But then we as fans won’t be happy. We are a needy, greedy bunch and we expect the club to compete with the likes of the oil rich and debt laden United for talent. We will encourage more spending in tandem with growing the wage bill, all the while feeding the cycle that has broken the game and justified the dirty dozen’s position that they’ll have to grow revenue however they can to keep up with the expenses of signing and paying the world’s best players.
It all feels a bit shit at the moment, but the end is near, right? Or is it? You don’t think more games will be postponed or canceled?
Part of me is waiting for the next bit of bad news, the next thing to make you question what the fuck we’re doing with our lives caring about this thing. Maybe FSG will decide to have the club join MLS, who knows?
Yesterday I saw a headline that Carole Baskin was launching a cat themed cryptocurrency. I mean of course she is. Is there a sane and normal world where she doesn’t do that? Where she is just a crazy cat lady rather than pseudo-celebrity?
Maybe the next headline will be Stan Kroenke and Florentino Perez have gotten together to create their own paper currency to solve their club’s debt issues and all player transfers in and out of the top clubs will have to be paid in what they’ve dubbed as “Star Bucks”. Promptly they are sued for copyright infringement and governing bodies of the EU go after them for creating an alternative currency and history repeats itself, with Kroenke backing away from the project but Perez pressing on, insisting Star Bucks are good for everyone and a big hit with players age 16–24.
Does any of this even feel ridiculous in 2021? Any more ridiculous than the volume of chances Liverpool creates without hitting the back of the net on an average day? We’ve entered an absolute bizarro world and the only thing we can hope for is that as the pandemic eases, maybe too will some of the collective psychosis.
In a season where games feel 10 hours long, we can take solace in the fact that there aren’t many of them left and a break is right around the corner. But no matter what happens in those five games, brace yourself for what comes after. It’s likely going to be some hike back to the summit from here and there will no doubt be a few false summits ahead.
