I hate that excuse too, it's an excuse for him but not for the players.
Brentan Rodgers
- Thread starter The Neviller
- Start date
- Status
I hate that excuse too, it's an excuse for him but not for the players.
Why has he chosen to complain about transfer budgets after a loss against a team that has spent less than £7 million on players this summer, compared to Liverpool spunking over £100 million?
He's a master manipulator, and they lap it up.
Fixed
Tbf all managers spout bullshit. Remember SAF claiming we were the better team after Liverpool spanked us 4-1 at OT. Now that was BS of the highest order.
Rodgers has a £100m net spend in his two full seasons and one half season at Liverpool and he has the cheek to complain about a lack of funds?
To be fair to Rodgers he did say he needed all his best players fit because his budget is a third of some clubs. I don't have a problem with it as its most likely true. I'm just glad they dropped points and I think with lack of depth they will struggle because of champs league.
They've spent about the same (possibly more in gross) than City since he's taken over! His transfer record is awful.
The only signing out of the 25 he's made that you can say has been a success is Sturridge.
They got £65 million for Suarez, then spent that much on Lovren, Lallana and Markovic. Lallana looks nothing more than an alright squad player. Lovren looks no better than Agger, who they let go for £3 million, and Markovic had played only 19 senior games in his career prior to joining, and they were spread over 3 years at Benfica and Partizan Belgrade.
He spent £15 million each on Sakho and Allen. Sakho's shite and Allen is only alright at best.
Then you've got the £50 million he's spent on Borini, Assaidi, Yesil, Alberto, Aspas, Ilori, Lambert and Origi. And then the pointless loans of Sahin, Moses and Cissokho.
Finally, you've got £9 million down the pan on Mignolet, who's certainly not been an improvement on Reina who they let go for £2 million.
With the amount he's spent and the number of players he's brought in, they should have had enough depth in the squad to cope with playing fecking Villa at home.
Since Rodgers joined Liverpool they've had a net spend of £100 million spread over 25 incoming players.
Tottenham have made a profit of about £4 million and brought in 22 players.
Everton have had a net spend of £20 million and brought in 19 players.
Arsenal have had a net spend of £95 million and brought in 13 players.
United have had a net spend of £230 million and brought in 15 players.
Chelsea have had a net spend of £140 million and brought in 21 players.
City have had a net spend of £130 million and brought in 17 players.
They've had half the budget of United, but there's been about 1 top class signing between them, Chelsea and City since he arrived at Anfield. Rodgers' problem has been that he's a) spent too much on shite or average players (see Lallana, Sakho, Allen, etc.), b) gone for quantity over quality (see Aspas, Alberto, Assaidi, Lambert, etc.), and c) managed to not strengthen the defence despite spending a shit load of money on it and bringing in a load of new players (see Reina and Agger leaving & Mignolet, Sakho, Toure, Lovren, etc. coming in).
That's a ridiculous post Alex.
Thanks
We WERE the better team, we made some terrible individual mistakes, but it was not a great Liverpool performance. Of course it's the result that counts but I was over that loss within some minutes bevause I knew it were just silly mistakes which happen from time to time. It's not comparable at all to when City for example beat us 4-1 last season.Let's break this down then.
Out of his 25 signings, 10 of them came this summer so we'll remove them. That leaves 15, 3 more of which were loans so I will remove them as well. Those 12 are...
- Borini 10.4 million
- Allen 15 million
- Assaidi 2.5 million
- Yesil 1 million
- Sturridge 12 million
- Coutinho 8.6 million
- Alberto 6.8 million
- Aspas 7.5 million
- Mignolet 10 million
- Toure Free
- Illori 7 million
- Sakho 15 million
- Borini didn't work out, but they actually got a bid accepted for higher than they paid for him so it's hard to argue it was that bad of a deal.
- Allen is young and a decent central midfielder. As a Man Utd fan you should know these aren't that easy to find.
- Assaidi and Yesil were just flyers. If they work out, great. If not, no loss.
- Sturridge and Coutinho have been great signings, especially at the price paid.
- Alberto and Aspas not so much. Bad signings.
- Mignolet is decent and young enough to replace Reina who had fallen out of favor
- Illori is still young, maybe he will be something.
- Sakho didn't have a good first year but he's still young, was highly rated at PSG and has 24 caps for France.
So to summarize,
2 fantastic signings (Sturridge and Coutinho)
2 bad signings (Alberto and Aspas)
2 good squad player signings (Allen and Mignolet)
2 okay signings that are still young (Borini and Sakho)
3 flyers on under the radar guys (Assaidi, Yesil and Illori)
1 free transfer (Toure)
And of all those guys, the highest fee paid was 15 million. That's a very good record. The rest of your post is so blatantly biased it is hard to take it seriously.
But a crucial one. The league is uber-competitive and it makes a lot of sense to d anything to stay in the PL. In Spain, a team like Liverpool(Occasional challengers, perennially around 5-7) can afford to idealistic, Liverpool can't--the stakes are too high.
2 "fantastic" signings out of 12 is a very good record for a manager that supposedly wants to challenge for titles?
Problem is the way you and Alex are phrasing your posts. Implying that the rest were bad signings.
I'm not saying they were bad as such, I am saying they were the wrong kind of signing.
Liverpool needed to sign first team players that were better than what they already had if they wanted to compete. That meant less players of higher quality. Instead they seem to have decided they needed a bigger squad because of the Champion's League, and went with greater quantity at lesser quality.
That kind of thinking isn't going to have them competing on all fronts.
Liverpool needed to sign first team players that were better than what they already had if they wanted to compete. That meant less players of higher quality. Instead they seem to have decided they needed a bigger squad because of the Champion's League, and went with greater quantity at lesser quality.
That kind of thinking isn't going to have them competing on all fronts.
You have a point on their signings this summer. But up till then I don't think you can criticise him much. When he went for the likes of Borini, it's not like he was turning down established stars. They were out of the champions league for several years and couldn't attract top talent.
I think prior to the previous season he wasted some on signings like Aspas, again it was a case of buying a few that could have been put towards a better signing. It wasn't as big a deal as some of the other signings came good and he was coming off a low base. ALl in all he did what he had to do and was clearly successful.
When you start to challenge you need to switch gears as a manager and step up to that next level in all respects. He hasn't done that in the transfer market, IMO he hasn't yet shown he can properly organise a defence. Those are two pretty big limitations he has to overcome. Until he's done that he should stop pretending to be a footballing Yoda.
When you start to challenge you need to switch gears as a manager and step up to that next level in all respects. He hasn't done that in the transfer market, IMO he hasn't yet shown he can properly organise a defence. Those are two pretty big limitations he has to overcome. Until he's done that he should stop pretending to be a footballing Yoda.
For the money he has spent versus the general quality of signings made and the improvements to the team, his record is underwhelming. Looking at the individual transfer isn't that important, both because it's so hard to know beforehand if a signing will be succesful (we were delighted to get Kagawa, remember) and because there's no telling how many of them were actually cases of picking that player before superior alternatives. It's more relevant to look at the trends in their transfers and in how much their squad has improved relative to the money spent, and this is where Rodgers really fails to impress.
You have to look at how much is accomplished over a few successive transfer windows, and in that regard, given the amounts spent, Rodgers has accomplished very little. Also consider the fact that each and every single star player that they've targeted has failed to join them. They need to replace Suarez - and, soon, Gerrard - but have just continued to sign average squad-fillers that none of the top clubs were ever even interested in. They seemed to be in for several big names each window but have managed to sign zero of them. They've also released a few established players for almost no money and then gone on to replace them with more expensive signings that are not correspondingly better.
They've made the signings of a second-rate club but have had the budget of a first-rate club with which to do it, so they've just made a lot of those signings. Looking at the actual players, they're the kind that I would expect to see going to Everton or Tottenham. Some of them will be decent for them, and one or two have been quite good (though none spectacular so far; Sturridge is the only candidate there, but he needs to maintain it for a full season without Suarez at his side before one can really be certain that he's more than an ordinarily good striker) but a lot of them are bang average players that weren't targets of any top club.
Rodgers has spent the money of a club in aggressive progress, but he has done little more than add a bit of breadth to the squad. The kind of progress he has made corresponds to a club spending about a third of what he has spent, and his failure to make even one single world class signing out of multiple attempts, and on a budget that clearly allows it, is crucial.
You have to look at how much is accomplished over a few successive transfer windows, and in that regard, given the amounts spent, Rodgers has accomplished very little. Also consider the fact that each and every single star player that they've targeted has failed to join them. They need to replace Suarez - and, soon, Gerrard - but have just continued to sign average squad-fillers that none of the top clubs were ever even interested in. They seemed to be in for several big names each window but have managed to sign zero of them. They've also released a few established players for almost no money and then gone on to replace them with more expensive signings that are not correspondingly better.
They've made the signings of a second-rate club but have had the budget of a first-rate club with which to do it, so they've just made a lot of those signings. Looking at the actual players, they're the kind that I would expect to see going to Everton or Tottenham. Some of them will be decent for them, and one or two have been quite good (though none spectacular so far; Sturridge is the only candidate there, but he needs to maintain it for a full season without Suarez at his side before one can really be certain that he's more than an ordinarily good striker) but a lot of them are bang average players that weren't targets of any top club.
Rodgers has spent the money of a club in aggressive progress, but he has done little more than add a bit of breadth to the squad. The kind of progress he has made corresponds to a club spending about a third of what he has spent, and his failure to make even one single world class signing out of multiple attempts, and on a budget that clearly allows it, is crucial.
I think that's just the level they can realistically expect. They can't compete financially with either Manchester Club or Chelsea and probably not even Arsenal. Add that to the fact that this is their first year back in the CL and it severely limits the type of players they can sign.
No it was not BS. If you remember the match, they scored off a couple of free kicks and Vida had his usual sending off against Torres. We were comfortably the better the better team in the first half before we decides to shit ourselves collectively for some reason.
I really don't buy that they can't compete financially. If there's one place where they can compete, at least in terms of individual signings, it's there. They've spent plenty - more than Arsenal, for instance - and would have been able to focus those sums into fewer signings of greater quality. It's not as though they've actually had to compete with all of those clubs for every single target, either. They can't compete as a whole, over the course of seasons, with United, Chelsea and City; but when it comes to the question of whether or not they can afford a star player, the answer is clear.
The obstacles have been the lack of consistent title candidacy and, in many cases, probably the geography. More recently, I suspect it has also been the prospect of going to a club where you'll be the only big player and will be working under a manager whose transfer policy is overwhelmingly quantity over quality. This is where he needed to be on the forefront prior to this window as losing their only world class player without maintaining a core of at least pretty good ones, like Arsenal have, will make it very hard for them to sign any other world class player. That's Rodger's big failure. He could have made Liverpool a more attractive target while that were still a realistic possibility.
The point is that to manage to make no big signings at all over the course of, what, four or so transfer windows, despite spending an amount of money that clearly proves they could if that were the obstacle, does not make Rodgers' transfer policy look very flattering -- especially when they just lost their last world class player. Maybe if most of his middling signings had been decidedly succesful, and they had more than one star coming up from the youth ranks, but neither are the case.
Last edited:
They can't buy established world class players though. They have to buy players with potential and hope that they can be turned into stars.
They must have been able to buy better players than what they've got. Obviously they can't go and sign someone like Di Maria, but when a club is in a position to try and make a serious title challenge on the foundation of last season's success, and have a fortune with which to do so, it's underwhelming when their big signings are Lovren and Lallana. I think Rodgers has picked the wrong targets and/or failed to attract any of the right targets even though he had the funds.
I agree that Lovren and Lallana are underwhelming but I'm not sure who they should have gotten that would sign for them.
I hope by that you mean amazingly factual and accurate. He has wasted money by the bucketful. Great to see.
And yet he took them from 7th to nearly winning the league playing some scintillating stuff! I'm not wanting to defend Liverpool far from it but you got to give credit where it's due.
I don't think Liverpool will get top 4 (not because Villa game) I've been saying that all preseason. I think if we get our act together we will finish quite comfortably above them. Liverpool (did superb last season) but imo they were a set of circumstances in the top 4 last year than wont happen again.
Liverpool took advantage (to their credit) and the momentum they built up powered them home albeit just short.
Their success will be their downfall this season as the Champs league will dent their league ambitions as it will highlight their squad deficiencies.
I'll be happy to see Liverpool in the FA and league cup to the later stages as I believe the amount of games this season will be to much to cope with and this will show in the league (where I believe they will struggle to get top 6) I may be wrong but time will tell.
Indeed.
I don't think it's down to the manager, Liverpool have had a couple of false dawns over the past twenty years and nothing has materialised.
They can't pay big wages, they can't really afford big transfer fees (not 40 to 50 million on one player) because they need the numbers in.
Plus the club is based in the second most noxious dump in the UK after Leeds, why would you want to go there?
I love how the Arsenal and Liverpool fans have made a pact to back one another up on this forum.
It's cute.
It's cute.
You know that this statement is factually incorrect right ?
It's been proven that any team can buy established world class players 'if' they throw enough money at it. Liverpool/Rodgers have the ability and the money especially given their gross spending, the Suarez money has been squandered to a point and will be recycled again in the future when the failed average signings are moved on.
Blame lying purely at Rodgers door is more difficult to assess however as Liverpool have been doing this for years now, what it points to is a club developing talent in order to move it on for a profit.
It's a mutual masterbation society.
Birds of a feather
Atletico with a less budget than Liverpool bought the likes of Griezmann and Mandzukic on the same money as Lallana and Balotelli.
They are league champions and European Cup finalists though KM.
With less budget than Liverpool. As we've shown that if you throw money then world class players will arrive. This we don't have enough money is a bit ridiculous when you see the signings the likes of Atletico and Dortmund make with half the budget.
Take Lallana, a player of the equivalent level could have been much cheaper in another league such as Italy, Spain or Germany.
If he wants to complain about lack of funds then why on earth is he spending like he has a blank cheque.
If he wants to complain about lack of funds then why on earth is he spending like he has a blank cheque.
This. When you spend 100m, you then don't complain that you've not spent enough money or not got decent enough players in.
Rodgers was just trying to deflect attention from what was an extremely poor performance. Bad game plan, formation, and execution.
True. Atletico's success puts every big clubs spending to shame though.
- Status