The Rebuild and How Liverpool Are Currently Failing
AN ARTICLE BY MATTY
<When running a football club, there is no room for sentiment or loyalty. You must be ruthless in your attempts to consistently improve the team so that you stay competing on all fronts. I’ll admit, all those contract extensions looked nice on paper. Locking up the core that brought us so much success seemed like a good idea. That’s until you realize that, in locking up so many players, you’ve essentially paid for their years of decline. Frankly, given the intensity Liverpool played with at their peak, it’s astonishing how nobody saw this coming. Normally it doesn’t happen all at once, that I can give you. But an early decline for a number of these players should’ve been seen from a mile away, especially taking into account the number of games they’ve played over the past few seasons.
Remember when Firmino looked gassed in 2020 and 2021? Where we thought he might have already been done at the top level? Make that ten times worse and you’ll get what’s happened to Fabinho this season. At only 28 he looks utterly incompetent, merely months after looking invincible. But it goes to show just how razor thin the margins are at the very top of the game. Lose an ounce of pace when you don’t have much to begin with and then suddenly your timing’s off. Fabinho’s timing was impeccable at one point, now he looks a step slow. So does Hendo, so does Salah, Firmino was affected by this for two years before adapting his game to better suit his declining athleticism. The players coming into the team are given a nearly impossible task: not only are they asked to shine in order to get more playing time, they have to do so under the stress and burden that the lack of legs in front of them creates.
It’s no coincidence that our pressing numbers have fallen off a cliff over the past couple seasons, we’re playing the same players over and over again to the point where they’re worn out. They can’t press like they used to, they can’t cover ground like they used to, and as a result the defensive structure falls apart. Once again, it’s no coincidence that the players that have looked best this season are the players that haven’t been around for more than 2-3 years. These are the players that we need to build around. This season has proven more than ever that the bandaid of the previous era of Klopp football needs to get ripped off so we can start anew. If I were to speak to Harvey Elliott right now, I’d take a page from Herb Brooks, famous US hockey coach, and say “Their time is done, it’s over. This is your time.
Now go out and take it.” Elliott has been our standout player in recent weeks to the point where I’d make him the first name on the team sheet. Or maybe Alisson should be that, considering goalies age differently. Once again, no coincidence that Alisson is the only one of the old guard who looks good.
One of the failures Liverpool has made has been one that would’ve been very simple to rectify. You wouldn’t necessarily need to play the older players every week if the rest of the squad wasn’t so injury-prone. The constant injuries of Keita, Ox, Jones and Gomez, among others, meant that players in valuable positions on this squad, for better or worse, were unavailable, putting added miles and pressure onto the legs of players that have already gone through so much over the past few years. We have shown too much loyalty to these injury prone players when they should’ve seen the door years ago. Even £10-15 million could’ve been enough to fund some sort of reinforcements. But instead we’re stuck with them. Now we’re stuck with this summer being a summer of immense pressure on the boardroom staff because we need massive reinforcements but we likely can’t get the funds for them. Not with FSG openly admitting they’re pretty much skint on funds by begging for more investment. And not with Chelsea and Arsenal making late moves in the January window to try and sign Fernandez and Caicedo, respectively.
So what’s the point of all this, and where do we go from here? The point is that perhaps it shouldn’t have just been Gini and Mane to leave the club in the last few seasons. Not just Keita and Ox should’ve left, either. Knowing what is required from a CDM in a 4-3-3 and knowing Fabinho could face a rather steep decline, perhaps we should’ve cashed in on him before last season. Maybe it would’ve gone wrong, but maybe we could’ve signed a young replacement instead, surrounded by veteran experience to help. I also think the system we keep insisting on using, while it is the system best used for the concept of “total football”, doesn’t do our players any favors. The midfield is asked to cover too much ground, our wide players end up being a bit too wide which is a problem, especially when the pace starts to wane like it has for Salah. Perhaps, knowing what Salah would’ve wanted from a new contract, we could’ve gotten a boatload of cash in the summer for him and signed three or four new players with the funds received. You could’ve started to form a really young squad that could continue to play Klopp’s preferred style of football. But instead we’re stuck with an old, aging hodgepodge that’s become a bit of a mess.
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