Whatever Fabinho ends up achieving at Liverpool, it genuinely makes me smile that the club has moved with such decisiveness to make this happen so quickly after the disappointment of Kiev. It feels like a concerted effort to look immediately to the future, which is of course what any successful football club should always be doing, and calls to mind the stories of how Ronnie Moran would supposedly walk around Melwood at the end of each season back in the day, no pomp, no ceremony, just a box of medals for anyone lucky enough to have earned one. And then on to the next campaign, the next piece of silverware, never dwelling on the achievements of the past, always looking forward.
It’s also a reminder that previous performance is no guarantee of anything in a world teeming with talented footballers of all ages and abilities, which is as it should be. With the arrivals of Naby Keita, Fabinho and the club’s well-documented interest in Lyon’s Nabil Fekir, Liverpool may yet conceivably start the 2018/19 season with an entirely new midfield to the one which led them to the Champions League final months earlier. For any successful football club, the past surely serves primarily to produce lessons on which future victories can built — given that the sum total of Jürgen Klopp’s substitutions in that final necessarily consisted of 2 players with a combined 30 minutes of football between them in two months, he will surely be looking to take every step possible to ensure that similar issues don’t recur again, and sentimentality will be a luxury that he can ill-afford.
It’s different for the rest of us. Supporters are entitled to appreciate yesterday, to dwell for a little while on memories of past glories. That’s how you create tradition. Nights like Porto, City, Roma, and the excitement of the build-up to Kiev, those experiences can’t and don’t exist in a vacuum, to be unceremoniously disposed of based on the result of a single game. Anyone who tells you they do is best ignored — they’re either liars or they have no heart, maybe both. These are memories to keep you warm, not only next to the fires in which they are forged but on those barren days when the possibility of more such moments can suddenly seem impossible. Ideally, I would say that the two perspectives belong together and accompany each other perfectly — I’m looking forward to next season already, but I won’t be forgetting 2017/18 in a hurry.
Alongside the cultivation of tradition, there is also narrative in the past that can help to explain the present and light the road ahead. Some of the best football writers appreciate this and often use that backward-looking focus in their analysis (their happy, bone idle cousins, football pundits, tend to rely only on what is happening now, which helps to explain why they typically have nothing of note to say — no context, no frame of reference, just a flat-earth, two-dimensional perspective).
One currently unfolding scenario that a glance into the recent past may help to both explain and predict is why, in the last 2 years, players like Sadio Mané (from Southampton), Mohamed Salah (Roma), Virgil Van Dijk (Southampton again), Naby Keita (RB Leipzig) and now Fabinho (Monaco), players who may form the spine of the team for years to come and some of whom have already made quite an impact on both English and European football, have chosen to join Liverpool, at this point in their careers and at this moment in history, when other clubs offering perhaps an easier route to success were allegedly courting them. To fully understand the reasons why, I think you need to go back to the last time the club systematically built a team of world-class talents, to the last time it had a world-class manager, and to the last time it reached a Champions League final.
In the 3 years between 2004 and 2007, Liverpool signed Xabi Alonso (from Real Sociedad), Pepe Reina (Villareal), Daniel Agger (Brøndby), Javier Mascherano (West Ham) and Fernando Torres (Atlético), all of whom collectively went on to comprise, alongside Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher, the rock-solid spine of Liverpool’s best Premier League season (it took Ferguson’s greatest ever team to beat them to the title in 2009). For a period in Liverpool’s history defined by the club’s financial inferiority relative to its closest rivals and regularly pockmarked by manager Rafa Benítez’s (often public) frustration at its inability to close deals in the transfer market, that’s a remarkable collection of talent right there. Assembled inside 3 years, remember.
And those players had a couple of interesting things in common, aside from being goddamn good: they were all young when they signed (23, 23, 21, 22 and 23 respectively) and they were all ambitious. They had all enjoyed relative success elsewhere e.g. Mascherano had won League titles in Argentina and Brazil, and both he and Torres had made an impact for their countries at the 2006 World Cup, Alonso had been a key part of Sociedad’s 2002/03 campaign which had seen them finish runners-up in La Liga, and Reina had just finished 3rd with Villareal. But what they wanted to do now was take the next step in their careers, to win silverware and compete for club football’s biggest prizes on a consistent basis. Regardless of what happened subsequently, they believed that Liverpool was just the club at which to do that.
And in some respects, it was: Alonso picked up a Champions League winners’ medal pretty quickly and four of them were on duty when AC Milan narrowly won the rematch 2 years later in the midst of a run which saw the club reach the knockout stages of club football’s preeminent competition for 5 years in a row. Domestically. three of them left Anfield with FA Cup winners’ medals, and they were all there for the 86-point campaign in 2008/09. But realistically, their time at the club probably didn’t work out the way they wanted, certainly not in terms of silverware: excluding the Community Shield (the equivalent of a pre-season friendly), the 5 of them left the club with a collective haul of 7 major winners’ medals to their names, and both Mascherano and Torres went away empty-handed.
What happens next is impossible to predict with any accuracy, but what we can say is that Liverpool’s newest signing, linked with PSG, Atlético Madrid and Manchester United in recent times, is likely to be following the same thought process that players like Alonso, Reina, Agger, Mascherano and Torres followed before him. The same could be said of Van Dijk (linked heavily with Manchester City before choosing Liverpool) and Naby Keita (ditto with Barcelona). And like the others before them, Mané, Salah, Van Dijk, Keita and Fabinho have all signed for the club relatively young (24, 25, 26, 23 and 24 respectively).
The Brazilian is a young man who has certainly achieved some high-profile success in his career already — he has been capped for Brazil, no mean feat in an of itself, won Ligue 1 with Monaco and formed an important part of the side that reached the Champions League semi-final in 2017, knocking out Manchester City along the way. But with the bones of that team virtually picked clean by the vultures of Europe shortly thereafter and their main rivals (PSG) annihilating them 7-1 in April, he has clearly decided that he needs to go elsewhere to realise his ambitions. That he has chosen Liverpool, regardless of whether club and player eventually go on to achieve real success together, is significant and an indication of the exciting time and place in which the club currently finds itself.
Many of us, myself included, have pointed the finger at FSG in the past for not sufficiently supporting their managers in the transfer market, be it financially or, most frustratingly of all, not getting deals over the line for critical players at crucial times, losing out to rivals for the likes of Alexis Sanchez (Arsenal), Willian (both Chelsea and Tottenham), Diego Costa (Chelsea again) and, once upon a time, Mo Salah (you guessed it, Chelsea). And at times, through no direct fault of theirs, key players already at the club decided that domestic adversaries gave them a better chance of winning than Liverpool did — Luis Suárez once tried to leave for Arsenal, Raheem Sterling forced a move to Manchester City.
To be fair to the owners, it's hard to attract the best to a club that's drifting, as it was for their first number of years, much less keep them for the long-term. But now it’s going the other way — players are starting to line up at the Shankly Gates. I’ve mentioned that Fabinho, Van Dijk and Keita were all courted by other big clubs before signing for Liverpool, but what of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain leaving Arsenal for Liverpool and snubbing Chelsea on the way? Setting Europe alight this past season clearly helps, as we saw in 2005 and 2007; 3 cup finals in under 3 years also helps to build the profile of a serious football club; the presence of other big players, including one who has begun to be spoken of in the same breath as Messi and Ronaldo, helps too — who wouldn’t want to play alongside Mo Salah? Most of all, and this is not meant to be disrespectful to any of FSG’s managers since their arrival in 2010 (except for Roy, obviously), but the world’s best players want to work with Jürgen Klopp in a way they simply didn’t with his predecessors.
And it builds like a tsunami, this perception of the club as a contender, as a force, as a place to win trophies and medals. It strengthens with every top player signed, every high-profile opponent slain, and the hope is that such a perception becomes self-fulfilling, fuelled by the arrival of top players who see the arrival of other top players and the presence of one of the world’s best managers as something they want to be a part of. And then they contribute to the very success they covet. Then more come, and more, and a club already far more financially competitive than it has been at any time during the Premier League era hopefully makes it to the latter stages of the Champions League again, and again, and again, and bolsters its own coffers with the mind-boggling prize money on offer for not even winning it. And if Liverpool were to win it, shit…
Hey, it might not work out like that. The major signings began to rapidly fall away after 2009, in large part due to the financial stranglehold of Hicks and Gillett, but perception also matters and it quickly began to look like Liverpool weren’t contenders anymore. Alonso, Mascherano and Torres all left inside 2 years, and both Reina and Agger started to decline. None of them were replaced with equivalent quality, and by 2011 the club was over-spending on painfully average domestic signings like Andy Carroll, Stewart Downing and Charlie Adam. It seems like a long way from there to here, where a player like Coutinho can force his way out and the club barely breaks stride.
So a massive welcome to Fabinho. With the momentum now building behind Liverpool, I can’t see him being the last high-profile arrival this summer and beyond, and I don’t think he’ll live to regret his decision. The future is brighter than it's been for a long time.
