Okay - let's go over it again.
When Rodgers was the manager, he had his targets, and the others had their targets, and then others had theirs as well. They weren't on the same page, but they all had equal say. Hence, Firmino for the scouts and Benteke for Brendan.
Now, the scouts and Edwards all meet, they do their work, then Edwards presents the list to Klopp, Klopp says yay or nay, and then they get back down to business sorting the transfer end.
Those are two different structures. The club said so themselves when they "promoted" Edwards to "Sporting Director", a NEW ROLE they created for him:
Now if that's not an indication of a change of policy, then I don't know what to tell you. But it's different. The model is not the same as it was.
Not exactly. Under Brendan, we had Edwards and the recruitment team on the scouting side. The original idea was to bring in a Sporting Director with Edwards earmarked for the role but that was shelved when Brendan refused to play ball and instead the "committee" was created, which was Edwards and the recruitment team (represented by Dave Fallows from memory), Rodgers and Ayre as the money guy to work out the finances. The idea of it was that Rodgers would say that he needed a striker and the recruitment team (Edwards and Fallows) would find a list, and Brendan could pick the ones he liked out of that. Brendan, of course, didn't like the recommendations of Edwards and Fallows very often and therefore we ended up with a scenario where a Firmino would get the okay from Brendan in exchange for Benteke being okayed by Edwards and Fallows. Ayre seemingly had little input in player ID and only came in at a later stage when negotiations were required and that's a whole different story.
Now, we have Edwards given the authority of being a sporting director since Klopp has no issues with working with one and he finds a list of players that suits Klopp's requirements. They sit together and identify a couple that might be the best fit and Edwards starts negotiating with input from the financial guys. On the odd occasion where it is a really massive deal (VVD), Mike Gordon steps in directly and negotiates it himself.
The key here is the difference in the attitude of the manager to working with a recruitment team. I mean, how many players did Brendan even recommend from outside the British leagues? I remember the embarrassing stories of Steven Gerrard having to send text messages to players asking if they might be interested in playing for Rodgers while in the most recent case of Fabinho, we've beaten a couple of big clubs to his signing because by all accounts he spoke to Bobby and to Klopp, and thought "I like Klopp" and this is where I want to play. VvD is a similar scenario, Keita is similar and hopefully Fekir will be next. It's not that Rodgers was a bad person to talk to but it's clear he never trusted his colleagues and as a result could never sell his visions to anyone he didn't trust their ability as players and they didn't trust his ability as a manager.
Moreover, this probably led to a scenario where they were constantly negotiating internally within the TC because Rodgers didn't trust the recruitment team's recommendations before actually engaging in the real transfer talk with agents and the like. This was probably why we "monitored" players for ages before ultimately losing out on the deal as we didn't move quickly enough. The difference now is night and day where we decide to sign a player and suddenly he is leaning in Melwood wearing Red. Of course some of the processes have been streamlined but they've been streamlined because the head of the footballing side at the club is willing to work with other personnel without insecurity. You can't talk process without addressing the elephant in the room, which is that one of the key component of the decision making process had certain demands, which were putting us in that scenario in the first place.