We went 30 years without a league title, during which we had 3 different sets of owners and a myriad of managers. In the end, unless you get a sugar daddy or Hicks/Gillett, you're basically hoping for decent owners who can grow the club. But when you're not only up against the traditional powers (us, United, Arsenal) but also City and Chelsea pumping money in, you basically need a Klopp-type manager.
Arsenal's spending is probably not too dissimilar from Liverpool or United in the last 5 years. But if I were to ask which team got 97 points, 99 points, and 2 CL finals, you wouldn't necessarily have an easy answer, until you're told that Liverpool have Klopp and United had a Aloysius Paulus Maria "Louis" van Gaal on his way out, a washed up Mourinho, and Ole while Arsenal had a Wenger on his way out, Unai Emery, and Mikel Arteta. FSG are probably better owners than the Glazers or Kroenke, but this non-sugar daddy model is going to require an elite manager to build his way to the top. You look at City and Liverpool since 2015, and you look at everyone else, there's been a seismic gap (until this year anyway). No surprise when it's Pep at City and Klopp at Liverpool. United and Arsenal are trying to compete with the mega-rich clubs and a traditional power with inexperienced managers or bad fits. If Arteta is a decent manager and Arsenal make decent signings, if this was the 90s, you'd be competing for a title with United, provided you can hold off a fading Liverpool and flashes in the pan at Blackburn and Newcastle. Today though? You can catch us on a bad year, but you'd still be 4th with that and if you run into a good non-top side having a good year, you'd be fighting for even a CL spot.
You basically need owners that manage the team decently and spend a bit but a manager that can overperform. Klopp is the key reason everything worked for us the last five years. Liverpool's transfers (the committee, the failed signings, the big money flops) were a joke for years. Klopp comes in. Lo and behold, everyone at the club look like geniuses. Klopp is willing to be convinced on players, on second choices, whether out of necessity or special circumstance (like Salah over Brandt, Robertson after being priced out for Mendy, Jota over Werner, etc). At the same time, when the VVD saga happened, he didn't tell the group to get another CB. He was willing to wait but at the same time not blame anyone. Can you imagine someone like Mourinho after our 4-1 defeat to Spurs where Lovren looked like a pub player? He'd be leaking things to his mate Duncan Castles everyday about being undermined with transfers and throwing everyone under the bus in public. Klopp got on with it, dealt with the poor start to the season, got VVD anyway, and the rest is history. It takes a special manager that can make this model work so well.
Five years ago, if you remove the oil clubs and look at Liverpool, Arsenal, United, Dortmund, Bayern, Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Juventus, you'd say that Liverpool were the worst-run of that lot. Klopp comes in, and five years later, you'd argue that Liverpool were the best-run of that lot. It's not a coincidence.
On the flip side, you can look at Dortmund. Post-Klopp, BVB was established as the #2 team in the Bundesliga. They have had many 50 million pound players come through that can help them eventually build their side. Aubameyang, Dembele, and Pulisic were some of the big sales. Sancho, Haaland, Reyna, and Moukoko surely will join that list. With such efficient transfer movements, surely they'd be well-established as the #2 team and maybe even challenge in Europe? Nope, they're struggling to get into the Top 4 even in Germany (and not for the first time in the last few years). It's pretty simple: they're going to end up with 6 managers in 6 years: Thomas Tuchel, Peter Bosz, Peter Stöger (interim), Lucien Favre, Edin Terzic (interim), and soon Marco Rose. No matter what great plans your club has, if you go through managers like Chelsea does, you're going to have a bad time unless you have sugar daddy owners.
It's simple enough for Arsenal really. Get an elite manager, sign some players, and they'll be better as long as the owners aren't sabotaging the club. If you're hiring decent managers or inexperienced ones or bad fits, you'll be stuck where you are, just like we were for years and years. We had 8 managers since Kenny won the title in 1990. Outside of Rafa being sabotaged by bad ownership, many managers of all kinds of qualifications, experience, connections to the club, etc have come and gone without a title. It took until Klopp for us to finally win a title.
Put it this way, if in 2015, Arsenal hired Klopp and we hired someone that didn't work and then followed it up with Emery and Arteta, which of the clubs would've been challenging for titles? Maybe FSG is quite a ways better than Kroenke, but their success can be attributed to their appointment of Klopp. Everything else (the sporting director, the scouting network, the Harvard PHD data science guys, the nutritionists, etc) works around him. Klopp is what makes it tick. Until Arsenal find a sugar daddy or find their version of Klopp, they'll be a fringe CL-type team. We know. We've seen it for decades ourselves.
Or just throw Joe Willock on in the last 5 minutes of every match as he seems to have the magic touch.
