The benefit of almost a decade’s hindsight tells us that he was a shadow of his former self even before he left the club. The very definition of a busted flush at just 26, the point at which he should have been entering his prime years; little more than a collection of injuries yet to come and scar tissue from the ones that had already been. Upon leaving, he reasoned that “the Liverpool I left was not the same club as the one I joined”; by the same token, the Fernando Torres who left was not the same as the one who had arrived for a club-record fee in the summer of 2007. In the end, for an event that was so shocking at the time, his departure developed into something of a historical footnote over subsequent years, a move that neither significantly benefitted nor damaged either party. As a great man said at the time: “The most important thing is the club. More important and bigger than any individual, no matter who has been through it previously and who will in the future. The club is the club. I will never forget that and anyone who does is being a wee bit stupid and irresponsible.”
The sad truth is that both player and club were no longer in a position to help each other by January 2011. Liverpool would rise again, of course, long after Torres’ career at the top level had entered terminal decline, but they had a mountain of rebuilding and learning to undergo in the early years of this decade, from the pitch to the boardroom. The fact that they would go on to win just a single trophy (the 2012 League Cup) in the 8+ years between the Spaniard’s exit and their sixth European Cup earlier this month probably means that Torres can still feel some sense of vindication for his decision. After all, a Spanish Segunda Division medal was all he had to show for the entirety of his club career at the time, and his body was falling apart to such an extent that his window to win more was rapidly closing. But if Liverpool were in no position to help him realise his goals, the reverse was also true: Torres was no longer in much of a position to help Liverpool either, or anyone for that matter, as Chelsea would subsequently find out to their cost.
Had he stayed at Anfield he may well have struck up a prolific partnership with Luis Suárez over the following years, but it’s far more likely that his performances in Chelsea blue would have been replicated in Liverpool red. The days when he could breeze past Tal Ben Haim as if he wasn’t there, claim back-to-back home hat-tricks against West Ham and Middlesbrough that included every kind of goal you can imagine, leave Nemanja Vidic on his arse and finish past Edwin Van Der Sar before holding a five-finger salute aloft to the Old Trafford crowd, snarl at Real Madrid’s away support after opening the scoring in a crucial European Cup knockout game a few minutes after destroying Fabio Cannavaro with an audacious touch on the edge of the Anfield Road penalty area, hold off the considerable bulk of Rio Ferdinand to finish into the roof at the Kop end, swivel and volley over his shoulder into the Blackburn net, and so on, and so on, were long gone.
And that lot is only scratching the surface of how good he was. We’ve been extremely lucky with forwards (centre or otherwise) in the Premier League era, even as this title drought has stretched to 30 years: Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Luis Suárez, Daniel Sturridge, Roberto Firmino, Mo Salah, Sadio Mané. Torres, on ability and attitude, is up there with every single one of them, but his best days in a Liverpool shirt are now over a decade old and they never brought the silverware that was so coveted by both player and supporters. Between that and the little dig he took on the way out (“After this, there are no more steps forward. This is the top level. The target for every footballer is to try and play at one of the top-level clubs in the world, and I can do it now”), feeling towards him is understandably mixed. He is certainly no one’s idea of a legend for a club whose history is littered with them, not after such a short length of time.
What he is, and will always be, is a reminder that keeping the realistic prospect of trophies alive for your best players season after season is a significant test for any top football club, one that Liverpool have consistently failed over the years. It’s easy to forget now, in an era where we are privileged enough to be able to laugh off reports from Spanish rags linking Mo Salah and Sadio Mané with moves away from what the latter has described as the “sexy club” of Europe, where we are able to justifiably wonder why any professional footballer would want to be anywhere else on the planet right now and keep a straight face when we mention the words “Kylian”, “Mbappé” and “Liverpool” in the same sentence, that such stature, such glorious health for a football club to be in, especially without an astoundingly wealthy benefactor behind us, is a relatively new phenomenon, certainly in my time supporting Liverpool and pretty much non-existent in the club’s Premier League history.
Long is the list of world-class talents who arrived, contributed, got close, grew tired of waiting and fed up with the institutional dysfunction around them, and got off elsewhere to fill their trophy cabinet while they still could. As I wrote recently: “…not since that last league title in 1990 has the club managed to gather so many high quality, ambitious individuals together at one time. Each of them will look around that dressing-room ahead of the first game next August and see faces that they trust to help them achieve their goal, unlike players in the past like Fernando Torres, who was looking at Milan Jovanovic, Joe Cole, Paul Konchesky and Christian Poulsen in the months before he left for Chelsea”.
Virgil Van Dijk, Mo Salah and Sadio Mané have no doubt been living with the exact same concerns over the past couple of seasons that the likes of Torres (left Anfield with nothing), Steve McManaman (an FA Cup and a League Cup), Xabi Alonso (left with a Champions League, FA Cup, Community Shield and European Super Cup, highly-decorated by the Liverpool standards of the time), Javier Mascherano (nothing), Luis Suárez (a single League Cup medal), and Phil Coutinho (nothing) did over the years. Before the start of this month, Salah boasted a couple of Swiss Super Leagues, Mané an Austrian Bundesliga and Austrian Cup, and Van Dijk a couple of Scottish Premierships and a Scottish League Cup for their respective careers, in contrast to a torrent of individual awards, and all of them will soon be staring 30 in the face. Yet the last two seasons have shown them that success — real, tangible success — is possible at Anfield. That’s why Real Madrid and Barcelona are at nothing trying to tempt any of them away, at least for the time being: after all, who is more likely to win the European Cup next season than Liverpool, under a manager yet to lose a two-legged tie with the club?
If the Jürgen Klopp era that we’ve been enjoying since October 2015 has crystallised nothing else, it’s that the very best players are at their happiest and most content when there is the realistic prospect of trophies. Not money — a top, or even mediocre, professional footballer can get that anywhere — but silverware. Medals to show the kids, the grandkids, the great-grandkids. Something tangible to show for a lifetime spent in football. And not three or four years down the line: it has to be now, because the footballer’s equivalent of a biological clock is always ticking ever onwards.
Van Dijk, for example, didn’t come to Liverpool because of the fans, or the stadium, or the history, or at least not solely because of those factors. Instead, he sensed imminent glory to be had ‘round the fields of Anfield Road as he waited patiently for Liverpool in the closing months of 2017, despite offers from elsewhere, offers that may have made him that little bit wealthier than he’ll be after he leaves Merseyside. But let’s be honest, he was already exceedingly wealthy either way. The opportunity he saw at Liverpool, perhaps like his manager before him, wasn’t about money: it was about winning trophies and becoming a legend in the process at one of history’s most iconic footballing institutions. And to be fair, his instincts have looked pretty sharp so far: two European Cup finals in 18 months, one of them won, and the third-highest points tally in the history of English football’s top division now scrawled on his CV.
Torres likely sensed the same opportunity when he was tempted away from his hometown and his childhood club, Atlético Madrid, to Merseyside in the summer of 2007. And how could he not? The club he was joining had just reached two European Cup finals in three years (winning one), reached two domestic cup finals in the same timeframe (again, winning one), and had amassed 82 points in the league a season earlier. For a team and squad that was still very much in the process of being built at the time, that was quite a promising haul of success. Together with the historic scenes in Istanbul two years earlier, the Spanish presence around the club and one of the world’s best players in the team (Steven Gerrard), it made Liverpool a highly attractive destination for one of football’s brightest young talents who was ready to take the next step in his career at the tender age of 23.
As it turns out, Torres’ instincts were not quite as sharp as Van Dijk’s: as mentioned, he would leave Anfield three and a half years later saying that “the Liverpool I left was not the same club as the one I joined”. Actually, it was the same club (he was signed under the reign of George Gillett and Tom Hicks, after all). He just hadn’t seen that level of raw dysfunction coming at the time. None of us had, but the signs had been there. Torres joined a very different club than any of Liverpool’s current crop of stars, one that had closed the doors of its club shop the day after Istanbul and had once relied on a loan from its owner to sign Dirk Kuyt for £9m, the same owner who had recently sold it to a couple of half-arsed foreign speculators in the months before Torres’ arrival.
The club’s dysfunction, for the level at which it was trying to compete, quickly dashed any notions the player may have had of sustained success, but any disappointment he felt at that was something he very much had in common with the supporters. He arrived during an initial burst of funds in the opening months of the ramshackle regime inflicted on the club under its first American owners, a flurry of transfer activity that we all foolishly expected to last. By the Spaniard’s first autumn in England, his manager Rafa Benítez was openly feuding with owners who had now apparently closed their wallets (rarely to be opened again) and were sounding out Jürgen Klinsmann for his job. Harmony was suddenly in short supply, as was the money necessary to challenge the financial behemoths of Manchester United and Chelsea, who were making the Premier League their own personal fiefdom during a run where they shared six titles prior to Manchester City’s arrival as a force in 2011/12.
For his part, Torres was mesmeric during his first season at the club (2007/08), scoring 33 goals in all competitions (24 in 33 in the league) and crowning it with the winning goal of Euro 2008. In retrospect, it was the sole campaign where we got to see him at the peak of his powers. He would only feature in 24 games out of 38 in the league during Liverpool’s memorable but failed title charge in 2008/09, just 14 of them alongside Gerrard, and his goal return in the league fell from 24 to a disappointing 14. Lack of funds coupled with poor transfer decisions meant that David N’gog was often expected to pick up the slack. He rebounded somewhat with virtually a goal-a-game in the league during the difficult 2009/10 season (18 in 22), but injuries were again the defining factor. He missed significant chunks of Liverpool’s bitterly disappointing campaign, including the closing weeks due to surgery, played only a bit-part in Spain’s World Cup win that summer as a consequence, and came back to Roy Hodgson as his new manager.
"Two years ago we were very close to winning the league; we were practically touching heaven. We were second in the league, quarter-final, semi-final in the Champions League and then two years later is the complete opposite”. Indeed. To be fair to Torres, he was vocal about what lay ahead and gave due notice of his frustrations. Having lost at home to Reading in the FA Cup in January 2010, a match in which he added a torn knee cartilage to his catalogue of injuries, he said: “It’s now the owners’ turn. They have to sign players so that this does not happen again. If we want to compete with Manchester United and Chelsea we need a much, much more complete squad. We need more genuinely first-class players and we can’t let our best players leave. It’s frustrating. We finished second last season: this season should have been a turning point for us, the chance for us to do something great. Manchester United sold Carlos Tevez and Cristiano Ronaldo, while Chelsea didn’t sign anyone. But it hasn’t been”.
His solution one year later, having suffered through six months of Hodgson’s tactics, the protests, the club very nearly entering administration, the team languishing in the bottom half and already out of both domestic cups, playing under a caretaker boss who hadn’t managed in a decade, and with that biological clock spinning while his body fell apart with injury after injury, was simple: move to a club that consistently paid the cost to be the best and offered him the possibility of instant success. That was Chelsea, and it worked up to a point: he would eventually leave Stamford Bridge with Champions League, Europa League and FA Cup medals, but very little of that success had anything to do with him. Injuries had taken a terrible toll, and all Chelsea ultimately got for their £50m was a spent force. Liverpool, for their part, replaced Torres with Andy Carroll for £35m of that fee, who was just as unfortunate with injuries during a disappointing stay at the club as his predecessor in the number 9 shirt. It was a pair of deals that benefitted nobody, bar maybe Mike Ashley’s bank account.
It comes as no surprise now, as he prepares to retire from the game, to see him clarify that Chelsea “gave me what I always longed for, the titles” while describing his time at Liverpool as “a feeling I do not want to lose nor forget.” A feeling. The club may not always have delivered enough tangible rewards for our liking over the past three decades, but it continues to mainline soul-affirming intangibles straight into the vein. It’s to his credit that Torres knows and accepts what he gave up in order to secure those few pieces of gold that now hang in a cabinet gathering dust; in fact, I think he knew it even then. As he continued speaking about Liverpool in the weeks and months that followed, like a man trying to publicly justify his decision to himself, I was reminded of a Springsteen lyric that seemed to sum him up then and still holds true to this day: “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of”. He’s still not sure, I don’t think, all these years later. And there’s a lesson in that for those who come next, be it Salah, Mané, Van Dijk, or someone new, tomorrow or 20 years from now: medals are important, but so is where you are when you win them. And there’s nowhere better to win them than Liverpool. Just ask Fernando.