Always likely marriage of convenience was going to end in divorce
Tony Barrett
In hindsight, Brendan Rodgers’s relationship with Liverpool was doomed to fail because it was founded, if not on a lie, then certainly on an accommodation that suited neither party. Rodgers would have turned the manager’s job down had Fenway Sports Group (FSG) also appointed a director of football so Liverpool’s owners acquiesced. Instead, they formed a transfer committee with the Northern Irishman as a member but not as its head. A marriage of convenience had begun.
“I wanted to make sure that I would be in charge of football matters; that I would control the team, control the work,” Rodgers said at the time. In one sense, the Northern Irishman had that control. He was given, by his own admission, “final say” over the players that Liverpool recruited and spending was heavy during his reign with almost £300 million spent on signings.
The compromise, though, was that he would not always be able to sign his first choices, the likes of Ashley Williams and Ryan Bertrand being prime examples, if they were not rated by the rest of the committee and he would also be expected to take on board their guidance. What was intended to be a system that provided checks and balances ended up being a dysfunctional fudge that suited neither manager nor club.
The tension it caused between them was apparent almost immediately. A move for Daniel Sturridge shortly after his appointment collapsed because Rodgers preferred Clint Dempsey but Liverpool made a derisory offer to Fulham for the USA international and that deal also perished. John W Henry, Liverpool’s principal owner, penned an open letter to the club’s fans explaining what had gone wrong and backing Rodgers but privately he was seething at his manager for “killing” the Sturridge transfer.
For his part, Rodgers was incandescent when Liverpool dithered over the signing of Joe Allen and at one point threatened to resign if his new club failed to meet Swansea City’s £15 million valuation of the midfield player. This was in Rodgers’s first months as manager but already it was clear that the committee system he was working within was not going to run as smoothly as intended; it also seemed destined to ensure neither manager nor club got everything that they wanted.
Hope that this was just a case of teething trouble and that common ground would be found was to prove unfounded. The same problems continued with Rodgers reluctantly accepting players that were not his first choices – Mamadou Sakho, Emre Can, Alberto Moreno, Lazar Markovic and Roberto Firmino all fall into this category – in the hope that such willingness to co-operate would give him the bargaining power to sign at least some of his preferred targets.
That strategy was successful in that FSG reciprocated by signing off on huge deals to sign Adam Lallana and Christian Benteke at Rodgers’s request, even though the fees they had to pay for both players exceeded Liverpool’s valuations. Increasingly, though, the compromise began to show on the pitch as Liverpool became as disjointed as one would expect a team put together on the basis of the manager having one pick and the committee having another. Cohesion was conspicuous by its absence and a style of play became difficult to identify. Basically, it was a mess. Cock up by committee indeed.
By terminating Rodgers’s contract and retaining the services of his fellow committee members, Ian Ayre, the chief executive, Michael Edwards, the director of performance, and Dave Fallows, the head of recruitment, FSG have clearly decided that the manager is not capable of operating within their preferred system; something that Rodgers would probably agree on. More tellingly, they have also come to the conclusion that another manager will be able to get more from the players than Rodgers has, hence their assertion that replacing him as manager gives them “the best opportunity to deliver” success in the statement confirming his sacking.
The belief is that Liverpool’s squad is better than the sum of its parts, that Rodgers has been given ample opportunity to prove that he can work productively within a collegiate setting but has failed to deliver both on and off the pitch. Having given him a final chance at the end of last season when it would have been wiser to make a change rather than allow Rodgers to limp on, FSG finally ran out of patience after Liverpool’s 3-0 defeat to West Ham United on August 29 and he has been on borrowed time ever since.
The irony of all this is that had FSG listened to Rodgers when he was first appointed, they would have seen all of this coming. “One of the things you need to do is to know yourself, and I know myself. I know what makes me work well and that wouldn’t have been a model I would have succeeded in,” Rodgers said of his refusal to work under a director of football. “It’s absolute madness if you are the manager of the club and someone else tells you to have that player. It doesn’t work.”
While FSG would contend, with some legitimacy, that no players were ever forced on Rodgers, by opting for a committee they put in place a system in which he felt the need to compromise and he ended up accepting players as a result. An unravelling in Rodgers’s relationship with his employers was all but inevitable. Now FSG must ensure that his successor is not only willing to work with a committee, he is also capable of thriving within one.
