Did Jurgen Klopp really leave a better squad behind at Liverpool than Sir Alex Ferguson at Man Utd, or were the club just better at planning?
Watch some football on Tuesday night – the Champions League returns in earnest – and mail us at theeditor@football365.com
Klopp v Fergie legacy: The verdict
Klopp definitely left a strong squad behind but 6-12 months and a bad managerial choice would affect this a lot.
Fergie left a winning team that was clearly not going to improve no matter who came in to manage them. Far too many players too close to the glue factory (eg management or punditry).
Klopp left a team in good shape but with quite a few aging stars, contract issues, wantaway players, and a couple of gaping holes. That’s not exactly perfect.
There was no reliable central striker (Darwin not good enough, Jota not fit often enough).
Defensive midfield had clearly been an issue. Endo has a lot of qualities but wasn’t quite good enough and no one (including Klopp) thought that Ryan Gravenberch was the solution to that.
What we have right now is great and I am delighted. But some of that is down to changes made by the Slot and half of it could be ripped apart in a few months.
So with the wrong manager, or with another few months under the belt, Liverpool could be as bad as United were, just not as immediately as United were under Moyes.
The issue is that United didn’t have a long-term plan when Ferguson left. I’m not sure how much of that was Fergie’s fault. I’ve long suspected that he didn’t need long-term plans as he was so good at adapting. If the team were suffering he was good at changing things up, finding one star player who would make the difference, finding a youngster to add something different mid season, or just finding a weakness in the opposition.
Maybe because Fergie was so good at adapting and didn’t need help from the club with the long term set up, the club was caught completely off guard. Is that a negative accusation you could lay at his feet? Papa Fergie, you did everything for us so you didn’t prepare us for the real world!!
Klopp, meanwhile, never had that much control. There was always a background team doing the long-term planning.
Did Klopp leave a better team? Maybe in the short term.
Did Liverpool have a better long-term plan? Definitely.
Did Liverpool choose Klopp’s successor better? Yes!!
Joe, LFC
FA Cup could be real magic
People sometimes say that the magic of the cup is gone but look at the record of the teams left in it.
Brighton – never won
Forest – 66 years ago
Bournemouth – never won
City – 2 years ago!!
Preston – never won
Villa – 68 years ago
Fulham – never
Palace – never won
Safe to say that the fans of the 7 proper clubs remaining would give their right (and left) arm to win.
What a great year it is for this.
Now come on Bournemouth!
Paul
Johnny needs to find a new hobby
It feels like raging against the machine just for the sake of it. An awful round 4 of the FA cup showed us life without VAR, and while my club United benefited greatly from it, it must be MAD infuriating to be on the wrong end of a stupid refereeing or offside call and having no way to solve that.
VAR is justice in a place where there was no justice before. Referees make tons of mistakes, and without VAR the injustices will prevail. So if you have to keep quiet and wait 5 minutes to do so, please shut up and sit in your place without making stupid comments like “it’s moronic to defend VAR”. No it’s not, it’s just moronic to continue to fight against it.
When it’s your team on the line, I am sure all the supporters in the world would be happy to wait 3 days rather than watch their player get a wrongful red card or the opp get a penalty that never was etc in a knockout game. I am slightly exaggerating but let’s think of VAR in this singular thought, if your team scores a goal but it’s given offside and it never was, and your player is sent off but it was never a red. Would you still be against VAR?
The only issue with VAR is its implementation. And the trial and error process is bound to have some errors. So let them test it around, as long as the right decision is taken at the end of it, VAR is needed and will be prefered over referees any day of any week. Do we want it to be much faster and better implemented? Yes. Do I want to see Lampard’s goal disallowed, players rewarded for diving, offiside goals given and more ? Never again in my life.
I would rather remove referees and automate the system with the on field referee just being a mouthpiece of the person monitoring the system and making better, quicker and smarter decisions. All VAR needs is to be refined into a quicker, better functioning system.
Aman Sheth
Bored crazy person has crazy football-related idea for content
After I read Dave Tickner’s article about Man Utd being knocked out of the FA Cup by Fulham I had an idea. Please trust me.
Imagine you arrive at the stadium of the football club you follow and there is a lot of commotion outside because there has been a road accident and people are trying to help those involved. As you look around you see there is a door marked “Authorised Personnel Only – No Randoms Allowed” and no-one is guarding or watching that door.
As you are curious and disrespectful of authority you furtively make your way to that door and when you realise that no-one has noticed what you are doing you push open the door with your back and go into what you hope will be an inner sanctum of your favourite club’s stadium.
When you turn around you are in a short corridor and in front of you is a set of double doors which is partly open. The left hand door bears the letters “VAR” and you immediately walk towards it, turning your head as you do to check that no-one has followed you. When you realise that you are on your own you walk through the doors and find yourself in a room containing banks of blank screens, silent speakers, controls and machines displaying flashing lights but only one impressive chair, in front of which is a space at a desk where there is a button marked “On”. You sit down in the chair and press the button and the doors of the room slam shut and the screens and speakers crackle into life. As you walked into the room you didn’t look to see what was written on the right hand door but next the screens and the speakers tell you where you are.
You are in VARADIS which stands for Varying Actions Results And Decisions In Sport. VARADIS is a time machine and as it has materialised in a football stadium it has the ability to show you the entire history of football. Every match, board meeting, training session and kickabout in a street everywhere in the world at any time is available for you to watch from that chair.
Furthermore, VARADIS gives you the power to go back to any moment in football history and change it. However, before you get carried away with the possibilities that being the God of Football gives you VARADIS gives you a warning: you can change anything in the history of football but you can only change one thing and afterwards you can only watch to see the effects your one change had.
If this football-themed sci-fi fantasy came true what would you change and what effects do you think that change would have? There is a whole world of possibilities but you can only make one change so choose carefully. Would you disallow Maradona’s “Hand Of God” goal for handball? When a fan at Old Trafford held up a banner saying “3 years of excuses and it’s still crap…tara Fergie” on December 9th 1989 would you sack Fergie the next morning? When the ball was passed to Sergio Aguero with the match against QPR tied 2-2 in injury time would you make him miss and City miss out on the title? Would you persuade Roman Abramovich to spend some of his billions buying a Formula 1 team rather than Chelsea? Would you stop the Premier League breaking away from the rest of the football league? Would you make Lionel Messi be born into a family from Rickmansworth?
You may get a few messages to the mailbox or an article out of this idea, you may get absolutely no responses at all or you may get so many responses you could add a new section to your site for publishing football time travel fantasies and discussions of “What if” scenarios. What would have happened if the “Hand Of God” goal had been disallowed, Maradona had been sent off and play was restarted at 0-0 with an England free kick? If Fergie had been sacked in 1989 who would have replaced him, would United still have won the Treble in 1999 and would the Glazers ever buy the club? If the Premier League hadn’t broken away would Arsenal have been able to sign Bergkamp, Vieira and Henry? If Aguero misses is Roberto Mancini sacked and does Pep Guardiola become City’s manager four years earlier than he actually did, before Fergie retires, Liverpool appoint Jürgen Klopp and Leicester City can win the title? In the entire history of football you change one thing. Does that change the entire future of football?
TL;DR – cross Match Of The Day with Doctor Who, When Saturday Comes with Sliding Doors or Soccer Saturday with The Matrix and see what you can come up with. “Let’s go back to Kammy who has taken the red pill. What’s happening?” “It’s unbelievable, Jeff!”
Ignore the bit about The Matrix. It’s a different concept. I just couldn’t resist the Kammy red pill line.
If it goes well you can thank me later.
Yours philosophically,
You Can Call Me Al (“All along, along, there were incidents and accidents”)
What really makes a BIG club?
Oddly, I had been wondering what the definition of a Big Club was before I read Dan Mallerman’s mail. Not sure if he answered what was mulling around my head rent free, but it is what it was.
Is it PL titles? That would be City and Liverpool then, no? And Utd, but that was over a decade ago. Chelsea have won it a couple of times since then mind you, and Leicester have won one, too, but I don’t think anyone would say they would be a member.
How about European trophies? If we go back to City and Liverpool, we cannot exclude Utd or Chelsea, but neither can we ignore West Ham.
How about just European places, irrespective of how that was achieved? In that case Arsenal definitely jumps in here, but so, too, do Spurs. Hell, even the likes of Southampton and Burnley qualify for inclusion. Are they Big Clubs? Would an Arsenal fan agree with Spurs being in contention? Doubtful.
Revenue perhaps? Here we find ourselves hearing the cries of ‘cheat’, ‘not organic’, and the like but this is akin to the traditional elitist wealthy pulling their noses up at someone who won 100m in the lottery; money is money after all. But here we find that Utd are skint, Arsenal have blown through hundreds of millions to little effect, and God knows what Chelsea are doing.
Fan base and global recognition? Yes, that’s the barrel being scraped that you hear. The go-to for the idiots amongst our respective fan bases, but I would point to the Dallas Cowboys, possibly one of the most recognisable NFL teams. When was their last Superbowl win? Exactly.
In short, the Big Club definition is completely arbitrary; It is nothing more than ‘my Dad is bigger than your Dad’. There is simply no way to define it, beyond looking at the last 5 years. Because where do we stop? In the PL era we must include Utd, but 1980s Liverpool would like a word, as would the 1930s Arsenal, Forest of the late 1970s, Huddersfield of the 1920s, and Villa of the 1890s.
Just accept and be happy with – like the song we so frequently hear from the terraces – ‘XXX is the greatest team in the World’.
Mike D
Arsenal doing pretty well for their investment
Blimey Lee, you should be employed to write Liverpool’s history – the glorious, rose tinted narratives could warm the whole city.
Liverpool’s ‘undervalued bargains’ midfield cost you 152m euros as of now (notably somewhat more than Rice), pretty much the definition of a big spend. Of them, MacAllister stands out simply because of the release clause, which admittedly, fair play, but he’d just won the world cup, so not an unknown – also probably not the final number for him according to Sky anyway.
Selling Coutinho for that much money is luck – the most ‘in the right place and the right time’ transfer ever; you will never convince anyone outside Liverpool that it wasn’t.
On Arsenal incidentally, that almost a decade = 6 years. Almost a billion quid = £653m. Averaging 28m euros per player signed (2m less per player than Liverpool under Klopp incidentally). You are also allowed to look things up before typing.
Given that has brought us our best season in 20 years last year and back to the top level and Champions League, most people would say that Arsenal’s investment has been very good. That the majority of the squad aren’t at their full potential yet, there’s a lot more to come. As I said before, Arteta gets a mulligan for this season because of the injuries, but if he gets more money, more luck and still can’t get us over the line, even supporters like me will get impatient.
There isn’t really much more to say on this – ultimately if you think every good signing your club makes is incredible foresight and your team is operating on God mode, rather than football being an incredibly complex system where the only general principle is ‘the more you spend the likelier it is you win things’, and transfers can go well or badly based on anything other than your scout reports, then fair enough, clearly a bit of back and forth in your lunch break with someone who likely also has better things to be doing won’t change your mind.
Tom, Leyton
Ten Hag > Arteta
Dion seems to be a bit slow. So let me back up the person who said Ten Hag > Arteta. Ten Hag won 2 trophies with a team that is not even 50% of the team Arteta has, and Arteta won nothing in that period. That makes it quite simple now, doesn’t it. It’s not even close. If coming 2nd made you a good manager, then Ole would be considered so as well don’t you think? And don’t cry about 1-2 points or 10-15 points. 2nd is 2nd, trophyless is trophyless. Everything else just doesn’t matter.
You keep talking about progress while defending a team that is regressing. Your points did not matter because when the time came, you wont get to 84 points this season, so when you did get 84 or 89 points, it mattered for nothing as there was someone ahead of you. Like there has always been since a good 21 years now.
Winning trophies with a much worse team > than coming in 2nd winning nothing with a much better team. You know which answer is right, and which is Arteta.
Aman Sheth
Obsessed with Tickers
Dear Sirs – I obviously don’t expect to be honored enough to have my letter contributions published on your pages every time, or even ever, but when you ignore my comments about the ludicrously one-eyed writings from Dave Tickner, which I provided clear embarrassing evidence of, regularly, that’s also ok I guess, but then to actually replace it with a couple of letters which supposedly claim that he is biased in favour of another team altogether, Liverpool, I can’t help but think that the gas lighting is official within these pages.
Guys, wtf?? This is crazy…. I suppose me saying that I am deciding not to read F365 anymore is nothing you should are about in isolation, nor am I narcissistic enough to think you should care, but I might suggest that I can’t be the only person to see the obvious and refuse to be told that we are somehow mental. Damn guys, come on. Is this really it??
Mike WHU
(Mike, we had one mail about Tickers supporting Liverpool which we published entirely tongue in cheek; we then had a mail rightly pointing out that he’s a Spurs fan. And you think we are gaslighting you? Does that not strike you as slightly odd? And self-obsessed as well as Tickner-obsessed? – Ed)
Telling off Ed for being measured
Don’t be so naive. You are attributing guile, cunning and intelligence to a Millwall goalie!!
You see those incidents all the time, the tackles where “I can leave a bit on him and get away with it” all the time.
I guess Ed is the bastion of moral standing so we shouldn’t expect any less piety, just a bit more knowledge of the game and how it’s played would go a long way.
That was premeditated assault, but no, whilst your player is in hospital with 25 stitches you take the moral high ground trying to pretend you’re better. Of course you don’t have to get angry but to deny the clear and obvious is just nauseating self serving guff.
Welcome to Ed Quoth the essay. Hopefully not someone who works for the police.
Fat Man (and he supports Oliver, what a f**king hero!)
