Liverpool’s lack of movement in the transfer market on transfer deadline day and reluctance to meet Fulham’s asking price for Clint Dempsey just brought into sharp focus how wrong they had gone in the past. Damien Comolli’s spell at the club will not be remembered in a positive light, and the club are still counting the cost for his ruinous time at Anfield, just as Tottenham did in the past.
Comolli originally moved to Liverpool back in November 2010 as Director of Football Strategy before being promoted in March 2011 to a Director of Football position – his job was to oversee player recruitment and what an absolutely awful job he did of it.
Everyone and their dog knows the litany of barely believable fees forked out for deeply average, technically limited talent at Liverpool under Comolli’s tenure – making Andy Carroll the eighth most expensive player of all-time at £35m still hasn’t quite sunken in, while Stewart Downing, an average midfielder who can’t beat a man was brought in for £20m from Aston Villa and a promising but still raw Jordan Henderson was signed for £16m from Sunderland.
Liverpool’s inability to negotiate a good deal for themselves is well-known around the world now and paying well over the odds has become common practice, but this was off the charts. The bank is empty now for Brendan Rodgers and he’s been forced to reign in spending and trim the club’s hefty wage budget as a result.
The term ‘Moneyball’ is one that’s often floated about with reference to this period of Liverpool history, one which they would most likely want to forget, but it seems that those which use it have a very loose grasp on its meaning. It’s supposed to be linked to buying players cheaply, who perform a certain role in a side very well, and they in turn essentially ‘buy’ wins. This grand expenditure bordering on the negligibly indulgent is nothing like Moneyball and it never was – it was just hastily added because the owners FSG used it at their baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, after copying Billy Beane’s methodology.
Cast your eye around the signings made in that eighteen-month period, and only Luis Suarez is guaranteed of a regular starting spot in the side now, while Jose Enrique and Sebastien Coates remain in contention. Craig Bellamy has since moved on to Cardiff, Charlie Adam has to Stoke, Carroll has been marginalised to such an extent that he was allowed to leave on loan to West Ham, while Downing and Henderson were reportedly seen as little more than bargaining chips in the club’s pursuit of Dempsey.
The sheer amount of money that was wasted is off the charts and exposes the flawed logic of buying players off the back of a good season or decent six-month spell of form. Adam left at nearly half the amount he was bought for just a year on, the club would be lucky to recoup half of what they paid for Carroll, while Downing is now a reserve left-back and Henderson a Europa League back-up player, and they both have practically now sell-on value. The mismanagement was on a huge scale and the club may still take some time to recover.
Whenever analysing Comolli’s history at Tottenham, misty-eyed revisionism always seems to get in the way. While the man himself is quick to point out that he discovered Gareth Bale and take credit for his subsequent success, it’s worth remembering that he was regarded at the time as one of Britain’s top young prospects, so it was hardly the needle in a haystack that it’s often made out to be.
Over that three-year period at White Hart Lane, while he may have helped the club sign Luka Modric, Bale, Berbatov, Corluka and Assou-Ekotto, there was also a huge swathe of rubbish that came into the club such as Chimbonda, Ghaly, Gilberto, Rocha, Hutton and Bentley. This doesn’t even take into account the amount spent on players who have been good elsewhere since but just failed to perform at White Hart Lane like Bent, Prince-Boateng, Dos Santos, Pavlyuchenko, Murphy and Taarabt, while Kaboul was only good after being sold to Portsmouth and being bought back.
He helped the club spend £195m in three years and you could count his roaring successes on one hand, with a number of them failing to live up to expectations or only showing the best of their ability fleetingly. The thought that the club are making the most of Comolli’s successes in the transfer market to this day is dangerously myopic and conveniently one-sided.
Liverpool have had to cut their cloth accordingly and the era of big spending at Anfield is now over as a result, while Daniel Levy at Tottenham is now infamous, much to the chagrin of the club’s fans, for only spending what he has and when he has it, which led to yet another muddled and ultimately disappointing slice of deadline day activity this summer.
He may have helped Arsenal find the likes of Gael Clichy, Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Eboue for a pittance, but since then in his next two jobs in England at both Tottenham and especially Liverpool, the sheer amount of money wasted just isn’t worth thinking about and both clubs now operate differently since his departure, which tells you all you need to know about how scattergun his approach was and how successful it was after his departure, and he’d be extremely fortunate to ever work in the Premier League again now given his reputation and penchant for outrageous extravagance.
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