KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum £49 million and he is gone

In terms of resell, it's not a bad deal for City. How much will Ozil, fabregas and Agueo be worth in 5 years time? How much will sterling be worth if football money continues to go through the roof?

Sterling will be happy because he wants to leave. LFC should be happy because we are making 100x what we paid on him and he isn;t worth £49m in today's market. City will be happy because they got the man they wanted and could make a profit on him in the future.

If Sterling continues his form of last year, they'd be lucky to get a quarter of that back in a few years even with transfer fees going stupid!

I disagree. People are letting their hatred of Sterling get in the way of of seeing that he's actually a very good player. Granted, last season wasn't as good as the season before but that can be said about all of our players, not just Raheem. Sterling was at his best when had quality players attacking with him - he'll get that level of support at City with Aguero, Silva, Toure and whoever else they bring in.

No they're taking in and spending more than most clubs in the pl, but it's in pursuit of a strategy to add large numbers of potentials in the hope of selling them at similar profit margins to that of Suarez and Sterling. There's been more than enough money running through the club to have signed enough top class players to win us the pl, but they chose to spend it on large numbers of potentials as per their moneyball strategy. It's not a lack of money, it's a deliberate policy which doesn't require winning things to succeed, and the investment required to succeed would be seen by them as a negative risk/reward and potentially counter productive to their objective, and given their objective they are right, but we never get to celebrate unfortunately. Poverty has nothing to do with what's going on here.

So what is their strategy then, to buy potential and sell a few at profits? However, that hasn't helped the club to make profits and this investment of theirs (LFC) has had very little return so far. On top of that the brand is losing value as we are not winning anything. So again, what is the strategy? At least Southampton is making huge profits by selling their top players.

The jury is out for me. He has potential to be a massive player but he's as thick as shitte as this saga has proved and I just don't think he'll kick on and put in the Suarez like hard work that is needed to reach his potential.

He has absolutely no incentive to work hard now either as he'll be on his near £200k a week and will get medals by proxy too. A couple of bad games and he'll be benched or need a holiday as he's tired and I don't think he has the mental capacity to deal with that. Just my opinion of course.

I hear what you're saying. But I bet if they were as cash rich as City, these policies wouldn't be in place.

The strategy is to make money. The strategy still stands, even if you don't think they have done that so far.

We have made some very profitable sales in recent years:

Torres - profit of £30m
Suarez - profit of £55m
Sterling - profit of £40m+

We have also made some losses:

Carroll
Aquilani
Keane
Balotelli (only a matter of time...)
Coates
Downing


And there are a number of players that look very much like they will be eventually sold at a loss:

Allen
Lovren
Lallana
Markovic


All in all, the club's spending level has been sky high for a long time, but it has been nullified by poor value signings. This has been going on since I can remember. Despite the spend levels of other clubs, we should have done a lot better in the Premier League years than we have done - our average finishing spot has been around 5th, which is very poor considering the amount we have spent.

Basically, we've ALWAYS been a badly run club.

Their strategy is based on the moneyball strategy they followed with some if not outstanding success with the Red Socks. Personally I think it won’t work in terms of winning anything worthwhile in the PL for a couple of reasons:
1. It’s predicated upon the use of statistics to identify transfer targets, but that puts them away ahead of where statistical analysis is currently at in football, hence the many failures, and lack of return’s so far as you say.
2. The pl is much too competitive for this type of policy, you can’t expect a team of young aspiring would be footballers to compete with even the best of the rest never mind the top clubs.
3. As they’ve said themselves these young potentials require up to 5 years to develop, and that is far too long a lead time in this league, the best of them will be gone before you are ready to win anything.
4. As you say the brand (while not losing much if any value so far) will undoubtably lose value with this policy in the longer term. However they have doubled the asset value since they took over, between good marketing and sponsorship deals, but they’ll have to cash in on that sooner, rather than later, because without winning anything those avenues will also dry up too(note the rumour’s of them looking for a buy’er) pretty quickly.
5. basing a competitive strategy almost exclusively on potentials in football is almost certain to fail, as far as winning anything is concerned, because far too many young potentials never make it to the top. They’ve recently sacked two 1st team coaches and employed another two who are deemed to be expert at developing young players, in what I consider to be one last throw of the dice with this strategy. However in my view even the best coaches can’t make silk purses out of sows ears!