LONDON — The American owners of Liverpool F.C. and of Aston Villa have begun their postseason purge of the teams’ management.
After this weekend, the Russian owner of Chelsea will be on their tails, most likely also seeking a new manager or coach to turn his team around.
The equation is simple: Only winners succeed in the soccer business, and anyone who believes that the English Premier League is not a business has little idea of what attracts overseas investors to the clubs. Alex McLeish learned that Monday, when he was fired after just one season with Aston Villa.
The dismissal of Kenny Dalglish as Liverpool’s manager is an emotional subject. More than any team in England, with the possible exception of Newcastle United, Liverpool is a club of the people.
And when Fenway Sports Group, owners of the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball, ousted the previous American overlords at Liverpool in October 2010, the group led by John Henry and Tom Werner swiftly responded to popular appeal.
They gave the supporters what they vociferously wanted, a return of the legendary figure Kenny Dalglish, 61. A great player of the past, a successful manager 20 years ago, a man with Liverpool in his soul, Dalglish was able to buy time for the group from Boston.
Buy is a relative term. Fenway Sports Group oversaw a $200 million turnover of the playing staff, though much of that was recycled money because Liverpool sold as well as bought heavily in the transfer market.
If all the players coming in were “King Kenny’s” choices, then he has fallen short after 18 months on the job. The team finished eighth in the league standings, way off the Champions League qualifying places. Liverpool lost as many games as it won and finished 37 points behind the two Manchester clubs at the top of the league — and this in a season where the quality of the competition was decidedly below par.
In parochial terms — and this matters in the tribally driven English culture — Liverpool finished behind its close neighbor, Everton, for the first time since 2005. And Everton, still English-owned, is a financial pauper in comparative spending terms.
Dalglish is not to blame for every shortcoming at Liverpool. The owners have recently removed the men responsible for identifying talents, for keeping players healthy and for public relations.
Some of that fallout goes back to last winter, when Dalglish misjudged the public mood — and the informed American ownership — by demonstrably standing by Luis Suárez when the Uruguayan player was accused of racially abusing Patrice Evra of Manchester United.
It was an old-fashioned response by Dalglish, a manager siding with his player no matter what the player did while representing Liverpool. Fenway, which is competing for business from fans around the globe, belatedly intervened in that misjudgment.
Dalglish is gone because of results, because of the image abroad, and because he cut a forlorn figure on the sidelines, unable to suggest anything other than bad luck for the failings of the team.
Henry, and particularly Werner, should not be accused of being absentee landlords looking at their club from across the ocean. Their group has understood the essence of Liverpool, the strength of its bond with the fan base, and the sentimental attachment to Dalglish.
But each failure to qualify, at least, for the Champions League costs the club $50 million a season. Each failing in the Premier League costs television exposure, prize money and the thing most important to selling the brand, pride.
Dalglish is not a bad person, but his plea for time ultimately became a gamble that the owners felt they could no longer afford.
Their search now is not simply for a manager or coach; it is for men across the board who can give Liverpool a new dynamic. The speculation that the club requires a much younger man than Dalglish may be way off the mark.
Manchester City, the champion on goal difference, has a coach, Roberto Mancini, who is 47. Alex Ferguson, the manager at Manchester United, is 70. Jupp Heynckes, the coach at the Champions League finalist Bayern Munich, is 67. Roberto Martinez, Brendan Rodgers, Paul Lambert and Alan Pardew, all managers who have won admirers because of their teams’ styles and results this season, are between 38 and 50.
One imagines that the Boston group has a long-term plan and an agenda for change. Henry and Werner have to look now beyond the sentiment, and make a sweep of appointments based on their experience of running the Red Sox, a long-suffering franchise that won its first championship in 86 years just a few years after they took over.
Do they hire a coach first, or the sports director? Does age come into it, or does the experience of men like Ferguson, Heynckes, and Fabio Capello, for example, show that knowledge is paramount? Every club in Europe would like to get its hands on Pep Guardiola, who leaves Barcelona this month because, at 41, he feels burned out by the intensity of motivating world-class players.
Liverpool, no doubt, would love Guardiola’s style. But Chelsea would get him if salary could change the Spaniard’s mind. And rumor has it that Chelsea might opt for Capello as its next coach, or a combination of Guus Hiddink with Marco van Basten.
Change is due this English summer, as everyone chases the Manchesters.
Kenny’s Dalglish’s retracing of the very legacy he left at Liverpool all those years ago had always threatened to be a precarious task. Even at the time of Dalglish’s makeshift appointment, the perennial soccer soul-searcher — should a hero ever return? — persisted.
Just over a year later, Dalglish, along with Kevin Keegan and others who have fallen victim to the temptation of a second-coming, might admit they probably shouldn’t, after the man known as King Kenny on Merseyside was fired by Liverpool’s Boston-based owners, Fenway Sports Group.
Aside from a deceptive honeymoon spell in which the club finished fifth last spring, Dalglish endured rather than enjoyed his return to Anfield. The same could be said for the club’s supporters, who were afforded very little delight even in their season’s zenith, the Carling Cup final win over Cardiff City. When it ended with Anthony Gerrard’s crucial miss in the penalty shootout, the reaction seemed to be relief rather than rejoicing among the red contingent at Wembley.
Fenway Sports Group inherited a failing club, and Dalglish inherited a similarly failing team, but neither has made the progress either wanted, and that is the reason his second spell as Liverpool manager has now come to an end. But while fans of Premier League clubs may rightfully direct the focus of their blame for uninspiring, and ultimately failed, managerial appointments on those with the briefcases and Bluetooth earpieces in the executive seats, Henry and F.S.G. should not be targeted in the same way.
Such was the clamor from Liverpool fans 18 months ago for King Kenny, as Dalglish is known, to be anointed as the man to salvage a season left in supposed ruin after the ill-fated reign of Roy Hodgson, that Scott Murray of The Guardian even claimed, “Had the board unveiled their new permanent manager, and that man was Jose Mourinho, or perchance Pep Guardiola, the appointment would have been greeted with cries of bitter disappointment, if not a nuclear blast of outright hostility.”
There always appeared to be a disconnect between the direction F.S.G. envisaged for Liverpool and how Dalglish interpreted that strategy. It was a miscommunication that seemed to permeate the club, demonstrated by the recent departures of Damien Comolli as director of football and Ian Cotton as communications director.
Dalglish’s appointment itself did not correlate with F.S.G.’s blueprint for the future of Liverpool, which envisaged a comprehensive reformation of the club’s structure to bring about a coherent philosophy, from academy to first team, in the style of Ajax and Barcelona. Jurgen Klopp of Borussia Dortmund and Marseille’s Didier Deschamps appeared endowed with the appropriate skill-set to at least launch such a project, and both managers’ agents were reported to have met with Comolli before Hodgson’s departure.
But in suffering only five defeats in his 18 league matches as interim coach, Dalglish, 61, almost forced Henry to appoint him on a permanent basis. It was an arrangement dictated by the fans, not the owners.
Now that arrangement has run its course after a dismal season that saw Liverpool achieve their lowest league position since 1994 and their lowest win percentage (37 percent) since 1954, while £70 million worth of squad investment — in Andy Carroll, Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson — failed to impress. Add to that the furor of the Luis Suárez-Patrice Evra racism battle, which still smolders in the background, and the past nine months would have been challenging for any manager. Had it been anyone else, it’s doubtful he would’ve lasted this long.
Dalglish’s position was untenable. The results were disappointing, but more worryingly, more destructively, there appeared to be no understanding between the manager and the boardroom. Both parties clearly had very different visions of how to move forward, and that atmosphere was undoubtedly detrimental to the outcome of both on and off the pitch results, Unfortunately for Dalglish, some decisions that affect what happened on the field are made by those off it, not the other way round.
Of course, the decay runs far deeper than just underperformance on the field, and with the club’s managing director, Ian Ayre, rumored to be joining Dalglish on his way out of Anfield. It is this institutionalized overhaul that suggests Liverpool may be without clear direction for some time. F.S.G. has certainly given itself a demanding brief, with no less than four senior positions (manager, managing director, director of football director and director of communications) possibly to fill before the new season commences in August.
Wigan Manager Roberto Martinez has been linked with the job, as has Andres Villas-Boas, who had embarked on a project at Chelsea more suited to F.S.G.’s ambitions at Liverpool, only to have his long-term vision of the club terminated along with his contract. Still, one name resonates loudly with hurting Liverpool supporters: Rafael Benitez, who is still regarded as something of an icon on Merseyside, despite the ignominious manner of his departure from Anfield two years ago. He has been installed as an early favorite to take over.
Whether Henry and F.S.G. consider Benitez compatible with their plan for the future of the club is not yet known, but in Benitez’s availability they have an instant opportunity to repair the fragile rapport with those unsure of the American owners’ intentions in England.
Dalglish represented something of a protective barrier to F.S.G., as fans directed their frustrations directed towards him rather than the owners. In firing him, they have cast away their shield. Only Benitez would restore that buffer zone between Liverpool and Boston.
But should Benitez indeed be offered the chance of a return, he may need to consider the lesson learned by the man he’d be replacing: heroes should probably never return.