ACCORDING TO DAMIEN COMOLLI, Liverpool’s former Director of Football, the club’s summer recruitment strategy ‘kind of destroyed what they built’.
Having sold Luis Suarez to Barcelona, the Merseyside outfit spent heavily to bring in a litany of new players – Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren, Lazar Markovic, Mario Balotelli, Alberto Moreno, Divock Origi, Emre Can and Rickie Lambert. And Comolli feels that despite all of the acquisitions being talented players, the level of transfer-activity may have been unnecessary, especially when contrasted with another club that experienced something similar.
I think it’s very interesting to compare it with Atletico Madrid’s approach. They and Liverpool both lost their key player – Diego Costa won the league for Atletico on his own and took them to a Champions League final on his own. Luis Suarez took Liverpool to second place on his own, Champions League too. Atletico asked themselves ‘Can we find a replacement for Costa that we can afford? No we can’t. But what we can do is sign Mandzukic, who is quite similar, and Griezmann.’ They basically swapped one for two and kept a very stable team. Liverpool have done it the other way around.”
Last year at Liverpool, there were a number of modest signings with Mamadou Sakho’s arrival from PSG the most expensive at £16.7m. Twelve months prior, there was the same approach with Joe Allen, Daniel Sturridge and Fabio Borini joining for a combined total of just over £40m. At the same time, younger players were given opportunities to stake their claim. Comolli feels the recent transfer deals go against the strategy that had been successfully deployed over the last number of years.
“Liverpool have invested in youth with the likes Philippe Coutinho, Mamadou Sakho, Raheem Sterling, Jon Flanagan – and suddenly they change everything. I think the philosophies (at Atletico and Liverpool) are very different and time will tell which is the best one.”
But Atletico still have a very functional team and are doing very well – they haven’t destroyed what they’ve built. You look at Liverpool from the outside and they’ve kind of destroyed what they built, what they had. If you compare the two clubs – and if you ask yourself whose been the most successful at it, you’d say Atletico Madrid.”
Liverpool’s defeat against Newcastle last weekend was their fourth of the season and it was a performance devoid of inspiration, creativity and energy. But Comolli also feels the group may be struggling physically, if last Saturday is anything to go by.
“I don’t know what’s going on from a fitness point of view. They don’t look right. Being in clubs for a long time, I know sometimes that the eyes tell you that the team is not right physically but when you look at the data, it tells you otherwise. But when you look at the Liverpool players against Newcastle, the quick players looked slow, the players with great stamina looked heavy-legged so I don’t know if there’s a physical aspect to why they’re not performing.”
Comolli was in Dublin earlier this week, speaking at Web Summit 2014. During a discussion on statistics in sport and what the next breakthrough could be, he gestured to the audience and said: If there’s someone in the room who can, in the next 5 years, measure team chemistry, please contact me’.
He revisited the topic of team dynamics when he spoke exclusively to TheScore.ie about Liverpool’s current malaise.
“Last year, as much as they were killing everybody with the pace they had, the team spirit, team dynamics, togetherness and cohesion was unbelievable in the second part of the season. And it seems that this season, they’ve lost that completely. Which brings me back to my first point – bringing so many players in compared to Atletico Madrid. Did they kill the team spirit? Did they kill the cohesion they had? Maybe they did and that takes a long, long time to come back – especially if results aren’t going their way.”
But Comolli does feel that as much as the loss of Luis Suarez has affected Liverpool, Daniel Sturridge’s prolonged spell on the sidelines has ensured an insurmountable double-blow. Losing two potent attackers at the same time, Comolli says, is usually devastating.
That’s why Liverpool deserve credit. Losing your strike-force – one player because he’s sold, the other because he’s injured, is probably too much to cope with. If Sturridge was fit, it would be a different story. But it reminds me so much of what happened to us at Spurs. We had programmed to sell Dimitar Berbatov and we ended up selling both Berbatov and Robbie Keane because Keane wanted to go and the money offered by Liverpool was unbelievable and impossible to turn down. And then we lost the best attacking partnership in the Premier League – the best pair over two seasons was Berbatov and Keane in terms of assists made and goals scored. Liverpool have been getting a lot of criticism but I think it’s a bit unfair because Sturridge is not there. If it’s still not working when Sturridge gets back, then there’s really grounds for concern.”
