Yesterday I watched an utterly extraordinary thing – the sight of a Liverpool team absolutely capitulating in front of my very eyes. After 60 minutes of a pretty rugged game between them and Fulham at Craven Cottage, they just gave up, conceded two girls, and suffered two red cards to boot. It was as disastrous as it could be for the Merseyside team, since a win was badly needed to have any chance of keeping up with the pace setters in the Premier League.
So why are they struggling? Lots of reasons to be honest:
- They sold some of their best players in the summer (like Xabi Alonso).
- They are still relying on their best players – Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres.
- Individual performances are way below last season’s quality, with Jamie Carragher in particular doing badly.
- Rafa Benitez has made some bizarre tactical decisions this year that haven’t resulted in wins. Instead of people asking whether or not Torres should have been substituted, why not play him at all if they knew he wasn’t completely at 100% fitness. However, it didn’t stop him scoring yesterday.
There are also the financial woes that are still lingering over the club. Put simply, they’re in deep trouble. If Liverpool fail to qualify for the knockout stages of the Champions’ League this season, the situation doesn’t look good. Last year, if you got through to the knockout stages, you’d get €8 million. This year, that figure has increased. So you can imagine if Liverpool didn’t qualify for the competition for next season, it would be a staggering financial blow. David Conn wrote a great article for The Guardian a week and a half ago calculating how much the club could possible lose:
It is therefore impossible to put a figure on what Liverpool might lose out on if they fail to qualify from their group, but last season, when they reached the quarter-final while Arsenal and Chelsea reached the semi-final and United the final, the knockout stage was worth around €8m (£7.2m) to Liverpool. This season, the cost would be greater, because Uefa has provisionally announced an increase in Champions League TV and sponsorship deals, from €820m to €1.05bn (£950m). It is safe to say that if Liverpool were to be knocked out, they would fall markedly behind financially, especially if the other three clubs go through.
Failing to qualify at all for next season’s competition, a prospect nobody at Anfield is prepared to contemplate with barely two months of the season gone, would involve missing out on a very important slice of Liverpool’s income. Last season’s earnings were €23.2m from Uefa directly, plus unspecified income earned at Anfield from the Champions League matches themselves, and the money available next season, which four English clubs will certainly be earning, will be almost 25% higher.
So what is the best thing for Liverpool to do? Forget winning the Premier League, since they’ve destroyed their chance completely, and try at the very least to get to the knockout stages of the Champions’ League and solidify a top four Premier League finish. It won’t automatically stop the debt, but it will ease the worries slightly.
