Tends to bore the fuck out of me when people bang on and on about the commercial side of things on football forums, to be honest.
Amazing to what extent the game and the demographic of football fans has changed in recent years.
Fans banging on about ‘Net spend’, bragging rights over the number of fans who’ve attended friendly games, a clamour to appeal to as many ‘new’ fans as possible in Timbuc-fucking-too for fans of clubs that were historically for people from the cities from which they hailed, people wanking themselves stupid over clubs being able to pay their players 200k+ a week in wages, ‘our match day revenue is bigger than yours’ (never mind that we’re paying 50 quid plus for the privilege in a lot of cases!), ‘turnover’…….yeah, football’s big business these days but, as a fan at least, it all strikes me as a bit grim. Leave that stuff to the business people.
That all said, there’s a shit load Liverpool could do better both on and off the pitch currently– something most Liverpool fans are only too acutely aware of. Regarding the stadium, demand for tickets has significantly outweighed supply for upwards of 20 years – 44000 is far too small and even with the new increased capacity then Anfield will still be too small.
On the togger side of things, then Liverpool are still competitive (ish anway) around the top four but not really any more than that currently – whether that ultimately makes us ‘irrelevant’ is not really for me to say (and my view on it would be pretty fucking biased anyway). Others have made their views on this clear though – what I would say as an outsider looking in then it’s mad just how much some City fans have changed in recent years however.
From what I’ve seen so far then we’ll probably ultimately struggle to break into the top four with the current team. Then again, it’s still early days and we’ve looked more solid so far this season if nothing else. Benteke and the two full-backs also already look like decent buys to me – albeit Gomez is still very much in the ‘watch this space’ category.
It may ultimately boil down to how good Firmino turns out to be, whether we can get and keep Sturridge fit for any length of time and whether the defence can gain some cohesion for a large part of the season, as to whether we do make that top four.
Given we effectively played the whole of last season without a centre forward worthy of the name and finished 6th then I’d like to think there should be at least some improvements this year though.
That said, I can’t see anything other than a defeat at Arsenal on Monday night –particularly if Henderson’s not fit - but we’ll see.
Up the Reds!
