I'm With Stupid
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 6 May 2013
- Messages
- 20,472
Yeah but Liverpool were willing to fork out a world record fee for a defender to make that extra push to win the title (haha) when they were probably going to get CL anyway. I wonder whether the rags' bosses would have spent £80m on Harry Maguire if they were comfortably qualifying for the CL every year but they wanted to push for the title. Yes Liverpool got lucky with one or two players, but that only happened because they were willing to spend a lot of money on quite a large number of players. Salah might have been a bargain in hindsight, but they had to buy a lot of players and spend a lot of money on the whole squad to get lucky on that one player and build a team to get the best out of him.Yes - but 1 or 2 players can swing it. Take Mo Saleh out of Liverpool and they would just be another club in the top 6 - he got them into CL final then on the back of that they VVD and they won the CL and game 2nd in the PL. That was all down to the 44 goals he scored in his first year. Any top 6 club could be transformed by a player scoring that many goals.
Having said that, a lot's changed since the days of Arsenal's constant 4th place finishes. For a start, there's a lot more competition from teams willing to spend a lot of money, and also the Premier League deal is worth so much that the Champions League is relatively less important financially now. Sure it's better to qualify than not, but failing to qualify one or two years isn't the disaster it used to be.