Football Soccer Goals

Daniel Agger believes there is still room for improvement at Liverpool after an impressive start to the season.

Jordan Henderson has promised ‘a lot more to come’ after scoring his first goal for Liverpool.

Since arriving at Liverpool, John Henry and the rest of the Fenway Sports Group team have hardly put a foot wrong, immersing themselves in the club’s history, bringing back a legend and giving him the support he needed to turn things around, and showing a willingness to invest in the playing staff in a way that hasn’t been seen at the club in the Premier League era. Henry has also shown a willingness—at times even an eagerness—to engage with the fans, both immediately through at times cheeky use of his Twitter account and with local supporter’s groups, and at a remove through occasional interviews with the press. The latter, at least, hasn’t always sat as well with the fans as some of his other actions since joining the club, as at times that willingness to engage the media can seem as though it goes against the long held belief that the club’s owners should simply sign the cheques and stay out of the limelight.

Still, in a world of Sky Sports and TalkSport—not to mention Twitter—and a global fanbase with an insatiable desire to be kept informed, there is a constant void that exists to be filled in a way that just wasn’t the case in the club’s glory days. Right or wrong, Henry’s occasional public commenting is quite nearly unavoidable in the modern landscape, something even those who lament the reality tend to accept, and so at the end of the day the important question becomes how the club is represented when Henry does speak—and how he uses the various forums he has access to to inform and reassure those still a touch nervous after being burnt badly by the club’s last set of owners.

Most recently, Henry talked to the Telegraph, touching on issues as diverse as the club’s goals for the season and his recent trip to Munich on a fact finding mission to Bayern’s Allianz Arena, perhaps the single most impressive club stadium built in the past decade. He also sets out the club on the high road, contrasting Alex Ferguson’s recent tirade against the FA and its officials—a rant seemingly entirely separated from reality wherein the Manchester United manager claimed those who oversee the Premier League treat his club like shit.

The referees impress me. Football officiating is so subjective—much more subjective than any other sport. But the more I watch—and I watch too many matches—the more impressed I am with referees.

It’s impossible to get every call correct because so many of the calls are highly subjective. We have slow motion cameras looking from various angles but a referee is on the move and only has one angle. The most amazing thing to me is how accurate linesmen are on offsides.

It’s hard to quite tell if Henry’s words are subtle PR, or if it perhaps simply reflects a dedicated stat guru’s surprise that anything based as heavily on subjective split-second decisions as officiating in football could be anything but laughably poor.

He also takes the time to talk about some of the general concepts behind Moneyball as FSG see it. Moneyball, of course, is a word that’s quickly gone from intriguing to annoying as supposed experts spout daily wisdom about what the club must do to uphold the tenants of a system Henry and FSG have never applied dogmatically to their other interests. At best it often seems regurgitated wisdom most closely tied to Billy Beane and the Oakland As, and as such would seem to have little or no application when it comes to figuring out how Henry and his team will approach Liverpool Football Club—aside, perhaps, from that they do indeed place value in statistics and in the way those statistics can be used to seek out value. It’s good, then, to hear something first hand on the subject from the club’s owner.

The nature of markets, and that includes player acquisition markets, is such that sooner or later any set of successful formulae that provide an excess return above investment are discounted.

By that I mean that eventually what was undervalued becomes more valued—sometimes to the point of being over-valued. It’s just a matter of how stubborn executives are with regard to preferring subjectivity over objectivity. At one point only Boston, Oakland and the Yankees placed a very high value on On Base Percentage and we were heavily criticised as stat geeks.

Then we won two World Series and now virtually all 30 clubs believe in the power of baseball’s hidden statistics. So with a limited payroll it’s become very difficult for Oakland to compete despite having some of the most brilliant people in baseball there.

They’re clearly stats geeks at FSG, and the acquisition of multiple midfielders all amongst last season’s top ten chance creators clearly shows at least one stat they value in football. But throughout the interview, Henry makes it clear that the primary goal over the short term is improving the club, full stop. For the time being at least, the only meaningful criteria for a club trying to dig itself out of a talent deficit left by the previous owners is whether any potential transfer dealing improves the squad’s ability to compete—and compete in depth—or not, with the club having absolutely zero interest at present of selling off assets with potential value to the on-field product in order to make a few more pounds out of the exchange.

For a number of years players of quality were being sold and players of lesser quality were being purchased. The club wasn’t being run by people with the kind of discipline it takes to be successful over the long-term. It’s odd to be criticised by some who think we are over-spending.

The worry seemed to be that we wouldn’t spend. But we’ve been consistent, we intend to strengthen this club annually but that doesn’t mean we will deficit spend. It’s up to us to strengthen revenues. Only then will the club be strong enough to compete in Europe.

Elsewhere, he also talks about concerns over UEFA’s fair play rules being upheld, as a handful of English club’s appear to have signaled they won’t play by said rules even while clubs in the big continental leagues do appear to be on board. In the end, though, he seems to send a clear message to the fans he knows are watching, circling back to the stadium issue after starting things off by name-checking Bayern Munich. Ticking off first groundshare as being unfeasible as the fans could never accept it, then ruling out a redeveloped Anfied thanks to the objections of local counsel, he finally moves on to the dilemma of a new ground only making sense if its development is at least partially subsidized through naming rights.

We would love to expand Anfield, but there are enough local and regulatory issues to keep that avenue stalled for years with no assurances that once begun it would bear any fruit.

If Anfield cannot be expanded a new stadium is wonderful choice. But the fact is we already have 45,000 seats. If a new stadium is constructed with 60,000 seats you’ve spent an incredible sum of money to add just 15,000 seats.

If the cost is £300m for an extra 15,000 seats, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Liverpool isn’t London, you can’t charge £1 million for a long-term club seat. And concession revenues per seat aren’t that much different at Emirates from Anfield.

That’s why the search is on currently for a naming-rights partner. And that could very well happen.

It seems likely, then, that the club’s final efforts to push ahead with redevelopment have fallen on deaf ears. But as with the last time Henry hinted at news on the stadium front, it seems fairly clear the club now has a good idea of where it has to go in order to be successful. It will be a sad day if the club indeed does leave Anfield as now appears increasingly likely, but if FSG can be half as successful as Bayern were actualizing the Allianz Arena, it will be hard to argue against the end result.

With August’s Premier League schedule finished and an international break set to take centre stage for the next two weeks, for many Saturday’s game against Bolton provided a useful comparison to last season’s matching fixture. The upside is seeing just how far the club has come in a very short time. The downside, of course, is that talk of Roy Hodgson becomes nigh on impossible…

*When it came to possession and chance creation, last winter’s Joe Cole in stoppage time last gasp of Roy Hodgson’s tenure victory at Anfield over Bolton was actually the superior performance. Which will come as a huge surprise to anybody who watched the match on Saturday while remembering little but the general malaise of Hodgsonian Liverpool towards the end of his unfortunate time with the club.

However, as monolithic as that time might seem in retrospect, Liverpool’s New Years Day display was one of the scant few bright spots before Dalglish took over—even if it came right at the end and was played to a stadium half full of empty seats. Liverpool actually played well that day. As well as they might have at any point under Hodgson, even if in the final tally that quite nearly wasn’t enough to get all three points. In the end, as Ed led with at the time, it was a match that allowed everybody for at least a moment to experience something other than the soul crushing ennui that had become de rigueur for those who remained committed.

Still, despite the unexpected numbers when comparing the attacks, there was one big change for Liverpool between the two games: Defensive pressure. Under Clarke and Dalglish this season the team played a much higher defensive line and managed fifty percent more successful tackles on the ground. It’s a telling statistic that signals the vast gulf between where the club is now compared to where it was at this time last season, when despite some decent attacking stats one of the pinnacles of Roy Hodgson’s time at the club seems a relatively poor performance sat next to a rather ho-hum, unexceptional day at the office for Dalglish’s squad. It can perhaps be a touch easy to overlook given the vocal commitment to pass and move football, but a renewed focus on defensive workrate, closing down the opponent, and playing a higher line in defense is as key as anything in the club’s heightened trajectory—something that comparing the two most recent matches at Anfield against Bolton highlights.

* While Liverpool fans may be moved to reflect on the changes from last August to now, there remains a resistance in the media to acknowledging Roy Hodgson’s quite negative spell at the club even existed. There is—perhaps unsurprisingly given his position as one of the media’s foremost darlings—an eagerness for many to jump straight from his good work at Fulham to his salvage job at West Brom while doing their best to pretend nothing even slightly negative lurks between the two relative highs:

He worked miracles at West Brom last season in a short space of time, and fully deserved all the plaudits he got for a remarkable turnaround; but he managed Liverpool for a longer period of time, and yet that gets brushed under the carpet as ‘too little time to make a difference.’

And all the while the while Jamie Redknapp and his ilk still like to bring up clichés of a negative Rafa Benitez whenever given half a chance. Even if, not entirely surprisingly, the facts spell out a different story and some intriguing parallels in the club’s recent managerial history:

It’s fascinating to see that Hodgson and Houllier have identical records: an average of just 1.7 goals per game at home. (Houllier’s record starts from 1999/00, his first full season in charge.)

Another identical record is that of Benítez from 2006 to 2010 (his last four seasons) and Dalglish since his return: 2.18 goals per game.

Both men took over teams that were averaging 1.7 goals a game and improved the scoring rate by a massive 30%.

* Meanwhile, as everybody looking in on the club seems to have used a comfortable demolition of Bolton at home as a chance to reflect, so too has Daniel Agger. Many will recall that Agger was far from shy in the fall of 2010 when it came to talking about the direction the club was heading under Roy Hodgson, with the Danish defender being shoved unceremoniously towards the exit due to differences he had with the manager over his insistence on passing the ball out of defense rather than hoofing it downfield. Now, however, Agger has nothing but positives for the club’s current approach to football that once again sees the classy defender as a vital player at the back:

My philosophy of how I want to play fits in with how the team is playing at the moment. That’s the way we all want to play.

We have some quality passers in the team and we’re playing it on the ground—that’s what people like to see. Results are the most important thing but if you can play like that it’s a bonus.

Word. Given how vocal he was when it came to his displeasure over Hodgson’s approach at the time, it’s hard to imagine he isn’t silently adding an “unlike last year” or two whenever he talks about the renewed commitment to pass and move football from the goalkeeper to the forwards. Though regardless, he might want to limit the right-footed efforts on goal for the sake of keeping proceedings attractive from a footballing perspective.

Hopefully we won’t have cause to mention Hodgson again around here for a good long while, but in the meantime, while we’re living in the past and holding on to grudges…

Arsène Wenger is in danger of being swept aside in the spate of cash unleashed by Chelsea and Manchester City

Arsenal have been swallowed up by the long shadow of that 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford. In addition to the immediate agony, the result raised questions as to whether the club can maintain its membership of the Premier League elite. The fees are exorbitant and Arsenal have come no higher than third since they were runners-up in 2005. Property development around the Emirates should be a boon eventually, but a sluggish economy causes delays.

Manchester United have no such worries and means could even be found for a splurge if necessary. The sport is usually dominated by the wealthy. If United’s commercial operations are formidable, Chelsea and Manchester City, the expected challengers, are funded by indulgent proprietors. The public’s mind is often taken off financial anxieties by the extravagance that still persists in football.

Only a curmudgeon could complain when City have David Silva and Sergio Agüero in the lineup as well as Edin Dzeko, scorer of four goals in the 5-1 rout at White Hart Lane. It was just last season that Tottenham Hotspur were in the Champions League, where they got to the quarter-finals before going out to Real Madrid.

Fans might look back on that campaign with disbelief. Access to the tournament appears, after all, as if it will be even more restricted in future. Money has often been critical to success in football but the materialism is unusually pronounced among most of England’s elite at the present. The Glazers, proprietors of United, are exceptions of a sort since there is no requirement to subsidise the club from their own funds.

Elsewhere, owners bear regular losses. Since the start of 2011, Roman Abramovich, right, has approved outlay at Chelsea of well over £100m, in total, for Fernando Torres, David Luiz, Juan Mata and Romelu Lukaku, with the desire to sign Luka Modric still intense. The Stamford Bridge club, however, cannot face quite so many charges of gross materialism when indignation has to be kept in store for City.

While a club such as Liverpool have made great efforts to improve their squad, the arrival of Luis Suárez, Andy Carroll and others has been financed to a notable extent by the Torres sale. Cash is generated more easily by those who are already wealthy.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s impact at Old Trafford has intensified the allure the club has held for generations. The craving of businesses to be associated with United verged on self-parody when DHL chose to sponsor the training kit for £10m a year.

Liverpool, aiming to achieve a better financial footing, have long contemplated a new stadium to be built in Stanley Park but such a project is taxing even to contemplate. Indeed the club has been pondering the scheme and striving to advance it since 2001.

Elsewhere these matters can barely be a consideration. While City may not own the ground at which they play, the naming rights to what is now the Etihad Stadium still brought them £400m, over a 10-year period, from the airline. City, of course, are owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family.

There are dilemmas in all this. Efforts by individuals to spend their way to domination of football are nothing new and there is often comic effect when projects go badly wrong. No one in the public at large minds a fiasco of that sort, but money can obtain success, especially when it is spent with the sort of finesse that made Jack Walker’s Blackburn Rovers champions of England in 1995.

There was a romance to that, all the more so since the club were not to repeat the achievement. The present-day situation is rather different, with owners aiming to put their club in a permanent elite dependent on means that others will never enjoy.

Manchester United cannot be put in that category and would most likely by overjoyed if financial fair play regulations encumbered their challengers. As it is, the spate of cash unleashed by City and Chelsea in particular sweeps the game along excitingly, despite the misgivings among the authorities.

Michel Platini, the president of Uefa, presses on with his financial fair play initiative and many clubs would be grateful if they were saved from their extravagant selves and forced to be prudent. A dilemma lies at the heart of all this. The spectacle of astonishing footballers holds us in thrall to such an extent that we avoid thinking of the way in which wealth warps the sport as a whole.

Ultimately, however, there would be an increased diversity and a greater element of surprise if clubs were denied “financial doping” and made to play clean. The perspective of an oligarch is one the rest of us can barely imagine but perhaps even they might come to value the element of surprise that is critical to sport.

• Anfield club offered £7m plus Yossi Benayoun back
• Chelsea still hope to sign Luka Modric and Alvaro Pereira

Chelsea have had an offer rejected for the Liverpool midfielder Raul Meireles of £7m plus Yossi Benayoun as a makeweight.

The London club will continue to talk to Liverpool in the hope of making progress for Meireles, as they look to close the transfer window with a flourish, but Benayoun is unlikely to be part of any deal – Liverpool sold the midfielder to Chelsea last summer for £5m and they have the first option on him but they do not appear to want him back.

Benayoun sees no future for himself at Stamford Bridge and he wants to leave, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Lille having shown an interest in him. Chelsea remain determined to sign Luka Modric from Tottenham, meaning that Benayoun has found himself advanced in a makeweight in those negotiations.

Chelsea also hope to take the left-sided player Alvaro Pereira from Porto before Wednesday’s deadline. They failed with a bid of €20m (£17.7m) last week, which fell short of the €30m buy-out clause in the Uruguayan’s contract, but they are encouraged by the player’s desire to complete the move.

Liverpool turn down a bid from Chelsea of £8m plus midfielder Yossi Benayoun in exchange for Raul Meireles, BBC Sport understands.

Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish is delighted with his team’s performance as a 3-1 win over Bolton ensures they lead the Premier League table.

Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish paid tribute to his players after a 3-1 victory over Bolton lifted them top of the Premier League table.

Liverpool produced an impressive performance to overcome Bolton 3-1 at Anfield and continue their strong start to the season.