on.
Having blocked his move to Arsenal the previous summer, Liverpool knew Suarez would exit in 2014 and pre-empted it by tying him to a new contract with a higher release clause of £75 million. It was still a snip for a player of his gifts, but Barça snapped him up for £10 million less than that fee after he was suspended from all football-related activity for four months for biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini during the World Cup.
Liverpool had a long time to prepare for life without their talisman but botched it. A process that started with priority target Alexis Sanchez joining Arsenal instead, was followed by next choice Loïc Rémy from Chelsea failing a medical, before the final pick was between an aged Samuel Eto’o and Mario Balotelli. Rodgers had publicly said he ‘categorically’ didn’t want the latter, but the maverick Italian was the player he got.
Balotelli was one of eight new first-team signings bought to the tune of £107.5 million to cushion the blow of losing Suarez. It was neither the wisest approach nor the best use of the money given to the manager, and other members of Liverpool’s transfer committee were, as one senior staffer put it, ‘not in the same book let alone on the same page’ in designing the squad.
With so many incomings, FSG understood there would be a reset of sorts. Adam Lallana was part of that mass recruitment drive during the summer transfer window of 2014, the midfielder costing £25 million from Southampton. He recalls how arduous his debut season was. ‘There were so many new players signed: a lot of different cultures, characters, languages and playing styles all coming together,’ says Lallana, who would go on to spend six years at Anfield before joining Brighton in July 2020.
‘It was a big adjustment for us, but also for the guys already at the club. We needed time to settle, but the expectation was huge. Liverpool lost Suarez, and Sturridge was injured, so the goals were effectively taken out of the team, yet there was still this pressure to go one better and win the league. It was a really difficult place to be in 2014–15 and things felt disjointed.
‘The way the season ended with that 6–1 defeat at Stoke City was really demoralising. We then lost Stevie [Gerrard] and Raheem [Sterling]. It only increased the pressure. It was intense. There was more fear than freedom and not a lot of confidence around.’
When FSG sat down with Rodgers to deconstruct such a pitiful season, they had underscored that it wasn’t just the listless performances that were a problem, but the anxious atmosphere around the club and lack of direction. While the owners appreciated the mitigating circumstances — reconfiguring the team post-Suarez, injuries, new signings needing to settle — they believed the manager hadn’t extracted the best from the squad. He was also underplaying his own hand by not fully integrating, trusting and maximising the strengths of those players he didn’t particularly want at the club.
FSG felt there weren’t enough ideas and diverse viewpoints being encouraged, with the manager’s coaching staff essentially only facilitating his plan rather than highlighting holes or offering suggestions.
There was an acceptance from Rodgers that a freshening up of the backroom team was needed to address the problems. His long-serving assistant Colin Pascoe was sacked and the contract of first-team coach Mike Marsh wasn’t renewed. Both decisions proved universally unpopular at the training complex, with players and staff outspoken about their views. Worse still, was the selection of Sean O’Driscoll as the new assistant manager.
‘When those changes happened, the dynamic completed shifted,’ says one employee who works closely with the backroom team. ‘It really didn’t sit well with anyone. Sean had a totally different opinion to Brendan and would openly counter his philosophy in a very abrupt way. He would say, “Why do we need to build from the back when we don’t have the players for it? Just smash it long.” He would go against the manager’s ideology and it would make the staff very uncomfortable as we had to argue with him.
‘We needed to all be pulling in the same direction, we needed consistency, we needed repetition, we needed to be convinced of our plan, but we didn’t have that. Sean rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. His mannerisms, his personality, his way of speaking to people wasn’t what we were used to. Everything was different, everything was up in the air and didn’t feel right.’
Former Liverpool player Gary McAllister was also added to the set-up as first-team coach, with Dutchman Pep Lijnders promoted from the academy to become first-team development coach.
‘There was probably too much that was new, too much to figure out during a pre-season when we just had to hit the ground running,’ the employee continues. ‘Dealing with Sean was the biggest thing to get used to. It was apparent that it wasn’t going to work and it was apparent that it wasn’t going to work very quickly.’
During that summer, FSG still hoped Rodgers and his coaching staff could navigate Liverpool back to the right path. They had to back him. Jürgen Klopp, their ideal choice as a replacement, wanted to recharge his batteries ‘after seven intense and emotional years’ at Borussia Dortmund, and was going to ‘take a break until further notice’.
For all the unease from the owners over how far away Liverpool were travelling from their expected direction, it was offset by the residual joy of the 2013–14 campaign, where the club missed out on the Premier League title by just two points while scoring 101 goals. And for all his faults as a young manager, Rodgers was a skilled tactician and excellent on the training pitches. Despite muddling through 2014–15, he was still the reigning League Managers Association Manager of the Year. Talents like Luis Suarez, Daniel Sturridge, Raheem Sterling and Philippe Coutinho had elevated their play under his guidance, with tweaks helping them find the edge to become a feared creative and attacking foursome on the pitch.
‘He helped me with my runs, arriving in the area at the right time and coming in from wide, which benefited my confidence,’ Suarez would explain two years after leaving Anfield. ‘We worked hard on finding ways I could isolate players and then try to beat them, man on man. That was the only way I could succeed in England … I wasn’t proven and I had to adapt to the Premier League, which Brendan knew. He knows all about English football and he educated me to become successful.’
When Manchester City paid Liverpool £49 million for Sterling in July 2015 — then a record sum for an English player — it was largely on account of the positional and tactical dexterity the forward had learnt while working with Rodgers.
When Brendan Rodgers parted company with Swansea City to become manager of Liverpool in June 2012, his panoramic view of the game, carved from travelling around Europe for an in-depth education from different leagues, clubs and managerial minds, was welcomed. He could communicate with players in multiple languages and was very popular with the ones he didn’t ostracise at Liverpool.
While Rodgers had a painful habit of falling into superficiality and unnecessarily selling himself at every opportunity, most at the club remember him as a warm man, who had a tireless work ethic. His upbringing on a council estate in County Antrim’s Carnlough — where he was taught the value of creating a living by his dad, Malachy, and the importance of empathy by his mum, Christina — underpinned everything he did. Rodgers sadly lost both his parents early: his mother, who volunteered for an Irish charity, was 52 when she had a sudden heart attack. Not long after, his father succumbed to throat cancer aged 59.
Family was a powerful element for Rodgers and he often tried to motivate the squad by plugging into their loved ones. In his autobiography, Crossing The Line, Luis Suarez revealed the special touch Rodgers applied to pre-match team talks as they chased the title in 2013–14. ‘He had contacted our mothers, one by one, and asked them to write something about their sons,’ the forward explained. ‘Before every game, as we went on the run which saw us come so close to winning the title, he would spend the final few
