A Place for Pep at Liverpool?

These sorts of stories, fairy-tales really, usually start this way. They look back to a storied past, once upon a time when we were young like that, and they predict a return if the time is right and the stars are aligned and the need is great. Well, for Liverpool, the time is certainly right and the need is immense, but unlike King Arthur who is slated to return if his kingdom is ever in need again, King Kenny is not the Scouse messiah. There is no yellow-brick road for the red side of Liverpool. Their problems are ¨too acute, too fundamental, to be solved by three or four short-term purchases.¨

Michael Calvin of the Mirror agrees with me. That´s his quote up there. He sees that the game has passed Dalglish by and rather than look towards the venerable boot-room for the very modern problems that afflict the red-side of town, he says that the new American owners should ask the same of their Spanish contingent. Pepe Reina and Fernando Torres are two of their best and brightest. They represent the changing face of Liverpool FC, Costa del Merseyside as it were, and they lived the changes that Rafa Benitez brought to the club. They know what should be done. Roy Hodgson certainly didn´t consult with them so it is imperative that any new manager bring two of your best players on board.

Up until then I was right with Calvin. Dalglish is not the answer just as much as a return for Rafa Benitez is out of the question. There is no way to bring back the magic of Istanbul in one fell swoop, but you won´t succeed by looking towards Pep Guardiola to come and save you either. ¨Guardiola has told them (Reina and Torres) he wants to come to England, when the time is right, and his work at Barcelona is complete. He is a principled man, a visionary. He could just be the new Shankly!¨

That isn´t realistic. Guardiola may yet leave Barcelona. He has mentioned to many in Spain that his time at Barca is limited, and he would like to try other leagues, other flavors, much like the last years of his playing career in fact, but that time is certainly not now. It isn´t realistic either to think that you can excise a bit of Catalunyan magic from La Masia and drop it on top of Melwood training ground. It doesn´t work like that. You can´t transplant an entire footballing culture to supplant another.

What you can do is bring someone in who has the experience to change the manner in which the club is being run. I think they already have. People make light of the management structure that John Henry and his group provide because they see ownership as a huge money-bag to reach into. Manchester City and Chelsea have had it, so why shouldn´t Liverpool? That fairy-tale´s over. That is not what these new owners are known for. They will take their time and rebuild their infrastructure. They will identify young players and build from within. They already have a director of football. Any manager they hire will fit into a system that is already in place. They don´t need to try to replicate Barcelona´s success, something particular to their own genetic make-up would be better.

If they want a Spanish club to emulate however, they should look to Villarreal. Villarreal have weathered the losses of star players (Juan Roman Riquelme) and star coaches (Manuel Pellegrini) and all with a limited budget competing in all competitions over the last decade against clubs with ten times the resources of a club. They have a youth-team set-up just as productive as La Masia and they get results, not with myth or fable but with and a forward thinking footballing cultured based on having practical owners who maintain a sensible economic structure.

There is no savior, no easy fix, no magic-pill for what ails Liverpool FC, and no will even after so many years in the desert, but there may still be a way for them yet.