Sadio Mané could hold the answer to navigating the current Liverpool struggles. FSG and Jürgen Klopp should heed his message as the rebuild continues.
In a lot of ways, football is like chess. You have to move the right pieces at the right time. Short-term gains can often backfire, and you always have to look at the bigger picture. Sometimes, you can take one step back to take two steps forward.
That’s probably the strategy Liverpool has embarked on this season. After coming closer than any other English team ever has to winning a quadruple last season, the summer saw Jürgen Klopp’s side undergo several major changes.
Stalwarts like Divock Origi and Sadio Mané were moved on, while new guns like Darwin Núñez were brought in to fill the void that had been left behind.
Klopp knows his side is not getting any younger, and football always works in cycles. If you don’t refresh sooner or later, you will run out of steam. The ravages of time, and the wear and tear on the body will always catch up with professional athletes: such is the fallibility of human nature.
But this is still a unique project Liverpool has embarked upon, because the last attack Klopp built was assembled gradually. FSG didn’t sign attackers almost all at once in the space of 12 whirlwind months, but instead integrated them year by year.
First Roberto Firmino was slotted into the puzzle and converted into a forward after Klopp took over in his first year. Then in his second year Mané came into the picture, marking the manager’s first major foray into the transfer market. He was allowed to gel with Firmino and settle into life at Anfield before the following season Mohamed Salah came in to complete the puzzle and establish one of the most feared offensive trios in world football at the time.
It took Klopp almost three years to build that formidable attack. Now, though, he has been tasked with the same responsibility in the space of just one single year. Since January of last year, Liverpool has brought in Luis Díaz, Cody Gakpo and the aforementioned Núñez.
The expectation has been that they would all hit the ground running straightaway. But perhaps many have forgotten it wasn’t necessarily like that with Liverpool’s previous front line. Salah may have started his Liverpool career on fire, but he was coming into a forward line where two-thirds of Klopp’s components had already settled and were integrated into the system, so it was easier for the Egyptian to find his feet. The injured Díaz and still-new Núñez can hardly play the role of Firmino and Mané for Gakpo.
Right now, Liverpool is not only asking its three new forwards to settle into Liverpool’s system but also to learn to play with each other, and that’s always going to take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes. Liverpool is not the only example of this. Look how long it took Mikel Arteta to get the best out of Arsenal.
Liverpool is undergoing a transition in almost every department at the moment, and the fruit needs time to ripen. That might take a couple of seasons, or perhaps things will click sooner. There is no precedent for such radical change and overhaul at Anfield.
But sooner or later, with a little bit of patience, Klopp’s side will be back at the pinnacle of the game. He’s done it at Liverpool before, and he should be trusted to do it once more. Núñez, Díaz and Gakpo have already shown flashes of their exciting potential, and with their relative youth, there is of course much more to come.
