Liverpool might not miss Luis Suarez
A reminder that Liverpool have been through this before.
Laurence Griffiths
Liverpool spent the duration of last summer's transfer window insisting that they will not sell Luis Suarez, because they can't sell their best players if they want to return to the Champions League. A year later, the Reds are back in Europe's biggest competition, Suarez has become the most valuable striker in the world, and he's simultaneously decreased has value to Liverpool by biting Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup, earning himself a four-month suspension.
In swooped Barcelona, who seem to have been working on a deal for Suarez with Liverpool for quite some time. His latest bite complicated things, but they've worked out a deal anyway, and Suarez will head to Camp Nou for a fee believed to be around £75m.
It’s potentially devastating for anyone to lose their best player, but as Liverpool FC blog The Liverpool Offside reminds us, the Reds have been through this before, and they looked smart in the process.
What comes next for Liverpool, though, will be the important part, and the club must reinvest wisely to hold on to the top four gains of last season. And what comes next for each fan will be to decide how they remember Suarez-as goalscoring saviour or as the repeat offender who spent last summer agitating for a move away.
For most, perhaps, it will be something in between. He was a brilliant player to watch. He was also a massive headache and potential liability. And the club will move on without him just as it did following the departures of Michael Owen and Fernando Torres, Liverpool's last two superstar strikers.
Does anyone think Liverpool weren’t right to cash in on Owen and Torres when they did? They sold both of those players at nearly the height of their value, and neither was the same after leaving Anfield. Suarez sold for more than both of them, and he’s probably one more incident of gross misconduct away from a year-long ban.
For more on the Reds, including the imminent signing of Lazar Markovic and all kinds of other rumors in a post-Suarez cash-in world, check out The Liverpool Offside.
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