There is something deeply sad about the fact that Brendan Rodgers' final game as Liverpool manager, Saturday's 1-1 draw with Everton, was of no material consequence when it came to his job prospects. Did he know? Did he suspect? Did his players? Was everybody just putting on their bravest faces, pretending that they couldn't see the axe glinting in the corner? And what would have happened if Liverpool had stuck five on their nearest and dearest?
When replacing Brendan Rodgers, Liverpool need to think weird
If Liverpool’s next manager is to have any hope of securing that elusive league title, then it won’t be enough to simply be a good coach. They’ll need to be something that the Premier League can’t handle.
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Of course, Liverpool didn't run out five-goal winners. Nor did they even threaten to. Instead, they turned in a performance that simply dripped of the Late Rodgers period: a few flashes of quality lost in a morass of directionless endeavour and chaotic defending. Daniel Sturridge was peripheral, Philippe Coutinho was timid and Everton's equaliser came when Emre Can lashed the ball across his own 6-yard box and into Martin Skrtel's flinching body.
When it comes to remembering Rodgers’ Liverpool, years from now, you suspect that “they just couldn’t defend” will be a common theme. So too, perhaps, “he did say a lot of very silly things”. But both will be overshadowed by “oh, they came so close to winning that title,” and as frustratingly incomplete legacies go, there are worse ones. Within a slip and a stumble of the most unlikely title since the really big money took control of the league.
The suggestion that the title charge can be ascribed to Luis Suárez and his catalysing effect is, at heart, simultaneously a little mendacious and a little bit true. Certainly, they wouldn’t have come so close without him. But equally, there are managers who wouldn’t have had the awareness to tear up their own beliefs on how football worked to accommodate his attackers, and managers who wouldn’t have had the confidence to hew with such fealty to the concept of “we’re going to score one, two, three more than you”. Perhaps there are a few managers that might have actually won the title with a more sensible team. But plenty of them wouldn’t have come close.
In the end, though, that season looks like a freak. And in its freakishness, it not only undermined Rodgers’ claims to be the right man for the job — if you want to argue that things are consistently improving, finishes of seventh, sixth, and fifth are much more helpful than seventh, second, sixth — but emphasised what Liverpool are going to have to do if they want to win the title.
(They do want to win the title, we’re assuming. We’re assuming that because a Liverpool that isn’t trying to win the title, however likely that might be, seems like a strange and pointless creature, one at war with its very reason for existing. “What shall we do this season, Brain?” “God knows, Pinky. Nothing seems to be working. Maybe we should just try to nick the last Champions League spot while building a solid platform for future development and hopefully not selling everybody good.”)
Within a slip and a stumble of the most unlikely title since the really big money took control of the league
At this moment, in this league, Liverpool can't win the title by being a sensible football club. The league is tilted against them, the economics are too strong. There's too much money, and too much of it is elsewhere. Chelsea, for example, will be in with a chance of winning the league if they buy well and then they play well. Liverpool, if they do both, will not be. They need to buy exceptionally well, and then play exceptionally well, and then something weird needs to happen.
That weirdness could be many things. It could, say, be all the richer teams suffering a simultaneous and season-long implosion, though since there are four of them, that’s not something for Liverpool to plan around. More relevantly, it could be a very good player flourishing into a world class player, in the company of several other complementary and also very good players, under the tutelage of a manager canny enough to realise how best to arrange and encourage them. Well, it could almost be that.
This is what Liverpool have to do: They have to chase the weird. Which is obviously going to be tricky: While weird things happen in football on a weekly basis — it's barely been a week since Tottenham gubbed Manchester City, for example — it's very difficult to find a weirdness that keeps happening, week after week, in the same direction. That's the point of league seasons, after all. A schedule of 38 games is plenty of time to smooth out the kinks.
Difficult, but not impossible. There have been weird titles and weird cup victories, where teams of more limited financial resources and with more limited playing pools have, by some method or other, dethroned their bigger and betters. International tournaments are ripe for this sort of thing, being one frenetic month, and recent years have given us Chile at the 2015 Copa América and Greece at Euro 2000. As for league titles, perhaps the most recent example is Atlético Madrid in 2013-14.
Which is not to say that Liverpool should appoint Otto Rehhagel, amusing as that would be. But all three of those teams, along with most other freak victories, have two things in common. First, those teams established a remarkable unity and spirit within their squads. They didn’t just win against the odds; they believed they could win against the odds, and so made it happen. That doesn’t happen without managerial manipulation.
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Second, they all did something that nobody knew how to cope with. They all played football that in some way upset their opponents. Greece rediscovered the ancient art of man-marking. Chile were guided by Jorge Sampaoli, evangelist priest of the church of the Bielsan heresies. Atlético, under Diego Simeone, went almost anti-Spanish: they played a 4-4-2, they defended like monsters and they scored set piece after set piece. All asked opponents questions that they didn’t — or couldn’t — answer.
So when Liverpool appoint their next manager, they need to be thinking: How is this man going to help us ask the league a question that the league won't know how to answer? Of the names that are being bandied about, Jürgen Klopp is the most obvious candidate, if they can persuade him to come to a team 10th in the table and not in the Champions League. He wins titles that he isn't supposed to, his players weep when they leave his side and if he can get his giddy high-pressing, high-octane Dortmund model functioning with Liverpool's players, then it could do horrible and bloody things to Premier League defences.
There are probably others, less immediately obvious than Klopp. Managers with personalities and strange ideas. You could even argue that Brendan Rodgers was just such an appointment: He came in promising death by possession football, and he spent his entire time there shuffling his team, searching for formations and combinations, hunting for magic bullets. It worked once, and they nearly won a title without a defence; it flopped the rest of the time. But at least he tried.
Such an appointment is a risk, obviously, perhaps even more of a risk than appointing a manager who can make Liverpool play just as well as they should, and finish just where they should. Because, ultimately, that won’t do. Not if the title’s the goal: Liverpool aren’t going to win the league by playing to their potential; they need to break it. They need to cheat at the exam, for the exam is unfair. They need to be weird.
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