Bargain Hunt

How Liverpool Have Shopped Wisely Over the Years

Unless Liverpool FC gets taken over by an oil-rich sovereign state, say, or an obscenely wealthy individual who had a country’s vast gas industry land in his lap parachutes in from a clear blue sky, it looks like we'll be shopping sustainably and selling to buy again this summer. Although the £176m prize money for winning the Premier League would also come in handy.

Sustainable spending has been the owners’ mantra ever since they took over after the courtroom battle of 2010. Yet there has been talk of a huge war chest being available, with stellar names like Izak and Alvarez, hitherto dismissed as unaffordable on our budget, being linked (along with what seems like several hundred others).

Those of the FSG-Out persuasion will obviously make the point that we’ve only got that war chest because they’ve been sitting on the money all those years. And after all, transfer spending equals success, right? The more you spend, the more you win. Ask Chelsea, or Man Utd. The fact that we look likely to be champions despite having only bought a bit-part in Chiesa last summer doesn’t really fit the FGS-Out model.

But it’s a matter of record that in recent years, Liverpool have been outspent (on net spend) not only by the usual suspects - City, Chelsea, United - but by such as West Ham, Brighton, Aston Villa, newly-shekelled Newcastle and even Bournemouth. Even newly-promoted Ipswich Town spent £120m before what looks like an instant return to the Championship. That, and the positions of such as Utd and Spurs this season, have illustrated that transfer spending alone is no automatic guarantee of success on the pitch.

One sure way to limit the need for expensive signings is, of course, to produce your own talent, something which Liverpool have done extremely well over the years. Yet it doesn’t excite the gratification junkies whose need to win the transfer window seems more important than actually winning football matches and trophies. Only major new signings can deliver the instant hit they crave.

Trent may be the scouser in our team, but with his expected imminent departure, it’s Curtis Jones who will assume that tag. Over the last 50 or so years. Liverpool have produced a stream of really top class home-grown players, from Tommy Smith, Ian Callaghan and Chris Lawler to Phil Thompson, David Fairclough, Sammy Lee, Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Steve Gerrard and Jamie Carragher.

Meanwhile, champion players like Steve Heighway and Jimmy Case were found with local clubs, Skelmersdale Utd (Heighway) and South Liverpool (Case), and in the late 1950s, Liverpool discovered the mighty Sir Roger Hunt plying his trade with Stockton Heath (which became Warrington Town in 1961) in the Mid-Cheshire League.

It was like finding priceless antiques in the back of a skip.

What would we have had to spend to buy players as good as those?

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