Jae
Well-Known Member
What's with all these new stealth moan threads popping up over the last few days? 
isn't this already common knowledge?
isn't this already common knowledge?
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The we almost signed them Thread
- Thread starter Rex Stone
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Bloodbather
Established Member
Country: Turkey
We can't use our front 3 like Liverpool because we don't have the midfield for it, not because we missed out on Zaha. Auba-Laca-Pépé still makes sense as a Liverpool-like front three as Auba and Pépé are both inverted forwards and Laca can work as a false 9, but we don't have the engine room midfield to support it. We could actually give it a shot by playing AMN in midfield, but it didn't happen, and at this point it'd be stupid to come up with a plan that doesn't accommodate Saka and ESR.
Jack_the_boy
Definitely Not Manberg
Do you watch Liverpool play? Their front line doesn’t rely on service from midfield. In fact, disregarding Thiago you could even say we have a better midfield than they do. There was no creativity in their midfield. Mane, Firmino and Salah were able to create and finish their own chances, including their interplay with each other, and their main service came from their fullbacks.
North5
Here since 2009. Unlike Cornavirus.
Country: England
10 years ago we were held up as example of how to run a club. A decade later we are probably pound for pound the worst run club in England
So watch us buy him and give him a 3 year contract. In the summer.
Country: England
To add to the "we nearly signed" series, my friends at The Athletic posted a piece about our bid for Suarez all those years ago:
Damien Comolli was in charge of Liverpool’s transfer strategy when he persuaded Luis Suarez to move to Merseyside.
A deal was possible because the Uruguayan was viewed by the leading clubs across Europe as damaged goods, having served a biting ban at the end of 2010.
Liverpool, who at the start of January 2011 had been in the bottom half of the Premier League table, were damaged themselves. New England Sports Ventures, later renamed to Fenway Sports Group (FSG), were three months into their reign as owners, having inherited a club wounded by three years of civil war under Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
Ultimately, Comolli and Liverpool were desperate enough to overlook Suarez’s indiscretions and pay the fee Ajax were demanding.
Suarez, meanwhile, was desperate enough to believe Comolli when he suggested Anfield offered a route to the Champions League inside 18 months.
Ambitious to reach the summit of the European game, however, Suarez sought an agreement on a potential escape route. An amendment was made to his Liverpool contract, the precise wording of which would become the subject of serious scrutiny two and a half years later.
The chances of reaching the Champions League with Liverpool were dented on day one. Suarez was brought in to play alongside Fernando Torres but passed him on the way out of the club quite literally, with the players meeting at Melwood’s glass front doors just as one was signing and the other was leaving.
Suarez would move into Torres’ home in Woolton, where he initially had Pepe Reina, Maxi Rodriguez, Lucas Leiva and Fabio Aurelio as neighbours. One of his closest friends in the squad was Glen Johnson, who spoke Spanish.
Suarez did not expect the sale of Torres to Chelsea and even if he publicly appeared to enjoy playing with his replacement Andy Carroll, team-mates could see at training that the relationship was never going to work.
Frustration often found its way to the surface. Suarez wanted the ball to feet. Carroll seemed only to be able to knock it into space. Suarez initially felt more comfortable in attack with Dirk Kuyt, who was not renowned for his first touch, but understood better how Suarez flourished when surrounded by players who were able to play quick one-twos.
Meanwhile, Suarez may have later appreciated Kenny Dalglish’s support through the period when he was banned for eight matches for making racist remarks towards Patrice Evra, but he did not think he was the sort of coach who would help develop his abilities as a player.
His first full season at Liverpool ended in disappointment, with the sacking of Comolli and Dalglish. The team were 17 points off the top four. Suarez believed Brendan Rodgers, Dalglish’s replacement, was an innovative coach but another season would pass without Liverpool’s league performances improving that much.
Suarez considered Joe Allen to be a good signing but he was frustrated when Fabio Borini, who was brought in to play in one of the wide areas of Liverpool’s attack, did not emerge as a regular starter. Suarez concluded the depth in Liverpool’s squad was thin and he did not feel as though he was being challenged enough, even for his own place.
He was approaching his 27th birthday and was concerned about the direction of his career, questioning whether some of his actions had been drawn out of frustration. Suarez described himself in his autobiography as “Public Enemy No 1” after another long ban, this one 10 games for biting Branislav Ivanovic. He claimed he was unable to take his daughter to the park because he was “under siege” from paparazzi.
“It was getting to me and upsetting the lives of the people I love most,” he said. Staying in the Premier League was not an option at that point. “I was mostly feeling miserable… I just wanted to leave England.”
Pere Guardiola, his representative and brother of Pep, reminded him that without Champions League football, he could leave Liverpool for offers of more than £40 million. Suarez sympathised with the task in front of Guardiola. Given Suarez’s ability and subsequent achievements at Barcelona, it now sounds incredible that the agent found it difficult driving up interest in him. Yet that would ignore his past. “There were big clubs who thought I’d bring problems and damage their image,” Suarez said. He wanted those clubs to think about what he could do on the pitch — “but then again, the biting incidents happened on the pitch”.
The summer of 2013 was a watershed moment at Arsenal. This transfer window, it seemed, would be different.
In the summer of 2011, Arsenal had lost Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri. Twelve months later, Robin van Persie and Alex Song left. For the first time in a long time, Arsenal entered a window without substantial debate over the future of one of their key players — and without an economic imperative to sell.
Chief executive Ivan Gazidis spoke in early June of an escalation in the club’s “financial firepower”. The previous November, Arsenal had renegotiated a £150 million naming rights deal for the Emirates Stadium, and a £30 million per year windfall from Puma was just around the corner.
At the time, Wayne Rooney’s future at Manchester United was the subject of debate after a fall-out with Sir Alex Ferguson. Asked if hypothetically Arsenal could afford to bid for a player of that stature, Gazidis said: “We could do that, we could do more than that,” he said. “We have a certain amount that we’ve held in reserve and we also have new revenue streams coming on board. All of these things mean we can do some things which would excite you. We can think about all kinds of things.”
One such thing was Luis Suarez. With neither Olivier Giroud nor Podolski convincing as Van Persie’s successor, a striker was top of Arsenal’s agenda.
As with so many transfer sagas, this one began with an intrepid intermediary. Suarez’s agent, Guardiola, made contact with Arsenal towards the end of the 2012-13 season. The information was clear: Suarez wants to leave. With the London club advertising their newfound wealth to the world, Arsenal were a logical destination.
This was not the Liverpool of today, nor the Arsenal of today. Brendan Rodgers’ team finished seventh that year, with Arsenal in fourth. Although they were run close by rivals Tottenham Hotspur, under Arsène Wenger, Arsenal were about as close as it came to a dead cert for Champions League qualification. In 2013-14, they would make their 16th consecutive appearance in the competition.
Arsenal had been in the midst of pursuing a deal for Real Madrid’s Gonzalo Higuain. An agreement had been reached with the player and his father, but Wenger was reluctant to grant the green light. Real Madrid were demanding a fee of €45 million, which the Arsenal manager considered exorbitant for a player who had not been consistently been first choice at the Bernabeu.
What really gave Wenger pause for thought, however, was Guardiola’s assertion that Suarez’s contract contained a release clause — one that forced Liverpool to consider offers above £40 million.
The seating arrangement in Melwood’s changing rooms went according to squad number and this meant Steven Gerrard usually got ready next to Suarez. Towards the end of the 2012-13 season, Gerrard had read about the interest in his team-mate. As his captain, he decided to ask him straight: “Luis, what is going on?”
The conversation that followed was brief, with Suarez making it clear he wanted to play in the Champions League. Liverpool were not offering him that opportunity. For Gerrard, history was repeating itself. Two years earlier, a discussion with Torres before he signed for Chelsea had gone the same way.
Gerrard was worried because he knew Suarez was right about his concerns. He had scored 51 goals in 96 appearances for Liverpool. He was the leading scorer at an underachieving club. Gerrard understood how it felt to be in demand. He had rejected offers to join Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich in the past. He accepted that Suarez was different to him because Liverpool was not his boyhood club — that it would be impossible to resist either Real or Barcelona particularly as a South American. But Arsenal? A move to London would have broken Gerrard’s heart.
Gerrard was worried that Suarez would move to Arsenal if Liverpool could not satisfy his Champions League ambitions (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)
Across the summer of 2013, Gerrard was worried. He could tell his team-mate was agitating to leave through his comments in the media. Gerrard would scroll the internet on holiday and see the stories linking him with various clubs. His state of alarm increased when he saw quotes given by Suarez to Uruguayan radio at the end of May. “I am happy at Liverpool, I’m happy because of the fans,” Suarez said. “But I’m not prepared to continue to put up with the English press. I have a contract with Liverpool, but it would be very difficult to say no to Real Madrid.”
Though Real’s president Florentino Perez confirmed in the same week that he liked Suarez, he soon described Gareth Bale as someone who was “born to play in Madrid”. Gerrard realised then that Suarez was not a target. In June, however, Suarez spoke again, this time before Uruguay’s friendly against France in Montevideo. “It’s a good moment for a change of environment,” he reflected.
It seemed inevitable to Gerrard that Suarez would depart. Edinson Cavani, Suarez’s strike partner with Uruguay, spoke about the matter, insisting that his international team-mate would not consider leaving Liverpool if they were in the Champions League. “He knows at this stage of his career that he needs to be playing at the top level.”
“Through the whole process, we were trying to figure out where the key to unlock the door was,” says **** Law, who was then serving as Wenger and Gazidis’ transfer negotiator. “The agent was claiming that with an offer of £40 million, Liverpool were obligated to talk. We quickly realised that was not the case — there was no obligation.”
Arsenal ascertained that the supposed “clause” was in fact a sop to the player, one that would prove impossible to enforce. Ultimately it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Liverpool knew it, and so did the player’s agent, but Suarez was desperate to leave Anfield. It was hoped that triggering this “agreement” might at least bring all parties to the negotiating table.
“The player was still in South America, and the agent was going back and forth between the clubs, trying to force the issue at Liverpool,” says Law. Arsenal were not concerned about agreeing personal terms — they were aware of Suarez’s demands and comfortable in meeting them. Guardiola insisted that even if Suarez did not have a release clause, there was a verbal agreement in place — and Arsenal resolved to test the waters.
“The intention was simply to bring the issue to a head,” says Law of the infamous £40,000,0001 offer. In his autobiography, Wenger admitted that the bid could be seen as “ludicrous”, but there was a method to the madness. “Nobody at Arsenal expected to sign the player for that price. We knew we had to go in over £40 million — obviously, we didn’t want to go in and offer £50 million, because maybe Liverpool would have sold for £45 million. We didn’t see any real reason to throw money away… we knew there was going to be a negotiation, we just needed to trigger it.”
What they triggered, however, was fury in the Liverpool boardroom.
John W Henry was on holiday in the Bahamas when Arsenal’s bid for Suarez was lodged. Correspondence had arrived via email from Merseyside. Forty-million plus a pound, he thought to himself. Arsenal were taking the piss. He had thought of Arsenal as a classy club — and had a good relationship with chief executive Ivan Gazidis — but this damaged his opinion.
Though publicly he made a stand, most of the contact between Suarez’s representatives and Liverpool’s owners went instead through Tom Werner, the Los Angeles-based chairman. Suarez liked Werner because he was always complimentary about him whenever they met and appeared to respect his position. He was so desperate to leave Liverpool that he offered to fly to America to explain his situation to the owners. Werner replied to that suggestion by texting Suarez: “Luis, you are staying. Our position is as Brendan and Ian Ayre have said it is: you are not leaving. We do not want to sell you.”
Rodgers considered Suarez’s value to be more than £50 million. Unless Liverpool received that kind of offer — coupled with a written transfer request — they would not consider a deal. Rodgers told Liverpool’s owners that he ranked Suarez in the same class as Cavani, who joined Paris Saint-Germain from Napoli for £55 million.
Suarez claims there were informal enquiries about his availability and other clubs suggested they were willing to pay a higher fee than Arsenal but Liverpool were always adamant that he was not leaving for any price. Though he did not see Liverpool’s strategy in a positive light at the time, he eventually came to realise that the club’s determination to keep hold of him was worth something.
Arsenal, ultimately, were the only club to make a bid for him. They were in the Champions League but this meant staying in England. Suarez wondered whether living in London would be different, where it was possible to live with a greater sense of anonymity. “Deep down, it wasn’t what I really wanted but I began to tell myself that this might work.”
Suarez’s “head was all over the place”. He soon realised that if he left Liverpool for Arsenal, his life could become even worse because it would result in Liverpool’s supporters hating him as well. “I was about to alienate the only people who had really stood by me.”
For Wenger, the decision to pursue Suarez was not straightforward. Although a gifted and prolific forward, his was a career dogged by controversy. For a coach who undertook extensive research on players’ characters before pursuing them, Suarez made for a surprising target.
For Wenger, the decision whether to bid for Suarez was not a straightforward one (Photo: Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
“We all had our worries,” says one former member of Wenger’s staff. “This wasn’t just any sort of transgression, this was biting and racism. It was… unusual.”
“We’d had a good few summers where we’d got rid of a few ‘bad eggs’,” says another. “We had a good group — it was the basis of the group who’d win the FA Cup the following year. Signing Suarez, from that perspective, might’ve been a backwards step… but in football, talent is everything.”
Ultimately, Wenger was convinced by the testimonies of Suarez’s team-mates and coaches. Arsenal’s manager felt the Uruguayan possessed the kind of selfless team ethic he sought in a striker. Several players advocated the signing — the likes of Jack Wilshere felt he could bring a much-needed edge to this Arsenal team. When Napoli agreed to meet Real Madrid’s asking price for Higuain, Arsenal’s focus trained fully on Suarez.
For his part, Suarez knew that Wenger was a manager with a track record of helping attacking talent fulfil their potential. The likelihood is that the Uruguayan envisioned using Arsenal as a stepping-stone to Barcelona or Real Madrid — although, intriguingly, he never made any request for a release clause in a prospective Arsenal contract.
One man who must have paid particular attention to the rumours was Giroud. While Wenger insisted publicly the club’s pursuit of a striker was no reflection on the former Montpellier man’s performances, Suarez’s arrival would have seen Giroud displaced as the club’s first-choice centre-forward.
Rather than wilt, however, the Frenchman redoubled his efforts in training. Perhaps it was the rumours of Higuain or Suarez, perhaps it was the fact he had acclimatised to Arsenal and English football — whatever it was, staff saw a sharper, more determined Giroud during pre-season.
A handful of journalists following Liverpool’s pre-season tour of the Far East and Australia were grouped together on the outfield at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) watching Rodgers conduct an open training exercise in front of 15,000 fans.
Midway through the evening session, phones started vibrating. Information from contacts in the UK suggested that Arsenal had stepped up their pursuit of Suarez. Two weeks earlier, Liverpool had turned down an initial offer of £30 million rising to £35 million with add-ons.
The decision was taken to head straight from the MCG to the team’s base at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Melbourne to try to find out more. As is often the case on trips like that, reporters were working together and sharing information.
Off-the-record discussions with senior Anfield officials revealed the exact figures behind the fresh bid and left those present open-mouthed. Riled by Arsenal, Liverpool wanted to make their stance crystal clear — there was no release clause and Suarez was not for sale. The reporters who had made the trip to Australia had their back-page story for the paper the next day.
Rodgers looks on as Suarez is substituted into the match against Melbourne Victory (Melbourne, Australia) at the MCG in July 2013 (Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
Gerrard had watched Suarez closely during those sessions and it was clear he did not want to be there. Dressing room banter or conversations about an opposing player aside, Gerrard had never spoken to Suarez before in detail about his life away from Anfield or Melwood. They were not close in a social sense, rarely texting one another or going for lunch together. Yet Gerrard liked him, not only because of his talent and the way he trained, but because his personality was infectious. He felt he could be honest with him.
Gerrard considered it especially unusual for players to discuss their contract situations openly but in Melbourne, Suarez unloaded, telling him: “Brendan and the owners have lied to me.”
Gerrard could see Suarez was seething. He was torn between his duty as captain of Liverpool, the club he loved, and his duty as a team-mate. He concluded quickly that his duty to Liverpool would always come first while accepting that legally and moralistically, it might be wrong for the club not to sell him.
The period between the end of the tour and Suarez’s next public appearance at Anfield in Gerrard’s testimonial with Olympiacos was, according to Gerrard, “torturous”. Suarez reassured his captain that he would play but he did not want to go to the function after the game. Jamie Carragher, a year into retirement, was due to feature in the Liverpool side and he had seen what a ferocious competitor Suarez could be. Before the testimonial, Carragher recalled, Suarez was not the same.
Inside 48 hours, he gave another interview, this time to the Guardian’s Sid Lowe, who ended up writing his autobiography. In that interview, he revealed publicly for the first time of broken promises made by Rodgers, who had supposedly told him a year earlier he could leave if Liverpool did not qualify for the Champions League. This led to Rodgers, who later denied making any promises to the striker, banishing Suarez to the Melwood wilderness.
On July 24, once the £40 million plus £1 bid had arrived, Liverpool owner John W Henry took to Twitter to express his disbelief.
His public dismissal of the offer did not play well at Arsenal. Wenger and Gazidis customarily conducted their business behind closed doors, but now their cover was blown. If the intention of the offer had been to develop a dialogue, the result was the inverse. It saw the door slammed shut in their face.
Arsenal sources deny the suggestion there was a major fall-out between the clubs. This, they suggest, was about public positioning — about FSG and Liverpool asserting themselves as a big club, and making it clear to Suarez that they were not prepared to negotiate his exit.
Arsenal now felt the onus was on the player. Only if Suarez insisted on leaving — if he effectively made his position untenable — could a deal be resurrected. The player’s agent maintained that would be the case. Arsenal were assured that for Suarez, there would be no going back.
There were five full-sized pitches at Liverpool’s training ground at the time. Suarez was already serving a ban but it was unusual to see him training two pitches away from the rest of the Liverpool squad. He was there with just a fitness coach for company. On some days, he was only allowed to train when the rest of the first team had finished their session. Gerrard saw the stand-off as “bitter” and he was caught in the middle.
“Luis was angry with Fenway. He was fuming with Brendan,” Gerrard wrote in his second autobiography. “The division between Luis and Brendan, between the player and the club, ran deep and wide. It was hard to see any way of bringing them together.”
Suarez felt betrayed by Rodgers, who had told the media that Suarez had shown a lack of respect to his team-mates by giving the interview to the Guardian. Suarez says he would have felt differently had Rodgers said the same thing to his face first, as he had done before speaking openly about the future. Suarez had told him then that he could not see himself being happy but Rodgers countered that by saying, “Yeah, but I know what you are like. I know how you live.”
It was a compliment in disguise, his way of saying that Suarez could not resist training hard and delivering performances. Yet Suarez concluded that Rodgers should have been more empathetic — he had only looked to improve as a coach by moving from Swansea to Liverpool 12 months earlier. In his first season, Rodgers had spoken to Suarez about his life away from the training ground but in the months after he threatened to leave Liverpool, conversations were strictly about football. A thaw would eventually arrive but the relationship was never the same.
There was an active social scene among the South Americans at Liverpool, which also involved the remaining Spanish players and their families.
Activities involved regular children’s parties, where Suarez seemed to enjoy larking about with the kids on the dancefloor more than making conversation with the adults sitting at their tables.
His daughter’s first birthday was in the basement of the Hard Days Night hotel and at the end of the party, when everyone went to say goodbye, his shirt was saturated with sweat. He’d been twirling around on the dancefloor the entire time — he just wanted to make sure the kids were enjoying themselves in the way he was not always able to after his parents split up when he was eight years old.
Listening to those who spent lots of time with him on Merseyside, a very different perception of Suarez develops. He would explain to them that football had toughened him, playing with older boys on the streets of Montevideo who could be twice his age and size. “He grew up in a hard environment and this came out of him at various stages,” says one source. “Off the pitch, he certainly wasn’t a demon but on it, he had the capacity to turn into one.”
Pride and trust were the two qualities he valued most, and this explains why his relationship with Rodgers after what happened in the summer of 2013 was never really the same. He was able to find his way back on the pitch because of, as Rodgers suspected, the pride in his own standards.
Gerrard was a big influence in his decision to stay, and so were Lucas Leiva, Philippe Coutinho and Jose Enrique. Lucas was the second longest-serving foreign player at Liverpool and his status in the hierarchy of the dressing room was well established. Away from Melwood, Lucas and Suarez regularly had lunch together in Woolton village. Lucas kept on at him, saying he should trust himself to stay — that the wrong move might end up backfiring. Barcelona or Real Madrid, Lucas could understand. But Arsenal?
Gerrard was trying to eat his dinner, but he could not. In front of him was his favourite meal: salmon, pasta and salad. Gerrard kept looking at it. His children were charging about the kitchen. He thought the world was coming to an end.
Before Suarez was told to train alone by Rodgers, he had been reluctant to get too involved. He did not consider himself a mediator. Suarez and Rodgers seemed to be talking a lot. At the age of 33, Gerrard had his own game to focus on as well and he was concerned about his place in the team.
Yet he realised that without Suarez, Liverpool’s chances of a good season were remote. With him in the team, Champions League football was a realistic possibility. He had to find a solution, even if the landscape in front of him was a mess. Suarez was Liverpool’s best player. He still had six games left to serve of his biting ban. He wanted to leave.
Gerrard decided it was time to do something. He sent Suarez a text, telling him they needed to “straighten” things out. Suarez responded straight away, telling him the manager and the club were liars. Gerrard asked him if he’d talk at training the following morning. Suarez agreed even though he was not supposed to arrive until the afternoon, once the rest of the players had gone home.
Gerrard had informed Rodgers about what he was about to do. He proceeded to tell Suarez that he thought he was making a big mistake. If he stayed for another year and performed to his potential, he’d earn the move he really wanted. Suarez was concerned that he might drift away from Barcelona and Real Madrid’s consciousness if Liverpool’s season did not go well. Gerrard reassured him that once a player was on the radar of either of those clubs, they remain there — providing he keeps doing the business.
Gerrard told him that he never wanted to play against him in a Premier League match, that going to Arsenal would give them a huge advantage over Liverpool and that if he did decide to go, it would break his relationship with Liverpool fans forever. If he stayed for just one more season there would be better teams than Arsenal after him.
Suarez did not protest. He nodded but he did not smile. He asked him if he could arrange a meeting with Rodgers and Suarez agreed. Gerrard then texted Rodgers and warned him that he’d have to tread carefully. Suarez insisted that Gerrard was there and when he told Rodgers about this, Rodgers admitted he wanted him present as well.
They sat in the leather couches of the manager’s office, overlooking Melwood. Gerrard felt awkward. They were all smiling but Suarez’s smile seemed threatening. It felt like the conversation could turn at any moment. Gerrard did not know the contents of their previous meetings, or whether any promises had been broken. By the end, Rodgers told Suarez he wanted him back in the team and Suarez promised that he’d train well. They shook hands. Though Gerrard was satisfied the matter had been settled, he would not know for sure until Suarez trained again. That moment would come a week later following an international break. Suarez, apparently, ran about like a man possessed. From across the pitch, Gerrard and Rodgers smiled at one another.
Rodgers would prove to be a Liverpool manager with many faults but he was right about Suarez’s passion for football.
This was illustrated when he played a behind-closed-doors match against Burnley in September 2013, just as he was about to return to first-team action after his biting ban. The friendly finished in a 0-0 draw but there was nothing friendly about it for Suarez, who took the game so seriously that he almost started fighting with the 19-year-old defender who he’d already “kicked all afternoon”, according to one of the Liverpool youngsters in the team.
It was standard practice for Liverpool’s under-21s to hold a debrief near one of Melwood’s dugouts rather than inside the changing rooms after the final whistle but Suarez was in a furious mood and having showered quickly, returned to the pitch where he continued remonstrating with the defender before the pair were separated.
For those teenagers representing Liverpool that afternoon, it made them ask the question: “Jesus Christ, how much does this guy care?”
“Pere Guardiola called me up and said, ‘The player is going to stay’,” recalls **** Law. “I said, ‘What changed? You told me the player was absolutely determined to force his way out’.
“The way Pere described it to me was that the Gerrard had talked him into staying — and, of course, Liverpool gave him a pay bump, and another promise: that he could leave the following summer.”
Ultimately, Arsenal discovered that the player wasn’t prepared to go the extra mile to force through a move. For all the agent’s talk, Suarez’s commitment had wavered at the crucial moment.
It was a deal that was dead almost before it began — and before Arsenal could explore the newly-acquired spending power Gazidis had boasted of earlier that summer.
Arsenal did eventually deliver on a marquee signing. Despite Higuain moving to Napoli, the club continued their dialogue with Real Madrid, who were looking to offload players to accommodate the arrival of Gareth Bale. Arsenal ended up breaking their transfer record to sign Mesut Özil — for a fee just a little higher than what they had offered for Suarez. Had Arsenal’s opening gambits been more to Liverpool’s liking, perhaps there was an agreement to be struck. It is a tantalising thought, but the sight of Suarez in another Premier League team’s colours remains hypothetical.
“It’s the summer we signed Özil,” says Law. “Özil ended up costing us the £40 million, but his salary demands were considerably more than Suarez. If we had just moved money from the player side over to the transfer side, it was doable. Would £60 million have done the trick that summer? Maybe.”
A deal was possible because the Uruguayan was viewed by the leading clubs across Europe as damaged goods, having served a biting ban at the end of 2010.
Liverpool, who at the start of January 2011 had been in the bottom half of the Premier League table, were damaged themselves. New England Sports Ventures, later renamed to Fenway Sports Group (FSG), were three months into their reign as owners, having inherited a club wounded by three years of civil war under Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
Ultimately, Comolli and Liverpool were desperate enough to overlook Suarez’s indiscretions and pay the fee Ajax were demanding.
Suarez, meanwhile, was desperate enough to believe Comolli when he suggested Anfield offered a route to the Champions League inside 18 months.
Ambitious to reach the summit of the European game, however, Suarez sought an agreement on a potential escape route. An amendment was made to his Liverpool contract, the precise wording of which would become the subject of serious scrutiny two and a half years later.
The chances of reaching the Champions League with Liverpool were dented on day one. Suarez was brought in to play alongside Fernando Torres but passed him on the way out of the club quite literally, with the players meeting at Melwood’s glass front doors just as one was signing and the other was leaving.
Suarez would move into Torres’ home in Woolton, where he initially had Pepe Reina, Maxi Rodriguez, Lucas Leiva and Fabio Aurelio as neighbours. One of his closest friends in the squad was Glen Johnson, who spoke Spanish.
Suarez did not expect the sale of Torres to Chelsea and even if he publicly appeared to enjoy playing with his replacement Andy Carroll, team-mates could see at training that the relationship was never going to work.
Frustration often found its way to the surface. Suarez wanted the ball to feet. Carroll seemed only to be able to knock it into space. Suarez initially felt more comfortable in attack with Dirk Kuyt, who was not renowned for his first touch, but understood better how Suarez flourished when surrounded by players who were able to play quick one-twos.
Meanwhile, Suarez may have later appreciated Kenny Dalglish’s support through the period when he was banned for eight matches for making racist remarks towards Patrice Evra, but he did not think he was the sort of coach who would help develop his abilities as a player.
His first full season at Liverpool ended in disappointment, with the sacking of Comolli and Dalglish. The team were 17 points off the top four. Suarez believed Brendan Rodgers, Dalglish’s replacement, was an innovative coach but another season would pass without Liverpool’s league performances improving that much.
Suarez considered Joe Allen to be a good signing but he was frustrated when Fabio Borini, who was brought in to play in one of the wide areas of Liverpool’s attack, did not emerge as a regular starter. Suarez concluded the depth in Liverpool’s squad was thin and he did not feel as though he was being challenged enough, even for his own place.
He was approaching his 27th birthday and was concerned about the direction of his career, questioning whether some of his actions had been drawn out of frustration. Suarez described himself in his autobiography as “Public Enemy No 1” after another long ban, this one 10 games for biting Branislav Ivanovic. He claimed he was unable to take his daughter to the park because he was “under siege” from paparazzi.
“It was getting to me and upsetting the lives of the people I love most,” he said. Staying in the Premier League was not an option at that point. “I was mostly feeling miserable… I just wanted to leave England.”
Pere Guardiola, his representative and brother of Pep, reminded him that without Champions League football, he could leave Liverpool for offers of more than £40 million. Suarez sympathised with the task in front of Guardiola. Given Suarez’s ability and subsequent achievements at Barcelona, it now sounds incredible that the agent found it difficult driving up interest in him. Yet that would ignore his past. “There were big clubs who thought I’d bring problems and damage their image,” Suarez said. He wanted those clubs to think about what he could do on the pitch — “but then again, the biting incidents happened on the pitch”.
The summer of 2013 was a watershed moment at Arsenal. This transfer window, it seemed, would be different.
In the summer of 2011, Arsenal had lost Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri. Twelve months later, Robin van Persie and Alex Song left. For the first time in a long time, Arsenal entered a window without substantial debate over the future of one of their key players — and without an economic imperative to sell.
Chief executive Ivan Gazidis spoke in early June of an escalation in the club’s “financial firepower”. The previous November, Arsenal had renegotiated a £150 million naming rights deal for the Emirates Stadium, and a £30 million per year windfall from Puma was just around the corner.
At the time, Wayne Rooney’s future at Manchester United was the subject of debate after a fall-out with Sir Alex Ferguson. Asked if hypothetically Arsenal could afford to bid for a player of that stature, Gazidis said: “We could do that, we could do more than that,” he said. “We have a certain amount that we’ve held in reserve and we also have new revenue streams coming on board. All of these things mean we can do some things which would excite you. We can think about all kinds of things.”
One such thing was Luis Suarez. With neither Olivier Giroud nor Podolski convincing as Van Persie’s successor, a striker was top of Arsenal’s agenda.
As with so many transfer sagas, this one began with an intrepid intermediary. Suarez’s agent, Guardiola, made contact with Arsenal towards the end of the 2012-13 season. The information was clear: Suarez wants to leave. With the London club advertising their newfound wealth to the world, Arsenal were a logical destination.
This was not the Liverpool of today, nor the Arsenal of today. Brendan Rodgers’ team finished seventh that year, with Arsenal in fourth. Although they were run close by rivals Tottenham Hotspur, under Arsène Wenger, Arsenal were about as close as it came to a dead cert for Champions League qualification. In 2013-14, they would make their 16th consecutive appearance in the competition.
Arsenal had been in the midst of pursuing a deal for Real Madrid’s Gonzalo Higuain. An agreement had been reached with the player and his father, but Wenger was reluctant to grant the green light. Real Madrid were demanding a fee of €45 million, which the Arsenal manager considered exorbitant for a player who had not been consistently been first choice at the Bernabeu.
What really gave Wenger pause for thought, however, was Guardiola’s assertion that Suarez’s contract contained a release clause — one that forced Liverpool to consider offers above £40 million.
The seating arrangement in Melwood’s changing rooms went according to squad number and this meant Steven Gerrard usually got ready next to Suarez. Towards the end of the 2012-13 season, Gerrard had read about the interest in his team-mate. As his captain, he decided to ask him straight: “Luis, what is going on?”
The conversation that followed was brief, with Suarez making it clear he wanted to play in the Champions League. Liverpool were not offering him that opportunity. For Gerrard, history was repeating itself. Two years earlier, a discussion with Torres before he signed for Chelsea had gone the same way.
Gerrard was worried because he knew Suarez was right about his concerns. He had scored 51 goals in 96 appearances for Liverpool. He was the leading scorer at an underachieving club. Gerrard understood how it felt to be in demand. He had rejected offers to join Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich in the past. He accepted that Suarez was different to him because Liverpool was not his boyhood club — that it would be impossible to resist either Real or Barcelona particularly as a South American. But Arsenal? A move to London would have broken Gerrard’s heart.
Gerrard was worried that Suarez would move to Arsenal if Liverpool could not satisfy his Champions League ambitions (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)
Across the summer of 2013, Gerrard was worried. He could tell his team-mate was agitating to leave through his comments in the media. Gerrard would scroll the internet on holiday and see the stories linking him with various clubs. His state of alarm increased when he saw quotes given by Suarez to Uruguayan radio at the end of May. “I am happy at Liverpool, I’m happy because of the fans,” Suarez said. “But I’m not prepared to continue to put up with the English press. I have a contract with Liverpool, but it would be very difficult to say no to Real Madrid.”
Though Real’s president Florentino Perez confirmed in the same week that he liked Suarez, he soon described Gareth Bale as someone who was “born to play in Madrid”. Gerrard realised then that Suarez was not a target. In June, however, Suarez spoke again, this time before Uruguay’s friendly against France in Montevideo. “It’s a good moment for a change of environment,” he reflected.
It seemed inevitable to Gerrard that Suarez would depart. Edinson Cavani, Suarez’s strike partner with Uruguay, spoke about the matter, insisting that his international team-mate would not consider leaving Liverpool if they were in the Champions League. “He knows at this stage of his career that he needs to be playing at the top level.”
“Through the whole process, we were trying to figure out where the key to unlock the door was,” says **** Law, who was then serving as Wenger and Gazidis’ transfer negotiator. “The agent was claiming that with an offer of £40 million, Liverpool were obligated to talk. We quickly realised that was not the case — there was no obligation.”
Arsenal ascertained that the supposed “clause” was in fact a sop to the player, one that would prove impossible to enforce. Ultimately it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Liverpool knew it, and so did the player’s agent, but Suarez was desperate to leave Anfield. It was hoped that triggering this “agreement” might at least bring all parties to the negotiating table.
“The player was still in South America, and the agent was going back and forth between the clubs, trying to force the issue at Liverpool,” says Law. Arsenal were not concerned about agreeing personal terms — they were aware of Suarez’s demands and comfortable in meeting them. Guardiola insisted that even if Suarez did not have a release clause, there was a verbal agreement in place — and Arsenal resolved to test the waters.
“The intention was simply to bring the issue to a head,” says Law of the infamous £40,000,0001 offer. In his autobiography, Wenger admitted that the bid could be seen as “ludicrous”, but there was a method to the madness. “Nobody at Arsenal expected to sign the player for that price. We knew we had to go in over £40 million — obviously, we didn’t want to go in and offer £50 million, because maybe Liverpool would have sold for £45 million. We didn’t see any real reason to throw money away… we knew there was going to be a negotiation, we just needed to trigger it.”
What they triggered, however, was fury in the Liverpool boardroom.
John W Henry was on holiday in the Bahamas when Arsenal’s bid for Suarez was lodged. Correspondence had arrived via email from Merseyside. Forty-million plus a pound, he thought to himself. Arsenal were taking the piss. He had thought of Arsenal as a classy club — and had a good relationship with chief executive Ivan Gazidis — but this damaged his opinion.
Though publicly he made a stand, most of the contact between Suarez’s representatives and Liverpool’s owners went instead through Tom Werner, the Los Angeles-based chairman. Suarez liked Werner because he was always complimentary about him whenever they met and appeared to respect his position. He was so desperate to leave Liverpool that he offered to fly to America to explain his situation to the owners. Werner replied to that suggestion by texting Suarez: “Luis, you are staying. Our position is as Brendan and Ian Ayre have said it is: you are not leaving. We do not want to sell you.”
Rodgers considered Suarez’s value to be more than £50 million. Unless Liverpool received that kind of offer — coupled with a written transfer request — they would not consider a deal. Rodgers told Liverpool’s owners that he ranked Suarez in the same class as Cavani, who joined Paris Saint-Germain from Napoli for £55 million.
Suarez claims there were informal enquiries about his availability and other clubs suggested they were willing to pay a higher fee than Arsenal but Liverpool were always adamant that he was not leaving for any price. Though he did not see Liverpool’s strategy in a positive light at the time, he eventually came to realise that the club’s determination to keep hold of him was worth something.
Arsenal, ultimately, were the only club to make a bid for him. They were in the Champions League but this meant staying in England. Suarez wondered whether living in London would be different, where it was possible to live with a greater sense of anonymity. “Deep down, it wasn’t what I really wanted but I began to tell myself that this might work.”
Suarez’s “head was all over the place”. He soon realised that if he left Liverpool for Arsenal, his life could become even worse because it would result in Liverpool’s supporters hating him as well. “I was about to alienate the only people who had really stood by me.”
For Wenger, the decision to pursue Suarez was not straightforward. Although a gifted and prolific forward, his was a career dogged by controversy. For a coach who undertook extensive research on players’ characters before pursuing them, Suarez made for a surprising target.
For Wenger, the decision whether to bid for Suarez was not a straightforward one (Photo: Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
“We all had our worries,” says one former member of Wenger’s staff. “This wasn’t just any sort of transgression, this was biting and racism. It was… unusual.”
“We’d had a good few summers where we’d got rid of a few ‘bad eggs’,” says another. “We had a good group — it was the basis of the group who’d win the FA Cup the following year. Signing Suarez, from that perspective, might’ve been a backwards step… but in football, talent is everything.”
Ultimately, Wenger was convinced by the testimonies of Suarez’s team-mates and coaches. Arsenal’s manager felt the Uruguayan possessed the kind of selfless team ethic he sought in a striker. Several players advocated the signing — the likes of Jack Wilshere felt he could bring a much-needed edge to this Arsenal team. When Napoli agreed to meet Real Madrid’s asking price for Higuain, Arsenal’s focus trained fully on Suarez.
For his part, Suarez knew that Wenger was a manager with a track record of helping attacking talent fulfil their potential. The likelihood is that the Uruguayan envisioned using Arsenal as a stepping-stone to Barcelona or Real Madrid — although, intriguingly, he never made any request for a release clause in a prospective Arsenal contract.
One man who must have paid particular attention to the rumours was Giroud. While Wenger insisted publicly the club’s pursuit of a striker was no reflection on the former Montpellier man’s performances, Suarez’s arrival would have seen Giroud displaced as the club’s first-choice centre-forward.
Rather than wilt, however, the Frenchman redoubled his efforts in training. Perhaps it was the rumours of Higuain or Suarez, perhaps it was the fact he had acclimatised to Arsenal and English football — whatever it was, staff saw a sharper, more determined Giroud during pre-season.
A handful of journalists following Liverpool’s pre-season tour of the Far East and Australia were grouped together on the outfield at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) watching Rodgers conduct an open training exercise in front of 15,000 fans.
Midway through the evening session, phones started vibrating. Information from contacts in the UK suggested that Arsenal had stepped up their pursuit of Suarez. Two weeks earlier, Liverpool had turned down an initial offer of £30 million rising to £35 million with add-ons.
The decision was taken to head straight from the MCG to the team’s base at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Melbourne to try to find out more. As is often the case on trips like that, reporters were working together and sharing information.
Off-the-record discussions with senior Anfield officials revealed the exact figures behind the fresh bid and left those present open-mouthed. Riled by Arsenal, Liverpool wanted to make their stance crystal clear — there was no release clause and Suarez was not for sale. The reporters who had made the trip to Australia had their back-page story for the paper the next day.
Rodgers looks on as Suarez is substituted into the match against Melbourne Victory (Melbourne, Australia) at the MCG in July 2013 (Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
Gerrard had watched Suarez closely during those sessions and it was clear he did not want to be there. Dressing room banter or conversations about an opposing player aside, Gerrard had never spoken to Suarez before in detail about his life away from Anfield or Melwood. They were not close in a social sense, rarely texting one another or going for lunch together. Yet Gerrard liked him, not only because of his talent and the way he trained, but because his personality was infectious. He felt he could be honest with him.
Gerrard considered it especially unusual for players to discuss their contract situations openly but in Melbourne, Suarez unloaded, telling him: “Brendan and the owners have lied to me.”
Gerrard could see Suarez was seething. He was torn between his duty as captain of Liverpool, the club he loved, and his duty as a team-mate. He concluded quickly that his duty to Liverpool would always come first while accepting that legally and moralistically, it might be wrong for the club not to sell him.
The period between the end of the tour and Suarez’s next public appearance at Anfield in Gerrard’s testimonial with Olympiacos was, according to Gerrard, “torturous”. Suarez reassured his captain that he would play but he did not want to go to the function after the game. Jamie Carragher, a year into retirement, was due to feature in the Liverpool side and he had seen what a ferocious competitor Suarez could be. Before the testimonial, Carragher recalled, Suarez was not the same.
Inside 48 hours, he gave another interview, this time to the Guardian’s Sid Lowe, who ended up writing his autobiography. In that interview, he revealed publicly for the first time of broken promises made by Rodgers, who had supposedly told him a year earlier he could leave if Liverpool did not qualify for the Champions League. This led to Rodgers, who later denied making any promises to the striker, banishing Suarez to the Melwood wilderness.
On July 24, once the £40 million plus £1 bid had arrived, Liverpool owner John W Henry took to Twitter to express his disbelief.
His public dismissal of the offer did not play well at Arsenal. Wenger and Gazidis customarily conducted their business behind closed doors, but now their cover was blown. If the intention of the offer had been to develop a dialogue, the result was the inverse. It saw the door slammed shut in their face.
Arsenal sources deny the suggestion there was a major fall-out between the clubs. This, they suggest, was about public positioning — about FSG and Liverpool asserting themselves as a big club, and making it clear to Suarez that they were not prepared to negotiate his exit.
Arsenal now felt the onus was on the player. Only if Suarez insisted on leaving — if he effectively made his position untenable — could a deal be resurrected. The player’s agent maintained that would be the case. Arsenal were assured that for Suarez, there would be no going back.
There were five full-sized pitches at Liverpool’s training ground at the time. Suarez was already serving a ban but it was unusual to see him training two pitches away from the rest of the Liverpool squad. He was there with just a fitness coach for company. On some days, he was only allowed to train when the rest of the first team had finished their session. Gerrard saw the stand-off as “bitter” and he was caught in the middle.
“Luis was angry with Fenway. He was fuming with Brendan,” Gerrard wrote in his second autobiography. “The division between Luis and Brendan, between the player and the club, ran deep and wide. It was hard to see any way of bringing them together.”
Suarez felt betrayed by Rodgers, who had told the media that Suarez had shown a lack of respect to his team-mates by giving the interview to the Guardian. Suarez says he would have felt differently had Rodgers said the same thing to his face first, as he had done before speaking openly about the future. Suarez had told him then that he could not see himself being happy but Rodgers countered that by saying, “Yeah, but I know what you are like. I know how you live.”
It was a compliment in disguise, his way of saying that Suarez could not resist training hard and delivering performances. Yet Suarez concluded that Rodgers should have been more empathetic — he had only looked to improve as a coach by moving from Swansea to Liverpool 12 months earlier. In his first season, Rodgers had spoken to Suarez about his life away from the training ground but in the months after he threatened to leave Liverpool, conversations were strictly about football. A thaw would eventually arrive but the relationship was never the same.
There was an active social scene among the South Americans at Liverpool, which also involved the remaining Spanish players and their families.
Activities involved regular children’s parties, where Suarez seemed to enjoy larking about with the kids on the dancefloor more than making conversation with the adults sitting at their tables.
His daughter’s first birthday was in the basement of the Hard Days Night hotel and at the end of the party, when everyone went to say goodbye, his shirt was saturated with sweat. He’d been twirling around on the dancefloor the entire time — he just wanted to make sure the kids were enjoying themselves in the way he was not always able to after his parents split up when he was eight years old.
Listening to those who spent lots of time with him on Merseyside, a very different perception of Suarez develops. He would explain to them that football had toughened him, playing with older boys on the streets of Montevideo who could be twice his age and size. “He grew up in a hard environment and this came out of him at various stages,” says one source. “Off the pitch, he certainly wasn’t a demon but on it, he had the capacity to turn into one.”
Pride and trust were the two qualities he valued most, and this explains why his relationship with Rodgers after what happened in the summer of 2013 was never really the same. He was able to find his way back on the pitch because of, as Rodgers suspected, the pride in his own standards.
Gerrard was a big influence in his decision to stay, and so were Lucas Leiva, Philippe Coutinho and Jose Enrique. Lucas was the second longest-serving foreign player at Liverpool and his status in the hierarchy of the dressing room was well established. Away from Melwood, Lucas and Suarez regularly had lunch together in Woolton village. Lucas kept on at him, saying he should trust himself to stay — that the wrong move might end up backfiring. Barcelona or Real Madrid, Lucas could understand. But Arsenal?
Gerrard was trying to eat his dinner, but he could not. In front of him was his favourite meal: salmon, pasta and salad. Gerrard kept looking at it. His children were charging about the kitchen. He thought the world was coming to an end.
Before Suarez was told to train alone by Rodgers, he had been reluctant to get too involved. He did not consider himself a mediator. Suarez and Rodgers seemed to be talking a lot. At the age of 33, Gerrard had his own game to focus on as well and he was concerned about his place in the team.
Yet he realised that without Suarez, Liverpool’s chances of a good season were remote. With him in the team, Champions League football was a realistic possibility. He had to find a solution, even if the landscape in front of him was a mess. Suarez was Liverpool’s best player. He still had six games left to serve of his biting ban. He wanted to leave.
Gerrard decided it was time to do something. He sent Suarez a text, telling him they needed to “straighten” things out. Suarez responded straight away, telling him the manager and the club were liars. Gerrard asked him if he’d talk at training the following morning. Suarez agreed even though he was not supposed to arrive until the afternoon, once the rest of the players had gone home.
Gerrard had informed Rodgers about what he was about to do. He proceeded to tell Suarez that he thought he was making a big mistake. If he stayed for another year and performed to his potential, he’d earn the move he really wanted. Suarez was concerned that he might drift away from Barcelona and Real Madrid’s consciousness if Liverpool’s season did not go well. Gerrard reassured him that once a player was on the radar of either of those clubs, they remain there — providing he keeps doing the business.
Gerrard told him that he never wanted to play against him in a Premier League match, that going to Arsenal would give them a huge advantage over Liverpool and that if he did decide to go, it would break his relationship with Liverpool fans forever. If he stayed for just one more season there would be better teams than Arsenal after him.
Suarez did not protest. He nodded but he did not smile. He asked him if he could arrange a meeting with Rodgers and Suarez agreed. Gerrard then texted Rodgers and warned him that he’d have to tread carefully. Suarez insisted that Gerrard was there and when he told Rodgers about this, Rodgers admitted he wanted him present as well.
They sat in the leather couches of the manager’s office, overlooking Melwood. Gerrard felt awkward. They were all smiling but Suarez’s smile seemed threatening. It felt like the conversation could turn at any moment. Gerrard did not know the contents of their previous meetings, or whether any promises had been broken. By the end, Rodgers told Suarez he wanted him back in the team and Suarez promised that he’d train well. They shook hands. Though Gerrard was satisfied the matter had been settled, he would not know for sure until Suarez trained again. That moment would come a week later following an international break. Suarez, apparently, ran about like a man possessed. From across the pitch, Gerrard and Rodgers smiled at one another.
Rodgers would prove to be a Liverpool manager with many faults but he was right about Suarez’s passion for football.
This was illustrated when he played a behind-closed-doors match against Burnley in September 2013, just as he was about to return to first-team action after his biting ban. The friendly finished in a 0-0 draw but there was nothing friendly about it for Suarez, who took the game so seriously that he almost started fighting with the 19-year-old defender who he’d already “kicked all afternoon”, according to one of the Liverpool youngsters in the team.
It was standard practice for Liverpool’s under-21s to hold a debrief near one of Melwood’s dugouts rather than inside the changing rooms after the final whistle but Suarez was in a furious mood and having showered quickly, returned to the pitch where he continued remonstrating with the defender before the pair were separated.
For those teenagers representing Liverpool that afternoon, it made them ask the question: “Jesus Christ, how much does this guy care?”
“Pere Guardiola called me up and said, ‘The player is going to stay’,” recalls **** Law. “I said, ‘What changed? You told me the player was absolutely determined to force his way out’.
“The way Pere described it to me was that the Gerrard had talked him into staying — and, of course, Liverpool gave him a pay bump, and another promise: that he could leave the following summer.”
Ultimately, Arsenal discovered that the player wasn’t prepared to go the extra mile to force through a move. For all the agent’s talk, Suarez’s commitment had wavered at the crucial moment.
It was a deal that was dead almost before it began — and before Arsenal could explore the newly-acquired spending power Gazidis had boasted of earlier that summer.
Arsenal did eventually deliver on a marquee signing. Despite Higuain moving to Napoli, the club continued their dialogue with Real Madrid, who were looking to offload players to accommodate the arrival of Gareth Bale. Arsenal ended up breaking their transfer record to sign Mesut Özil — for a fee just a little higher than what they had offered for Suarez. Had Arsenal’s opening gambits been more to Liverpool’s liking, perhaps there was an agreement to be struck. It is a tantalising thought, but the sight of Suarez in another Premier League team’s colours remains hypothetical.
“It’s the summer we signed Özil,” says Law. “Özil ended up costing us the £40 million, but his salary demands were considerably more than Suarez. If we had just moved money from the player side over to the transfer side, it was doable. Would £60 million have done the trick that summer? Maybe.”
Oh Ivan
BigPoppaPump
Reeling from Laca & Kos nightmares
I feel like he didn’t think his words had much weight, either that or he was stupid. He use to chat so much sh*t.
BigPoppaPump
Reeling from Laca & Kos nightmares
To add to the "we nearly signed" series, my friends at The Athletic posted a piece about our bid for Suarez all those years ago:
Damien Comolli was in charge of Liverpool’s transfer strategy when he persuaded Luis Suarez to move to Merseyside.
A deal was possible because the Uruguayan was viewed by the leading clubs across Europe as damaged goods, having served a biting ban at the end of 2010.
Liverpool, who at the start of January 2011 had been in the bottom half of the Premier League table, were damaged themselves. New England Sports Ventures, later renamed to Fenway Sports Group (FSG), were three months into their reign as owners, having inherited a club wounded by three years of civil war under Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
Ultimately, Comolli and Liverpool were desperate enough to overlook Suarez’s indiscretions and pay the fee Ajax were demanding.
Suarez, meanwhile, was desperate enough to believe Comolli when he suggested Anfield offered a route to the Champions League inside 18 months.
Ambitious to reach the summit of the European game, however, Suarez sought an agreement on a potential escape route. An amendment was made to his Liverpool contract, the precise wording of which would become the subject of serious scrutiny two and a half years later.
The chances of reaching the Champions League with Liverpool were dented on day one. Suarez was brought in to play alongside Fernando Torres but passed him on the way out of the club quite literally, with the players meeting at Melwood’s glass front doors just as one was signing and the other was leaving.
Suarez would move into Torres’ home in Woolton, where he initially had Pepe Reina, Maxi Rodriguez, Lucas Leiva and Fabio Aurelio as neighbours. One of his closest friends in the squad was Glen Johnson, who spoke Spanish.
Suarez did not expect the sale of Torres to Chelsea and even if he publicly appeared to enjoy playing with his replacement Andy Carroll, team-mates could see at training that the relationship was never going to work.
Frustration often found its way to the surface. Suarez wanted the ball to feet. Carroll seemed only to be able to knock it into space. Suarez initially felt more comfortable in attack with Dirk Kuyt, who was not renowned for his first touch, but understood better how Suarez flourished when surrounded by players who were able to play quick one-twos.
Meanwhile, Suarez may have later appreciated Kenny Dalglish’s support through the period when he was banned for eight matches for making racist remarks towards Patrice Evra, but he did not think he was the sort of coach who would help develop his abilities as a player.
His first full season at Liverpool ended in disappointment, with the sacking of Comolli and Dalglish. The team were 17 points off the top four. Suarez believed Brendan Rodgers, Dalglish’s replacement, was an innovative coach but another season would pass without Liverpool’s league performances improving that much.
Suarez considered Joe Allen to be a good signing but he was frustrated when Fabio Borini, who was brought in to play in one of the wide areas of Liverpool’s attack, did not emerge as a regular starter. Suarez concluded the depth in Liverpool’s squad was thin and he did not feel as though he was being challenged enough, even for his own place.
He was approaching his 27th birthday and was concerned about the direction of his career, questioning whether some of his actions had been drawn out of frustration. Suarez described himself in his autobiography as “Public Enemy No 1” after another long ban, this one 10 games for biting Branislav Ivanovic. He claimed he was unable to take his daughter to the park because he was “under siege” from paparazzi.
“It was getting to me and upsetting the lives of the people I love most,” he said. Staying in the Premier League was not an option at that point. “I was mostly feeling miserable… I just wanted to leave England.”
Pere Guardiola, his representative and brother of Pep, reminded him that without Champions League football, he could leave Liverpool for offers of more than £40 million. Suarez sympathised with the task in front of Guardiola. Given Suarez’s ability and subsequent achievements at Barcelona, it now sounds incredible that the agent found it difficult driving up interest in him. Yet that would ignore his past. “There were big clubs who thought I’d bring problems and damage their image,” Suarez said. He wanted those clubs to think about what he could do on the pitch — “but then again, the biting incidents happened on the pitch”.
The summer of 2013 was a watershed moment at Arsenal. This transfer window, it seemed, would be different.
In the summer of 2011, Arsenal had lost Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri. Twelve months later, Robin van Persie and Alex Song left. For the first time in a long time, Arsenal entered a window without substantial debate over the future of one of their key players — and without an economic imperative to sell.
Chief executive Ivan Gazidis spoke in early June of an escalation in the club’s “financial firepower”. The previous November, Arsenal had renegotiated a £150 million naming rights deal for the Emirates Stadium, and a £30 million per year windfall from Puma was just around the corner.
At the time, Wayne Rooney’s future at Manchester United was the subject of debate after a fall-out with Sir Alex Ferguson. Asked if hypothetically Arsenal could afford to bid for a player of that stature, Gazidis said: “We could do that, we could do more than that,” he said. “We have a certain amount that we’ve held in reserve and we also have new revenue streams coming on board. All of these things mean we can do some things which would excite you. We can think about all kinds of things.”
One such thing was Luis Suarez. With neither Olivier Giroud nor Podolski convincing as Van Persie’s successor, a striker was top of Arsenal’s agenda.
As with so many transfer sagas, this one began with an intrepid intermediary. Suarez’s agent, Guardiola, made contact with Arsenal towards the end of the 2012-13 season. The information was clear: Suarez wants to leave. With the London club advertising their newfound wealth to the world, Arsenal were a logical destination.
This was not the Liverpool of today, nor the Arsenal of today. Brendan Rodgers’ team finished seventh that year, with Arsenal in fourth. Although they were run close by rivals Tottenham Hotspur, under Arsène Wenger, Arsenal were about as close as it came to a dead cert for Champions League qualification. In 2013-14, they would make their 16th consecutive appearance in the competition.
Arsenal had been in the midst of pursuing a deal for Real Madrid’s Gonzalo Higuain. An agreement had been reached with the player and his father, but Wenger was reluctant to grant the green light. Real Madrid were demanding a fee of €45 million, which the Arsenal manager considered exorbitant for a player who had not been consistently been first choice at the Bernabeu.
What really gave Wenger pause for thought, however, was Guardiola’s assertion that Suarez’s contract contained a release clause — one that forced Liverpool to consider offers above £40 million.
The seating arrangement in Melwood’s changing rooms went according to squad number and this meant Steven Gerrard usually got ready next to Suarez. Towards the end of the 2012-13 season, Gerrard had read about the interest in his team-mate. As his captain, he decided to ask him straight: “Luis, what is going on?”
The conversation that followed was brief, with Suarez making it clear he wanted to play in the Champions League. Liverpool were not offering him that opportunity. For Gerrard, history was repeating itself. Two years earlier, a discussion with Torres before he signed for Chelsea had gone the same way.
Gerrard was worried because he knew Suarez was right about his concerns. He had scored 51 goals in 96 appearances for Liverpool. He was the leading scorer at an underachieving club. Gerrard understood how it felt to be in demand. He had rejected offers to join Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich in the past. He accepted that Suarez was different to him because Liverpool was not his boyhood club — that it would be impossible to resist either Real or Barcelona particularly as a South American. But Arsenal? A move to London would have broken Gerrard’s heart.
Gerrard was worried that Suarez would move to Arsenal if Liverpool could not satisfy his Champions League ambitions (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)
Across the summer of 2013, Gerrard was worried. He could tell his team-mate was agitating to leave through his comments in the media. Gerrard would scroll the internet on holiday and see the stories linking him with various clubs. His state of alarm increased when he saw quotes given by Suarez to Uruguayan radio at the end of May. “I am happy at Liverpool, I’m happy because of the fans,” Suarez said. “But I’m not prepared to continue to put up with the English press. I have a contract with Liverpool, but it would be very difficult to say no to Real Madrid.”
Though Real’s president Florentino Perez confirmed in the same week that he liked Suarez, he soon described Gareth Bale as someone who was “born to play in Madrid”. Gerrard realised then that Suarez was not a target. In June, however, Suarez spoke again, this time before Uruguay’s friendly against France in Montevideo. “It’s a good moment for a change of environment,” he reflected.
It seemed inevitable to Gerrard that Suarez would depart. Edinson Cavani, Suarez’s strike partner with Uruguay, spoke about the matter, insisting that his international team-mate would not consider leaving Liverpool if they were in the Champions League. “He knows at this stage of his career that he needs to be playing at the top level.”
“Through the whole process, we were trying to figure out where the key to unlock the door was,” says **** Law, who was then serving as Wenger and Gazidis’ transfer negotiator. “The agent was claiming that with an offer of £40 million, Liverpool were obligated to talk. We quickly realised that was not the case — there was no obligation.”
Arsenal ascertained that the supposed “clause” was in fact a sop to the player, one that would prove impossible to enforce. Ultimately it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Liverpool knew it, and so did the player’s agent, but Suarez was desperate to leave Anfield. It was hoped that triggering this “agreement” might at least bring all parties to the negotiating table.
“The player was still in South America, and the agent was going back and forth between the clubs, trying to force the issue at Liverpool,” says Law. Arsenal were not concerned about agreeing personal terms — they were aware of Suarez’s demands and comfortable in meeting them. Guardiola insisted that even if Suarez did not have a release clause, there was a verbal agreement in place — and Arsenal resolved to test the waters.
“The intention was simply to bring the issue to a head,” says Law of the infamous £40,000,0001 offer. In his autobiography, Wenger admitted that the bid could be seen as “ludicrous”, but there was a method to the madness. “Nobody at Arsenal expected to sign the player for that price. We knew we had to go in over £40 million — obviously, we didn’t want to go in and offer £50 million, because maybe Liverpool would have sold for £45 million. We didn’t see any real reason to throw money away… we knew there was going to be a negotiation, we just needed to trigger it.”
What they triggered, however, was fury in the Liverpool boardroom.
John W Henry was on holiday in the Bahamas when Arsenal’s bid for Suarez was lodged. Correspondence had arrived via email from Merseyside. Forty-million plus a pound, he thought to himself. Arsenal were taking the piss. He had thought of Arsenal as a classy club — and had a good relationship with chief executive Ivan Gazidis — but this damaged his opinion.
Though publicly he made a stand, most of the contact between Suarez’s representatives and Liverpool’s owners went instead through Tom Werner, the Los Angeles-based chairman. Suarez liked Werner because he was always complimentary about him whenever they met and appeared to respect his position. He was so desperate to leave Liverpool that he offered to fly to America to explain his situation to the owners. Werner replied to that suggestion by texting Suarez: “Luis, you are staying. Our position is as Brendan and Ian Ayre have said it is: you are not leaving. We do not want to sell you.”
Rodgers considered Suarez’s value to be more than £50 million. Unless Liverpool received that kind of offer — coupled with a written transfer request — they would not consider a deal. Rodgers told Liverpool’s owners that he ranked Suarez in the same class as Cavani, who joined Paris Saint-Germain from Napoli for £55 million.
Suarez claims there were informal enquiries about his availability and other clubs suggested they were willing to pay a higher fee than Arsenal but Liverpool were always adamant that he was not leaving for any price. Though he did not see Liverpool’s strategy in a positive light at the time, he eventually came to realise that the club’s determination to keep hold of him was worth something.
Arsenal, ultimately, were the only club to make a bid for him. They were in the Champions League but this meant staying in England. Suarez wondered whether living in London would be different, where it was possible to live with a greater sense of anonymity. “Deep down, it wasn’t what I really wanted but I began to tell myself that this might work.”
Suarez’s “head was all over the place”. He soon realised that if he left Liverpool for Arsenal, his life could become even worse because it would result in Liverpool’s supporters hating him as well. “I was about to alienate the only people who had really stood by me.”
For Wenger, the decision to pursue Suarez was not straightforward. Although a gifted and prolific forward, his was a career dogged by controversy. For a coach who undertook extensive research on players’ characters before pursuing them, Suarez made for a surprising target.
For Wenger, the decision whether to bid for Suarez was not a straightforward one (Photo: Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
“We all had our worries,” says one former member of Wenger’s staff. “This wasn’t just any sort of transgression, this was biting and racism. It was… unusual.”
“We’d had a good few summers where we’d got rid of a few ‘bad eggs’,” says another. “We had a good group — it was the basis of the group who’d win the FA Cup the following year. Signing Suarez, from that perspective, might’ve been a backwards step… but in football, talent is everything.”
Ultimately, Wenger was convinced by the testimonies of Suarez’s team-mates and coaches. Arsenal’s manager felt the Uruguayan possessed the kind of selfless team ethic he sought in a striker. Several players advocated the signing — the likes of Jack Wilshere felt he could bring a much-needed edge to this Arsenal team. When Napoli agreed to meet Real Madrid’s asking price for Higuain, Arsenal’s focus trained fully on Suarez.
For his part, Suarez knew that Wenger was a manager with a track record of helping attacking talent fulfil their potential. The likelihood is that the Uruguayan envisioned using Arsenal as a stepping-stone to Barcelona or Real Madrid — although, intriguingly, he never made any request for a release clause in a prospective Arsenal contract.
One man who must have paid particular attention to the rumours was Giroud. While Wenger insisted publicly the club’s pursuit of a striker was no reflection on the former Montpellier man’s performances, Suarez’s arrival would have seen Giroud displaced as the club’s first-choice centre-forward.
Rather than wilt, however, the Frenchman redoubled his efforts in training. Perhaps it was the rumours of Higuain or Suarez, perhaps it was the fact he had acclimatised to Arsenal and English football — whatever it was, staff saw a sharper, more determined Giroud during pre-season.
A handful of journalists following Liverpool’s pre-season tour of the Far East and Australia were grouped together on the outfield at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) watching Rodgers conduct an open training exercise in front of 15,000 fans.
Midway through the evening session, phones started vibrating. Information from contacts in the UK suggested that Arsenal had stepped up their pursuit of Suarez. Two weeks earlier, Liverpool had turned down an initial offer of £30 million rising to £35 million with add-ons.
The decision was taken to head straight from the MCG to the team’s base at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Melbourne to try to find out more. As is often the case on trips like that, reporters were working together and sharing information.
Off-the-record discussions with senior Anfield officials revealed the exact figures behind the fresh bid and left those present open-mouthed. Riled by Arsenal, Liverpool wanted to make their stance crystal clear — there was no release clause and Suarez was not for sale. The reporters who had made the trip to Australia had their back-page story for the paper the next day.
Rodgers looks on as Suarez is substituted into the match against Melbourne Victory (Melbourne, Australia) at the MCG in July 2013 (Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
Gerrard had watched Suarez closely during those sessions and it was clear he did not want to be there. Dressing room banter or conversations about an opposing player aside, Gerrard had never spoken to Suarez before in detail about his life away from Anfield or Melwood. They were not close in a social sense, rarely texting one another or going for lunch together. Yet Gerrard liked him, not only because of his talent and the way he trained, but because his personality was infectious. He felt he could be honest with him.
Gerrard considered it especially unusual for players to discuss their contract situations openly but in Melbourne, Suarez unloaded, telling him: “Brendan and the owners have lied to me.”
Gerrard could see Suarez was seething. He was torn between his duty as captain of Liverpool, the club he loved, and his duty as a team-mate. He concluded quickly that his duty to Liverpool would always come first while accepting that legally and moralistically, it might be wrong for the club not to sell him.
The period between the end of the tour and Suarez’s next public appearance at Anfield in Gerrard’s testimonial with Olympiacos was, according to Gerrard, “torturous”. Suarez reassured his captain that he would play but he did not want to go to the function after the game. Jamie Carragher, a year into retirement, was due to feature in the Liverpool side and he had seen what a ferocious competitor Suarez could be. Before the testimonial, Carragher recalled, Suarez was not the same.
Inside 48 hours, he gave another interview, this time to the Guardian’s Sid Lowe, who ended up writing his autobiography. In that interview, he revealed publicly for the first time of broken promises made by Rodgers, who had supposedly told him a year earlier he could leave if Liverpool did not qualify for the Champions League. This led to Rodgers, who later denied making any promises to the striker, banishing Suarez to the Melwood wilderness.
On July 24, once the £40 million plus £1 bid had arrived, Liverpool owner John W Henry took to Twitter to express his disbelief.
His public dismissal of the offer did not play well at Arsenal. Wenger and Gazidis customarily conducted their business behind closed doors, but now their cover was blown. If the intention of the offer had been to develop a dialogue, the result was the inverse. It saw the door slammed shut in their face.
Arsenal sources deny the suggestion there was a major fall-out between the clubs. This, they suggest, was about public positioning — about FSG and Liverpool asserting themselves as a big club, and making it clear to Suarez that they were not prepared to negotiate his exit.
Arsenal now felt the onus was on the player. Only if Suarez insisted on leaving — if he effectively made his position untenable — could a deal be resurrected. The player’s agent maintained that would be the case. Arsenal were assured that for Suarez, there would be no going back.
There were five full-sized pitches at Liverpool’s training ground at the time. Suarez was already serving a ban but it was unusual to see him training two pitches away from the rest of the Liverpool squad. He was there with just a fitness coach for company. On some days, he was only allowed to train when the rest of the first team had finished their session. Gerrard saw the stand-off as “bitter” and he was caught in the middle.
“Luis was angry with Fenway. He was fuming with Brendan,” Gerrard wrote in his second autobiography. “The division between Luis and Brendan, between the player and the club, ran deep and wide. It was hard to see any way of bringing them together.”
Suarez felt betrayed by Rodgers, who had told the media that Suarez had shown a lack of respect to his team-mates by giving the interview to the Guardian. Suarez says he would have felt differently had Rodgers said the same thing to his face first, as he had done before speaking openly about the future. Suarez had told him then that he could not see himself being happy but Rodgers countered that by saying, “Yeah, but I know what you are like. I know how you live.”
It was a compliment in disguise, his way of saying that Suarez could not resist training hard and delivering performances. Yet Suarez concluded that Rodgers should have been more empathetic — he had only looked to improve as a coach by moving from Swansea to Liverpool 12 months earlier. In his first season, Rodgers had spoken to Suarez about his life away from the training ground but in the months after he threatened to leave Liverpool, conversations were strictly about football. A thaw would eventually arrive but the relationship was never the same.
There was an active social scene among the South Americans at Liverpool, which also involved the remaining Spanish players and their families.
Activities involved regular children’s parties, where Suarez seemed to enjoy larking about with the kids on the dancefloor more than making conversation with the adults sitting at their tables.
His daughter’s first birthday was in the basement of the Hard Days Night hotel and at the end of the party, when everyone went to say goodbye, his shirt was saturated with sweat. He’d been twirling around on the dancefloor the entire time — he just wanted to make sure the kids were enjoying themselves in the way he was not always able to after his parents split up when he was eight years old.
Listening to those who spent lots of time with him on Merseyside, a very different perception of Suarez develops. He would explain to them that football had toughened him, playing with older boys on the streets of Montevideo who could be twice his age and size. “He grew up in a hard environment and this came out of him at various stages,” says one source. “Off the pitch, he certainly wasn’t a demon but on it, he had the capacity to turn into one.”
Pride and trust were the two qualities he valued most, and this explains why his relationship with Rodgers after what happened in the summer of 2013 was never really the same. He was able to find his way back on the pitch because of, as Rodgers suspected, the pride in his own standards.
Gerrard was a big influence in his decision to stay, and so were Lucas Leiva, Philippe Coutinho and Jose Enrique. Lucas was the second longest-serving foreign player at Liverpool and his status in the hierarchy of the dressing room was well established. Away from Melwood, Lucas and Suarez regularly had lunch together in Woolton village. Lucas kept on at him, saying he should trust himself to stay — that the wrong move might end up backfiring. Barcelona or Real Madrid, Lucas could understand. But Arsenal?
Gerrard was trying to eat his dinner, but he could not. In front of him was his favourite meal: salmon, pasta and salad. Gerrard kept looking at it. His children were charging about the kitchen. He thought the world was coming to an end.
Before Suarez was told to train alone by Rodgers, he had been reluctant to get too involved. He did not consider himself a mediator. Suarez and Rodgers seemed to be talking a lot. At the age of 33, Gerrard had his own game to focus on as well and he was concerned about his place in the team.
Yet he realised that without Suarez, Liverpool’s chances of a good season were remote. With him in the team, Champions League football was a realistic possibility. He had to find a solution, even if the landscape in front of him was a mess. Suarez was Liverpool’s best player. He still had six games left to serve of his biting ban. He wanted to leave.
Gerrard decided it was time to do something. He sent Suarez a text, telling him they needed to “straighten” things out. Suarez responded straight away, telling him the manager and the club were liars. Gerrard asked him if he’d talk at training the following morning. Suarez agreed even though he was not supposed to arrive until the afternoon, once the rest of the players had gone home.
Gerrard had informed Rodgers about what he was about to do. He proceeded to tell Suarez that he thought he was making a big mistake. If he stayed for another year and performed to his potential, he’d earn the move he really wanted. Suarez was concerned that he might drift away from Barcelona and Real Madrid’s consciousness if Liverpool’s season did not go well. Gerrard reassured him that once a player was on the radar of either of those clubs, they remain there — providing he keeps doing the business.
Gerrard told him that he never wanted to play against him in a Premier League match, that going to Arsenal would give them a huge advantage over Liverpool and that if he did decide to go, it would break his relationship with Liverpool fans forever. If he stayed for just one more season there would be better teams than Arsenal after him.
Suarez did not protest. He nodded but he did not smile. He asked him if he could arrange a meeting with Rodgers and Suarez agreed. Gerrard then texted Rodgers and warned him that he’d have to tread carefully. Suarez insisted that Gerrard was there and when he told Rodgers about this, Rodgers admitted he wanted him present as well.
They sat in the leather couches of the manager’s office, overlooking Melwood. Gerrard felt awkward. They were all smiling but Suarez’s smile seemed threatening. It felt like the conversation could turn at any moment. Gerrard did not know the contents of their previous meetings, or whether any promises had been broken. By the end, Rodgers told Suarez he wanted him back in the team and Suarez promised that he’d train well. They shook hands. Though Gerrard was satisfied the matter had been settled, he would not know for sure until Suarez trained again. That moment would come a week later following an international break. Suarez, apparently, ran about like a man possessed. From across the pitch, Gerrard and Rodgers smiled at one another.
Rodgers would prove to be a Liverpool manager with many faults but he was right about Suarez’s passion for football.
This was illustrated when he played a behind-closed-doors match against Burnley in September 2013, just as he was about to return to first-team action after his biting ban. The friendly finished in a 0-0 draw but there was nothing friendly about it for Suarez, who took the game so seriously that he almost started fighting with the 19-year-old defender who he’d already “kicked all afternoon”, according to one of the Liverpool youngsters in the team.
It was standard practice for Liverpool’s under-21s to hold a debrief near one of Melwood’s dugouts rather than inside the changing rooms after the final whistle but Suarez was in a furious mood and having showered quickly, returned to the pitch where he continued remonstrating with the defender before the pair were separated.
For those teenagers representing Liverpool that afternoon, it made them ask the question: “Jesus Christ, how much does this guy care?”
“Pere Guardiola called me up and said, ‘The player is going to stay’,” recalls **** Law. “I said, ‘What changed? You told me the player was absolutely determined to force his way out’.
“The way Pere described it to me was that the Gerrard had talked him into staying — and, of course, Liverpool gave him a pay bump, and another promise: that he could leave the following summer.”
Ultimately, Arsenal discovered that the player wasn’t prepared to go the extra mile to force through a move. For all the agent’s talk, Suarez’s commitment had wavered at the crucial moment.
It was a deal that was dead almost before it began — and before Arsenal could explore the newly-acquired spending power Gazidis had boasted of earlier that summer.
Arsenal did eventually deliver on a marquee signing. Despite Higuain moving to Napoli, the club continued their dialogue with Real Madrid, who were looking to offload players to accommodate the arrival of Gareth Bale. Arsenal ended up breaking their transfer record to sign Mesut Özil — for a fee just a little higher than what they had offered for Suarez. Had Arsenal’s opening gambits been more to Liverpool’s liking, perhaps there was an agreement to be struck. It is a tantalising thought, but the sight of Suarez in another Premier League team’s colours remains hypothetical.
“It’s the summer we signed Özil,” says Law. “Özil ended up costing us the £40 million, but his salary demands were considerably more than Suarez. If we had just moved money from the player side over to the transfer side, it was doable. Would £60 million have done the trick that summer? Maybe.”
Man I wonder how much of these stories are fan fiction but This is so interesting. Do you know any other athletic articles like this? Ones that tell some behind the scene stuff.
Country: England
There's been a few over the years but I can't even remember them now, if I do I will copy paste. I try to post them when they pop up, this one dropped today.
Some are definitely more interesting than others, I agree.
BigPoppaPump
Reeling from Laca & Kos nightmares
I see you post them sometimes and I never read them, this was the first one I read the whole thing and I feel like I've missed out on so much now lol.
Might have to get an Athletic subscription but I don't really like them either.
Country: England
Out of the recent articles, I would say the Raul ones were interesting. Both when "he got the keys" and when he got the sack.
The Özil interview when he said his side of the story and buried the club was sick too (actually changed my opinion on him a bit)
There's a few I just can't remember them now. The non shill ones when they blatantly aren't trying to do damage control or retrospective ones are definitely the best.
Riou
In The Winchester, Waiting For This To Blow Over
Country: Northern Ireland
Player:Gabriel
Can't imagine the words "Joe Allen is a good signing" ever coming out of Suarez' mouth, tbh...also love the thought of Stevie G, scrolling through the transfer rumours on the internet on his holiday, like a desperate AM member
The £40, 000, 001 offer was ridiculous by us, regardless of what the intention was, that killed the deal and made us look like ******.
The £40, 000, 001 offer was ridiculous by us, regardless of what the intention was, that killed the deal and made us look like ******.
Riou
In The Winchester, Waiting For This To Blow Over
Country: Northern Ireland
Player:Gabriel
"Gerrard was trying to eat his dinner, but he could not. In front of him was his favourite meal: salmon, pasta and salad. Gerrard kept looking at it. His children were charging about the kitchen. He thought the world was coming to an end."
Country: England
This actually killed me"Gerrard was trying to eat his dinner, but he could not. In front of him was his favourite meal: salmon, pasta and salad. Gerrard kept looking at it. His children were charging about the kitchen. He thought the world was coming to an end."
I fully believe it too.
Sweet'n'Soulful
Yet another banned account of Jury
Nil-fred Haha threads makes me ****ing sick tbh.
BigPoppaPump
Reeling from Laca & Kos nightmares
"Gerrard was trying to eat his dinner, but he could not. In front of him was his favourite meal: salmon, pasta and salad. Gerrard kept looking at it. His children were charging about the kitchen. He thought the world was coming to an end."
I was wondering how tf they knew this, must have got it from his auto biography.
Wilf signing would've meant no Willian for you
Sweet'n'Soulful
Yet another banned account of Jury
Nah, would have meant no Pepe. Willian has time on his side anyway. I’m in the extreme group on AM who thinks a player you like can go on improving forever, as opposed to being on your last legs at 25!Wilf signing would've meant no Willian for you
