FSG Out? Alexander-Arnold among seven Liverpool mistakes

We’re only ever a goal, a missed penalty or a transfer U-turn away from ‘FSG Out’.

Liverpool are cruising to to the Premier League title under a manager who was doomed to fail having taken on the Impossible Job of replacing the honorary scouser, who won multiple titles having been hired and backed by the American owners.

While rival fans look on at a well-run self-sustaining football club that gets decisions right more often than not to fight for major trophies with envy, a not insignificant group of spoiled Liverpool supporters continue to take any opportunity to criticise their owners, displaying an often stunning ignorance as to how fortunate they are compared to others.

But they’re certainly not beyond reproach and we’ve taken a look at seven reasonable gripes Liverpool fans have over Fenway Sports Group’s ownership of the club since they took charge in 2010.

Furloughing staff

We don’t think Rishi Sunak had the world’s seventh-richest football club in mind when he announced the Coronavirus-enforced furlough scheme in 2020.

Liverpool wanted the government to pay 80 per cent of the wages of non-playing staff despite making a profit of £42m the previous year. They reversed their decision after a fierce backlash, “opting to find alternative means to pay staff” like forcing Mohamed Salah to wait a week before buying another new car.

European Super League

You might remember John W. Henry’s apology video filmed between wild boar hunts ahead of 30-year-old single malt victory Scotch by the fire. He took full responsibility for Liverpool being one of the 12 founding clubs of the failed European Super League, revealing they backed out of the money-grabbing plan that looked set to rip the soul out of football having come to the realisation that the fans are actually quite “important”.

It felt like a bigger misstep by Liverpool compared to others because of the jarring nature of agreeing to the coup during a pandemic in which the This Means More mantra took on greater meaning, before then being used as a phrase to mock the club and its greedy owners who proved that they had no real concept of what football means to the fans in the community. The More didn’t mean money, guys.

Trent, Mo and Virgil

No matter how you look at it, allowing the contracts of arguably the club’s three best and most iconic players to run down to the point where they can leave for nothing AT THE SAME TIME is criminal.

In some ways the possible exodus has been ameliorated by The Last Dance for the trio ending in a major trophy, but Liverpool’s stroll to their second Premier League title has also very clearly outlined just how f***ed they’re going to be if they lose them.

Mohamed Salah has contributed to 44 of their 69 Premier League goals, Virgil van Dijk has Rolls Royced his way through every single minute of the league season and although Trent Alexander-Arnold perhaps hasn’t been at his very best that may well be because he already has one foot in Madrid.

Extending the contracts of all three probably wasn’t possible thanks to their wage demands, and a couple of years ago when they might have offered up new deals for Salah and Van Dijk they may well have reasonably predicted a downward trajectory, but as Gary Neville says, “with Trent, it’s unforgivable”.

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£77 ticket prices

There are plenty of fanbases right now – Manchester United chief among them – up in arms over ticket price rises as owners squeeze the lifeblood of football to increase revenue. FSG were the canaries down the mine in this regard, with their planned increase of ticket prices from £59 to £77 in 2016 leading to a proper protest from Liverpool fans, as around 10,000 of them flooded out of Anfield in the 77th minute of their clash with Sunderland to a chorus of ‘you greedy b*astards, enough is enough’.

An apology followed – they’re good at those – and to their credit there’s been only a very small increase to £61 since.

Net spend

Ah yes, this old chestnut. The Why Aren’t We Spending As Much As Them? query. It’s almost as if they want to be Manchester United, who have the highest net spend (£1.08bn) over the last decade and little more than a financial crisis to show for it.

The argument is that Liverpool may have been even more successful had the owners not been quite so thrifty, and we admit that a net spend of £304m over the last ten years putting them below Bournemouth (£318m) in 17th place in world football does suggest they’ve been overly frugal.

But look at this season: no signings (because no one’s counting Federico Chiesa) and they’re storming to the Premier League title. Ah, but might they have won the Champions League with a new midfielder or a better striker? Maybe. Probably not.

This summer, when we will likely see significant exits on top of Alexander-Arnold – probably Darwin Nunez, hopefully Harvey Elliott and maybe Luis Diaz as well as the out-of-contract stars – will be the point at which FSG will need to loosen the purse strings to keep dining at the top table, or face the wrath of the fans who have been desperate for investment in the squad even at the best of times.

READ MORE: Premier League net spend table: Newcastle £100m more than Liverpool

A late midfield rebuild

If they fail to act this summer like they did in in the summer of 2022 there’s going to be uproar. In fairness to FSG, Klopp didn’t see the midfield demise coming either, or at least claimed he didn’t, insisting before the 2022/2023 campaign started that the only midfield type they were missing was the “1.95m who arrives into the box to head balls in”.

But with Fabinho and Jordan Henderson taking significant turns for the worse as Naby Keita and Thiago Alcantara continued to struggle, while Curtis Jones and Harvey Elliott weren’t ready for the increased responsibility, Liverpool looked very short in midfield throughout the season, with Klopp’s stance softening over a January move before he became adamant that recruits were required after their fifth-place finish.

Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch all arrived and have played pivotal roles in this season’s dominance.

Trademarking ‘Liverpool’

We want to avoid xenophobia here, but we don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that Americans are the most likely citizens to turn up at a city of half a million people, famed as the home of The Beatles, for its maritime history, its array of museums and art galleries as well as its friendly and resilient residents as well as a whole other large football club, and attempt to trademark the name ‘Liverpool’.

The Intellectual Property Office rejected the application citing the “geographical significance” of Liverpool, which was a very diplomatic way of saying ‘of course you can’t, you daft tw*ts, it’s f***ing Liverpool’ and the Spirit of Shankly group said it was a “victory for common sense” as the word “Liverpool” belongs to the city, not to the club and definitely not to FSG.