If his name’s not down, he’s not coming in.
That was the law when it came to Liverpool’s player recruitment during Brendan Rodgers’s reign, as the Northern Irishman used his appearance on Sky’s Goals on Sunday to explain the restrictions on incoming players at the club.
Rodgers’s spell at Anfield came to an end earlier this season as another series of expensive imports failed to see Liverpool climb the Premier League table, and while Rodgers paid the price for that failure, he indicated that in some respects his hands were tied at the transfer table.
“The transfer model at the club is slightly different to that of other clubs,” he said. “There’s a recruitment team in place whose job it is to bring in the players.
“If the player you want is not on the list you have to take someone else. For example if you want a left back, but the one you want isn’t there, you have to take the best one that’s in that group.”
Rodgers also explained how the failure of the club to sign Alexis Sanchez from Barcelona in the summer of 2014 led directly to the disastrous signing of Mario Balotelli to fill the void left by Luis Suarez.
“The huge blow for us that season was that we thought we were getting Alexis Sanchez,” Rodgers said. “We were going to then bring in Rickie Lambert alongside him, but it ended up that we didnt get Sanchez, we just got Rickie.
“All of a sudden our only striker is Rickie Lambert. At 32 years of age going into the Champions League season that wasn’t ideal.
“I was asked a question and I felt Mario was someone who wouldn’t work for us, the profile of what we were after. But come the end of the summer, we were struggling to get someone who could do the role we wanted.
“They were thinking that maybe he is a £50m player that we can get for £16m. We can bring him in and we can develop him in the way I had developed some of the other players.
“So, when the owners are wanting you to go down that route and there is no other options, then of course you give it a go.”
