Ian St John has come out and criticised the ten years of foreign management that he believes has transformed the club beyond recognition. The Liverpool legend believes that for such dramatic changes to the backroom staff, there should have been a great deal more success than just the Champions League triumph of 2005. St John told BBC Radio Merseyside that it maybe was time to return to the club’s British roots:
“Personally I hope we get a British manager. We’ve had over 10 years of foreign managers. Take away the night in Istanbul and the whole club seems to have changed. The staff we’ve got now, one minute it was all Frenchmen, the next minute all Spaniards. I mean this is Liverpool Football Club. I thought earlier in the season when Rafa changed the academy staff, I thought that was shocking. The academy boys had been there for years turning out players like Gerrard and Carragher and winning the (FA Youth) cup a couple of times. And for them to lose their jobs, and for what? I thought that was shocking, and then to get an influx of Spaniards coming in, I thought it was a big mistake and it was something that was happening at the club that shouldn’t have happened.”
So does St John have at point about our identity? Has the spirit of the bootroom and passion to play for Liverpool gone away under foreign management in recent years? It’s difficult to say in some respects because the English game has been globalised to such an extent in recent times that this was inevitably going to happpen. Even Rafa recognised as much with his youth policy which St John much criticised. The aim that Benitez and the Spanish coaches Rodolfo Borrell and Pep Segura had was to develop players with a “passion” for the football club. Rather than relying on poaching youngsters from abroad, the aim was to develop a youth academy similar to Barcelona’s where Borrell and Segura originated, developing a crop of local youngsters who want to play for the club for the rest of their careers.
How the Barca academy works is typified by the contrasting attitudes of Lionel Messi and Cesc Fabregas. Both developed their skills at Barca’s La Masia academy, Messi came from a young age from Argentina to play for Barca while Fabregas left the club after being poached by Arsenal. While Messi wants to stay at the club for the rest of his career rather than returning to Argentina, Fabregas clearly has the desire to return to Spain. Why is Cesc not as loyal as Messi? Because Barca trained them both in the ways of Barca, and while one wants to stay, the other wants to return there. The same sort of thing was hopefully going to take place at Liverpool, and this is why I disagree with St John on the changing of the academy staff. For the best part of ten years, the Academy had only produced one player of any note, Stephen Warnock, and it was time for a change.
Part of this new approach was to bring in young English players to kick start this process of club indoctrination. Both Jonjo Shelvey and Raheem Sterling reportedly rejected bigger offers from other clubs to join the Reds, and these sort of players are seen as the way forward for the club. How much this was motivated by the Premier League quota system being established or by a genuine belief that that the team would be improved by more local talent is open to interpretation, but I believe the continual involvement of both Borrell and Segura is crucial for this process to continue. One of the best things a new manager could do is to convince them both to stay and continue with their long term project. Otherwise we may go back to square one and revert to poaching foreign youngsters. Then the club would truly be losing its identity.
Certainly the loss of the traditional Liverpool bootroom will lead to a certain extent a change of identity for the football club but such a thing is inevitable in any club these days as coaches and players come from all around the world to play in the world’s richest league. As long as the coaches and players understand the Liverpool Way and have that “passion,” then we shouldn’t ask for anything else, and any players who do not share this passion and loyalty to the club should, as Jamie Carragher put it, just leave. When going through a difficult spell in the club’s history, it is time for the team and staff to come together, the only way this can happen is through commitment to the club rather than wanting out.
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