Ageing Liverpool fighting Father Time as well as faltering form

It is a Champions League double header for clubs connected by European Cup-winning captains. Graeme Souness and Steven Gerrard both lifted the trophy Liverpool prize most and managed Rangers. If Wednesday’s tie at Ibrox is part of Gerrard’s legacy, considering Rangers’ improvement in his tenure, Souness may assume a greater pertinence, given Liverpool’s plight.

His reign at Anfield was both controversial and unsuccessful but the backdrop was difficult. Souness returned to Merseyside as manager in 1991 and inherited an ageing team. His attempts at rejuvenation, and his signings of players such as Dean Saunders, Paul Stewart, Julian Dicks, Mark Walters, Nigel Clough and Neil Ruddock, backfired. Souness correctly identified a problem. In trying to solve it, he made Liverpool worse.

That may feel a theme now. It was Souness, rather than Sir Alex Ferguson, who Jamie Carragher argued knocked Liverpool off their perch; it was Jurgen Klopp who returned them there, making them champions in 2020, three decades after Kenny Dalglish’s final triumph, a year before Souness came in and started clearing out Peter Beardsley, Steve Staunton, Steve McMahon and Ray Houghton.

Fast forward to the current day and Liverpool’s former champions are in the relegation zone; not of the table that matters most but of a youth league of sorts. In 2017-18, Klopp named, on average, the youngest starting 11 in the Premier League. Now he has chosen the third oldest. Indeed, the oldest side any manager has sent out was the team Klopp chose at Fulham on the opening day. Only Trent Alexander-Arnold and Luis Diaz were under 28 and, with each injured now, it raises the possibility Klopp could pick a still more senior line-up at Ibrox, especially if James Milner comes in at right back. Even with Joel Matip now also out, there is scope for seven thirty-somethings to start and if neither Alisson’s age nor his form is a concern, the birth certificates of Virgil van Dijk, Jordan Henderson, Thiago Alcantara, Roberto Firmino and Mohamed Salah represent a ticking timebomb. In some cases, their performances do too, although Firmino seems to be enjoying an Indian summer.

Liverpool have gone from having a perfect age profile to a wildly imperfect one. It can come from having a group of players able to peak together; the danger is a team declines together. Ferguson used to argue sides have a four-year cycle, even if constants like Ryan Giggs were in several of his. Most of Klopp’s group have been together for at least four years, and most were born within a four-year period, from Henderson in July 1990 to Andy Robertson in March 1994, taking in the aforementioned Thiago, Van Dijk, Matip, Firmino, Salah and Alisson plus Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Fabinho and the now departed Gini Wijnaldum and Sadio Mane.

For a team based on energy and intensity, perhaps inactivity has caught up with them, and not merely when they go a goal down after slow starts to games. In the summer of 2019, their sole senior signing was a back-up goalkeeper, Adrian. It was no immediate impediment: at the zenith of Kloppball, Liverpool won 26 of the first 27 league games on their way to 99 points.

Liverpool planned a bigger rebuild for 2020; a Covid crunch on finances rendered them luckless in that respect, limiting their budget and reducing the scope for change. Include 2021, however, and in three summers, they only signed four players designed to go straight into first-team contention. One, Kostas Tsimikas, was a back-up left back. Two, Diogo Jota and Ibrahima Konate, fitted the FSG blueprint of young players who could and did improve in a different environment. Thiago was the great anomaly, the special talent designed to add another dimension, bought in spite of his age and his injury record. His best has been brilliant, and the exception to the rule can work. All four have been good or very good buys.

As Liverpool were two games from completing a quadruple last season, it would be rewriting history to suggest a policy failed. The problem is that age has seemed to catch up with individuals and the collective. Klopp’s style of play may not be designed for those in their autumn years and Liverpool have been outrun at times this season. An issue has been that the majority of their many injuries have sidelined the younger players. For various reasons, they have been left more reliant on the old-timers. At 27, Naby Keita should be supplying the dynamism in midfield but instead mans the treatment table. At 28, Fabinho has started playing like a 34-year-old in the last couple of months. At 25, meanwhile, Joe Gomez was the worst player in the worst performance of Klopp’s reign, against Napoli. Newly turned 24, Alexander-Arnold is enduring the toughest spell of his career.

But Liverpool have been left with a void at the heart of the squad: too few players at their nominal peaks, when they used to have a host. They certainly have not ignored succession planning. Harvey Elliott and Fabio Carvalho were futuristic buys who have shown promise, and time will tell if Calvin Ramsay can be bracketed alongside them. Jota and Konate have the air of stalwarts for years. Diaz has been more of a revelation and Darwin Nunez a conundrum but sizeable fees were committed to forwards half a generation younger than Salah, Mane and Firmino. Yet it is telling that the only players aged 26 or 27 are the last-minute loanee Arthur Melo, the enthusiastic understudy Tsimikas and the oft-injured Keita. Six then in that age bracket – Alisson, Van Dijk, Matip and the three forwards – plus three who were younger started the 2019 Champions League final; the other pair, Henderson and Wijnaldum, were both 28.

Liverpool were not oblivious to the future. Their Moneyballers have always been wary of paying big salaries to players whose physical output has gone down. A series of contract impasses have shown a reluctance to commit to their conquering heroes: Henderson and Salah eventually signed, Wijnaldum and Mane left. Thus far, the Egyptian’s thirties have been hugely profitable for him, considering his wages, but not for Liverpool, given his performances.

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Form may be temporary and class permanent but physicality is not. There is a question if Liverpool are now more fatigued physically or mentally. Klopp’s heavy-metal football can suit those whose eardrums have not burst. His two Bundesliga titles came with among the youngest teams in Germany; by his last season, Borussia Dortmund were one of the oldest, though still younger than this Liverpool side. The risk, albeit one many a manager might envy, is that he has one great side at a club again, but not a second. By agreeing a deal until 2026, however, he took on the task of shaping a second. He can be accused of being too loyal, though there are worse faults to have and unlike Souness he has not pensioned anyone off too soon, but he may have to be ruthless.

Liverpool’s ages alone, with the years suggesting much of their squad is on the way up or down but not at the summit, suggests a team in transition. It may be exacerbated by the finances, too: lacking the transfer budgets of Chelsea and the Manchester clubs, they always had less margin for error and less scope to buy superstars. But at a club where history is ever present, the past offers the starkest of warnings. The last time they fell off their pedestal, during Souness’s tenure, it took them the best part of 30 years to get back there.