[article=http://www.espnfc.com/blog/espn-fc-united-blog/68/post/2485900/liverpool-woe-due-to-fsg-brendan-rodgers-confusion]
John Henry and FSG are running Liverpool superbly off the field but have yet to figure out the on-pitch element.
The second time I met John Henry, he was having trouble ordering his breakfast. We were in Liverpool's offices on Chapel Street, a few weeks after he and the rest of Fenway Sports Group had finally chased Tom Hicks and George Gillett out of town.
Henry is an amiable sort: open, calm, fiercely intelligent. He is extremely likeable. That is a factor that has played in his (and FSG's) favour over the past four years. By the standards of the sort of people who can afford to buy a Premier League club, Henry seems OK. Liverpool fans, by and large, want him to do well.
I spent about half an hour in his company that morning. He was in that stage of seeking as many views as possible about the state of the club he had bought: he had met with players, coaching staff, other employees and fans. Now he had finally reached the bottom of the food chain, soliciting the opinions of the local journalists.
Ours was his first meeting of the day. He had not eaten. After about five minutes, a girl came in bringing us all coffee and tea. Nervously, she asked if she could get Henry any breakfast. Very politely, he said yes.
He would like, he said, scrambled egg whites on wheat-germ toast, please.
The girl looked at him. He looked at the girl. She really wanted to have understood what he had just said. "Scrambled eggs?" she said.
"Scrambled egg whites," he corrected her, gently. "On wheat-germ toast."
"On toast?" she said. "Wheat-germ toast," he replied.
You could see her trying to remember the sounds, because she certainly did not recognise the words. Maybe someone in the kitchen would know what he was talking about.
Now, memory is a tricky thing. I have been telling that story to anyone who does not have any mechanism by which to publish it for the past four years. It has become a little morphed with each retelling. In my version, the punchline is that Henry is served a fried egg in what is known, in my part of the world, as a butty and has to gulp it down out of his own sense of courtesy.
I think that is probably not true. I think he was probably given scrambled egg whites on wheat-germ toast, but vowed at that point to get his breakfast in the hotel from then on.
Brendan Rodgers also suffers by chasing fads, something reflected in his constant tinkering with the team and tactics.
That story comes to mind quite often when I think about Henry, Liverpool and FSG. Not because it is representative of some sort of cultural clash, not because it stands as a cipher for a group of owners who don't (in the parlance of the fan) "get" the club they have bought. That is not a fair accusation; FSG and Henry do get it. They get it better than most overseas owners, anyway.
No, it comes to mind because it suggests that Henry (I will stress again that I like him very much) is a bit faddy to English eyes. Scrambled egg whites on wheat-germ toast is, I am sure, an excellent thing to have for breakfast. It is, I am quite certain, very good for you indeed, and it is the sort of thing that we should all eat first thing in the morning. It is probably because of all the scrambled egg whites and wheat-germ toast that Henry looks so youthful for 65 and that he has managed to accrue a fortune of $1.6 billion.
It's just that, well, Henry might be from small-town Illinois, have made his money in New York and now be a regular fixture in the most rarefied circles of Boston society, but that is the sort of breakfast just smacks of California. It's the sort of thing Gwyneth Paltrow would probably tell you to eat in the morning, and then everyone would have that for breakfast for six months, but then someone else would come along and say that actually egg whites give you rheumatoid arthritis and that it's better to have stewed plums and kitten's tears for breakfast, so we'd all eat that instead.
Whenever I think of John Henry, Liverpool and FSG, I think of that breakfast, and then I think that I bet he doesn't have that for breakfast anymore. And the reason I think that is not just because of the Paltrow factor. It is because that is how he has run Liverpool (and how, after he lost interest, Tom Werner and Mike Gordon have run Liverpool). Increasingly, that breakfast strikes me as being perfectly indicative of FSG's reign.
There are many reasons to criticise the state of Liverpool at the moment: the sackings of the coaching staff, the transfer committee, the Brendan Rodgers-ness of Brendan Rodgers. But the main root of all of these problems is that FSG treat their team like I suspect John Henry treats his breakfast.
They arrived back in 2011: the wheat-germ toast days. They hired Damien Comolli and decreed that they were going to do Moneyball and be successful. Except that that didn't work (almost immediately) and so, they sacked him.
Then, when Comolli's wheat-germ toast was out of fashion, they moved on; they have not stopped moving since. FSG are owners with the right intentions and many of the right ideas, but they are critically undermined by being so susceptible to what can only be described as guru thinking. Henry, and the organisation he runs, have this awful habit of falling head over heels for one idea, following it to the letter and then a few months later scratching that and going for something else.
They are, in many ways, football's equivalent of the fad dieters. They have done the Dukan, the Atkins, the 5:2, the paleo. They have gone through all the phases: no carbs, no fat, no sugar, no apples, just steak.
So when they sacked Comolli and decided to appoint Rodgers, they initially wanted to ally him with another director of football. This, they felt, was the best way to be successful: dynamic young coach, wise old head guiding him through the transfer market. But then they met Rodgers. He had his PowerPoint presentation and his envelopes, and they fell for him. He said he did not want a director of football, so they changed their minds.
Phase three was the transfer committee (the 5:2 diet) when FSG decided that Rodgers could not be trusted on his own in the market and needed lots of different brains to help. That remains in place, and they seem wedded to the structure, but the problem now is that the transfer committee cannot decide what they think because FSG's priorities keep changing.
Last summer, the idea was to buy young players, brightly promising ones and then watch as they developed under Rodgers' careful tuition. This was not their first "philosophy" in the transfer market: they had already been through the "British Is Best" phase, and then the "Recreate Rodgers's Swansea" phase, and then the "Undervalued Bargains From Abroad" phase.
In December, though, they were so confident that signing young players with resale value was the way forward that they considered sacking their manager because he was not playing these new signings enough, or in the right position. Fast-forward six months and the criteria have changed again. Now they want Premier League-Proven players, the least imaginative transfer strategy imaginable, an approach that actually negates the need for scouts at all and would work just as well if you gave control of it to someone who's done quite well at fantasy football in the past 12 months.
In other words, FSG never, ever, seem to quite make up their mind.
There are countless issues at Liverpool. The players, clearly, have lost their ardent faith in the manager. The transfer committee is stocked with the wrong people. The manager does not remember what he wanted to be because he has spent so long claiming to be so many different things. Someone, somewhere, has had the chutzpah to pretend it is all the fault of assistants Colin Pascoe and Mike Marsh. If you don't see that decision as either damning for Rodgers as a man for lack of loyalty or damning for Rodgers as a manager for total lack of faith from above, then you are deluding yourself, because they are the only two options.
But at the back of so much of it is FSG's lack of a plan. They have one off the pitch -- make Liverpool self-sustaining by expanding their commercial reach -- but on it, they are no nearer to knowing what they want to do than they were that day when Henry tried to order wheat-germ toast.
That is why I think of that story. Because FSG know what they want, but they have never been quite able to work out how to get it.
Rory Smith is a columnist for ESPN FC and The Times. Follow him on Twitter @RorySmithTimes.[/article]
John Henry and FSG are running Liverpool superbly off the field but have yet to figure out the on-pitch element.
The second time I met John Henry, he was having trouble ordering his breakfast. We were in Liverpool's offices on Chapel Street, a few weeks after he and the rest of Fenway Sports Group had finally chased Tom Hicks and George Gillett out of town.
Henry is an amiable sort: open, calm, fiercely intelligent. He is extremely likeable. That is a factor that has played in his (and FSG's) favour over the past four years. By the standards of the sort of people who can afford to buy a Premier League club, Henry seems OK. Liverpool fans, by and large, want him to do well.
I spent about half an hour in his company that morning. He was in that stage of seeking as many views as possible about the state of the club he had bought: he had met with players, coaching staff, other employees and fans. Now he had finally reached the bottom of the food chain, soliciting the opinions of the local journalists.
Ours was his first meeting of the day. He had not eaten. After about five minutes, a girl came in bringing us all coffee and tea. Nervously, she asked if she could get Henry any breakfast. Very politely, he said yes.
He would like, he said, scrambled egg whites on wheat-germ toast, please.
The girl looked at him. He looked at the girl. She really wanted to have understood what he had just said. "Scrambled eggs?" she said.
"Scrambled egg whites," he corrected her, gently. "On wheat-germ toast."
"On toast?" she said. "Wheat-germ toast," he replied.
You could see her trying to remember the sounds, because she certainly did not recognise the words. Maybe someone in the kitchen would know what he was talking about.
Now, memory is a tricky thing. I have been telling that story to anyone who does not have any mechanism by which to publish it for the past four years. It has become a little morphed with each retelling. In my version, the punchline is that Henry is served a fried egg in what is known, in my part of the world, as a butty and has to gulp it down out of his own sense of courtesy.
I think that is probably not true. I think he was probably given scrambled egg whites on wheat-germ toast, but vowed at that point to get his breakfast in the hotel from then on.
Brendan Rodgers also suffers by chasing fads, something reflected in his constant tinkering with the team and tactics.
That story comes to mind quite often when I think about Henry, Liverpool and FSG. Not because it is representative of some sort of cultural clash, not because it stands as a cipher for a group of owners who don't (in the parlance of the fan) "get" the club they have bought. That is not a fair accusation; FSG and Henry do get it. They get it better than most overseas owners, anyway.
No, it comes to mind because it suggests that Henry (I will stress again that I like him very much) is a bit faddy to English eyes. Scrambled egg whites on wheat-germ toast is, I am sure, an excellent thing to have for breakfast. It is, I am quite certain, very good for you indeed, and it is the sort of thing that we should all eat first thing in the morning. It is probably because of all the scrambled egg whites and wheat-germ toast that Henry looks so youthful for 65 and that he has managed to accrue a fortune of $1.6 billion.
It's just that, well, Henry might be from small-town Illinois, have made his money in New York and now be a regular fixture in the most rarefied circles of Boston society, but that is the sort of breakfast just smacks of California. It's the sort of thing Gwyneth Paltrow would probably tell you to eat in the morning, and then everyone would have that for breakfast for six months, but then someone else would come along and say that actually egg whites give you rheumatoid arthritis and that it's better to have stewed plums and kitten's tears for breakfast, so we'd all eat that instead.
Whenever I think of John Henry, Liverpool and FSG, I think of that breakfast, and then I think that I bet he doesn't have that for breakfast anymore. And the reason I think that is not just because of the Paltrow factor. It is because that is how he has run Liverpool (and how, after he lost interest, Tom Werner and Mike Gordon have run Liverpool). Increasingly, that breakfast strikes me as being perfectly indicative of FSG's reign.
There are many reasons to criticise the state of Liverpool at the moment: the sackings of the coaching staff, the transfer committee, the Brendan Rodgers-ness of Brendan Rodgers. But the main root of all of these problems is that FSG treat their team like I suspect John Henry treats his breakfast.
They arrived back in 2011: the wheat-germ toast days. They hired Damien Comolli and decreed that they were going to do Moneyball and be successful. Except that that didn't work (almost immediately) and so, they sacked him.
Then, when Comolli's wheat-germ toast was out of fashion, they moved on; they have not stopped moving since. FSG are owners with the right intentions and many of the right ideas, but they are critically undermined by being so susceptible to what can only be described as guru thinking. Henry, and the organisation he runs, have this awful habit of falling head over heels for one idea, following it to the letter and then a few months later scratching that and going for something else.
They are, in many ways, football's equivalent of the fad dieters. They have done the Dukan, the Atkins, the 5:2, the paleo. They have gone through all the phases: no carbs, no fat, no sugar, no apples, just steak.
So when they sacked Comolli and decided to appoint Rodgers, they initially wanted to ally him with another director of football. This, they felt, was the best way to be successful: dynamic young coach, wise old head guiding him through the transfer market. But then they met Rodgers. He had his PowerPoint presentation and his envelopes, and they fell for him. He said he did not want a director of football, so they changed their minds.
Phase three was the transfer committee (the 5:2 diet) when FSG decided that Rodgers could not be trusted on his own in the market and needed lots of different brains to help. That remains in place, and they seem wedded to the structure, but the problem now is that the transfer committee cannot decide what they think because FSG's priorities keep changing.
Last summer, the idea was to buy young players, brightly promising ones and then watch as they developed under Rodgers' careful tuition. This was not their first "philosophy" in the transfer market: they had already been through the "British Is Best" phase, and then the "Recreate Rodgers's Swansea" phase, and then the "Undervalued Bargains From Abroad" phase.
In December, though, they were so confident that signing young players with resale value was the way forward that they considered sacking their manager because he was not playing these new signings enough, or in the right position. Fast-forward six months and the criteria have changed again. Now they want Premier League-Proven players, the least imaginative transfer strategy imaginable, an approach that actually negates the need for scouts at all and would work just as well if you gave control of it to someone who's done quite well at fantasy football in the past 12 months.
In other words, FSG never, ever, seem to quite make up their mind.
There are countless issues at Liverpool. The players, clearly, have lost their ardent faith in the manager. The transfer committee is stocked with the wrong people. The manager does not remember what he wanted to be because he has spent so long claiming to be so many different things. Someone, somewhere, has had the chutzpah to pretend it is all the fault of assistants Colin Pascoe and Mike Marsh. If you don't see that decision as either damning for Rodgers as a man for lack of loyalty or damning for Rodgers as a manager for total lack of faith from above, then you are deluding yourself, because they are the only two options.
But at the back of so much of it is FSG's lack of a plan. They have one off the pitch -- make Liverpool self-sustaining by expanding their commercial reach -- but on it, they are no nearer to knowing what they want to do than they were that day when Henry tried to order wheat-germ toast.
That is why I think of that story. Because FSG know what they want, but they have never been quite able to work out how to get it.
Rory Smith is a columnist for ESPN FC and The Times. Follow him on Twitter @RorySmithTimes.[/article]
