Michael Edwards is the unsung hero of the Liverpool team.
The former Plymouth trainee is now our director of football, and in the transfer window recently, he’s nailed it.
We’re still waiting for Naby Keita and Fabinho to show us what they can do, but Alisson is excelling, while Mo Salah at £37m is maybe the best signing in our recent history.
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Edwards’ other wins include Andy Robertson, Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino, Gini Wijnaldum and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain…
A fantastic piece has been published today which goes in-depth about Edwards’ role in transfers.
“Edwards challenges the orthodoxy of clubs watching a player once, then sending a scout back a few weeks later to see them again,” writes Jonathan Northcroft in the Sunday Times. “Liverpool watch in blocks of 15-20 games to get a true picture of consistency and performance.
“There is emphasis on how players train, and every January scouts go around the world to watch European clubs at their winter break camps. Edwards himself stood by the side of a pitch in Marbella watching [Mohamed] Salah practise with Basel.
“When Chelsea gazumped Liverpool for Salah in January 2014 there was desolation, but when Salah re-emerged, at Fiorentina then Roma, Liverpool could marry that evidence with all their glowing research on him as a youngster. They knew Chelsea would not want him, Spurs could not afford him and that he was not one for the Manchester clubs. They saw him as a natural Arsenal signing and were amazed that Arsenal’s Italian scout had thought Salah “wasteful”.”
There was a time when Liverpool’s infamous transfer committee was mocked and ridiculed for buying the likes of Christian Benteke, Mario Balotelli and securing Rickie Lambert as a replacement for Luis Suarez.
But now, we’re the envy of our rivals, transfer wise.
The club needs enormous congratulations on how they’ve turned this around, which has resulted in us being genuine challengers for silverware.