The wheels were well and truly put into motion at Chelsea this week.
Having seen former owner Roman Abramovich exit due to the forced sale of the club owing to sanctions placed upon him over historic ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin, the era of an owner willing to fund success through his own money, and willing to lose plenty of it, is now over at Stamford Bridge.
The takeover of the club by a US consortium led by LA Dodgers part-owner Todd Boehly, one that has financial backing from private equity giants Clearlake Capital and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, was completed earlier this month after the group won a race that had been overseen by UK Government to purchase the club for a sum around £2.5bn.
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This week saw the boardroom changes brought into effect with two heavyweights of the Abramovich era, Marina Granovskaia and Bruce Buck both departing. Boehly is in as chairman, joined by Clearlake co-founders Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano who will be co-controlling owners of the club along with Boehly. Also joining as co-owners are Wyss, LA Dodgers and LA Lakers owner Mark Walter, Jonathan Goldenstein, Lord Daniel Finkelstein, Barbara Charone and James Pade, another member of Clearlake's senior leadership.
The same announcement that Chelsea delivered on Wednesday morning included the decision to install Boehly as 'interim sporting director', with the American having already played a role in Romelu Lukaku's loan move to Inter Milan for £7.5m, 12 months on from the club having paid almost £100m for his services.
The decision to expedite the exit of Lukaku was one born from a desire to get his considerable wages of more than £300,000 per week off the books. It is the first impact of the new regime, one that points to them trying to do things differently moving forward.
Chelsea have an abundance of young talent that has come through their Academy at Cobham, and that is something that has allowed them to turn strong profits on player sales. That pipeline to the first team is something that Chelsea, like Liverpool, will continue to value.
Boehly wants to change things up at Chelsea but still be in the hunt for trophies. The 48-year-old is an admirer of the way that Fenway Sports Group have managed to successfully deliver their approach in baseball and apply it to football by focusing on the right players as opposed to the most expensive ones.
Speaking to Bloomberg last week, Boehly said : "If you look at the models that are very successful, Liverpool is a great model. Liverpool generates a couple of hundred million more revenue than Chelsea and they generate earnings, so there is an opportunity to compete."
Boehly himself is said to be data driven, and having seen how Liverpool have managed to use their investment into that side of the game to their advantage it is expected to be a focus, with signings of the ilk of Lukaku's last year expected to be a thing of the past under the new regime, with a different type of player profile identified and a more concerted effort to manage wage liabilities and where the money is spent.
When Chelsea were free spending under Abramovich there were plenty of clubs who looked on enviously as they were continuously gazumped in the transfer market or poached for their top players, Chelsea's swoop for Liverpool's Fernando Torres for £50m in 2011 part of that. But the landscape has now changed and the era of excess appears to be over, and having managed to keep control on costs and run the club as a business as well as delivering a Premier League title, Champions League crown and wins in the FIFA World Club Cup, FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Super Cup there is a move to follow how Liverpool operate. Clubs who aren't owned by sovereign states know that they have to do things differently in order to compete.
Boehly's Chelsea vision will likely have to be long term, and they are some years back from where FSG were when they began their journey, although using the blueprint of what FSG have done at Liverpool, looking at their successes and mistakes, means that they can cut straight to the chase in some areas.
One of those areas is that of sporting director. Where FSG sit as best in class is their ability to employee the right people in the right places to execute a vision. They are also willing to invest in the infrastructure behind the scenes in order to provide the best people with the best facilities and tools to work with. All that combines to create a winning formula.
The most obvious example of hiring the right person for the right job is undoubtedly that of Jurgen Klopp, with the German's 2015 hire transforming a football club from dreamers into believers. It is hard to imagine that the same level of success arrives without Klopp driving it forward, he provides the edge that winners need.
But Klopp, while a big part, isn't the only part of the machine that is Liverpool Football Club. Michael Edwards, who left the club this summer to seek new opportunities, excelled in his promotion from within to becoming one of football's most sought after sporting directors. He has been replaced by another promotion from within, Julian Ward, while people like director of research Dr Ian Graham and his data team that includes the likes of William Spearman, Tim Waskett and Dafydd Steele have all played a role in the product that is on the pitch through data analysis.
Some teams ticked a box with data analysis but Liverpool went all in pretty much from the off.
Speaking at the Financial Times' Business of Football Summit earlier this year, Graham said : "My first year at Liverpool in 2012, the first 12 months was exclusively built on recruitment applications. I told our owners it would take a year to build that stuff and they said 'fine'.
"That long-term planning and adoption of data was rare at football clubs at the time and luckily for me the owners saw the value in it and we have had some success with that approach.
"Liverpool is a lucky place to be. When I arrived there was very little in terms of anyone doing anything with data in any sort of systematic way."
A decade on from Graham arriving at Anfield and the infrastructure that Liverpool have is best in class. Building something to the level that Liverpool have, where the idea is that the approach remains constant whoever is at the helm, means that Chelsea have some work to do under Boehly, and expecting the same kind of results in a short space of time is likely not feasible. Boehly will be hoping for some time to be able to bring about the change that he wants.
Earlier this week reports in the Mail suggested that former Liverpool sporting director Edwards was the man that Boehly wanted to bring in to shape the future of Chelsea and have them looking in a different direction in the transfer market. After all, if the idea is to replicate what FSG have delivered at Liverpool then what better way to do that than to hire the man who was one of the architects of that success.
Quite whether Edwards would fancy taking on a role that would effectively see him trying to build something that he already had a Liverpool is questionable. But the links, and Boehly's desire to have control from the off on transfer negotiations until a new sporting director is found, speak volumes about how Chelsea's new owners see their future.
With Manchester City the challenge for Liverpool is to find ways to beat the odds by maximising their strengths in seeking value others miss, and not trying to go blow for blow in a transfer market shoot out. Last summer's £100m acquisition of Jack Grealish seemed to set the level at which Liverpool and the rest need to operate, but after a tough first season he has seen his value, according to analysts at Football Benchmark, drop by some £45m from what they paid to sign him from Aston Villa.
With Chelsea the task had been for so long very similar. Moving forward, Liverpool will have to remain at the vanguard of analytics and recruitment to stave off the challenge from a club that wants to follow the same path, then do it better.
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