Today is the birthday of former Liverpool director of football Damien Comolli. It is also more than 10 years since the Reds parted company with him back in April 2012 With FSG undergoing a time of huge change once again at Anfield, we have taken a look back at the Comolli era and how it now looks in hindsight...
Liverpool have been one of the best clubs in the transfer business in recent years, with the Reds getting it right time and time again when it comes to both strengthening Jurgen Klopp’s squad, bringing in the right players at the right price, and moving players along for maximum profit.
But that hasn’t been the case for the majority of the Premier League era, with a succession of Liverpool managers having mixed success in the market and being responsible for a number of big-money flops. Eventually learning from such mistakes and adapting with modern times under FSG, a new structure was implemented that would help transform the Reds into one of the best sides around.
Former Sporting Director Michael Edwards played a key role in this gradual change at Anfield. His successor Julian Ward looked well-placed to carry on where his predecessor left off, with £49m January signing Luis Diaz the first coup. While the forthcoming departure of Ward at the end of the season means a period of uncertainty, no-one would bet against Liverpool making the right move to replace him.
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FSG’s way of doing things wasn’t an overnight success, however. Former manager Brendan Rodgers and the Liverpool transfer committee didn’t always see eye to eye, while the Reds’ transfer record under Kenny Dalglish was particularly hit and miss, including Andy Carroll (£35m from Newcastle United) and Stewart Downing (£20m from Aston Villa).
Spending £118.8m on nine players in 2011, during FSG’s first year at the club, Liverpool’s new American owners expected more than an eighth-place finish in the Premier League, a League Cup win and an FA Cup final defeat as a return on such investment. Dalglish lost his job as a result at the end of the season, but he wasn’t the only man the club parted company with.
Director of football Damien Comolli left the Reds after his contract was terminated by mutual consent in April 2012, just days before their FA Cup semi-final clash with Everton, with FSG not even waiting until the end of the season to dismiss the man responsible for their transfer business at the time.
"I am happy to move on from the club and go back to France for family reasons,” the Frenchman said at the time of his exit. "I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to work at Liverpool. I wish the club all the best for the future."
Comolli had joined Liverpool as director of football strategy in November 2010, a month after FSG had taken over the club. "I am delighted to be joining Liverpool and look forward to working with John (Henry) and Roy (Hodgson)," he said at the time. "I think we all realise there is a big job ahead, but we all share the vision that John has for rebuilding the club and bringing back the success that the supporters deserve."
When first appointing Comolli, owner John W. Henry had lauded his previous work when setting out FSG’s vision which would eventually serve them so well, with the Frenchman having served as a European scout at Arsenal under Arsene Wenger and received credit for signing the likes of Kolo Toure, Emmanuel Eboue and Gael Clichy.
"Today's announcement is just the first step in creating a leadership group and structure designed to develop, enhance and implement our long-term philosophy of scouting, recruitment, player development and all of the other aspects necessary to build and sustain a club able to consistently compete at the highest level in European football," the Liverpool owner said.
"Damien has a proven track-record of identifying exciting young footballing talent and we are delighted that he has agreed to join Liverpool. Working closely with Roy Hodgson and the coaching staff, I know he will make a valuable contribution to strengthening the club and the squad as we move forward.
"We intend to be bold and innovative. We will not rest until we have restored Liverpool Football Club to the greatness Liverpool fans expect."
FSG would ultimately succeed, but without Comolli.
At the time of his appointment the Frenchman said Roy Hodgson, who would be replaced by Dalglish in January 2011, had the final say on all transfers, with his role instead identifying targets. As a result, he was responsible for the signings of Carroll and Luis Suarez (£22.8m from Ajax) in January 2011, along with negotiating Fernando Torres’ £50m move to Chelsea, and the spending spree that was to come the following summer.
“I had days and days of discussions with Fernando Torres and his agent. I kept saying, ‘We can’t afford to let you go. We bought Luis Suarez to play with you and now you want to go,’" he’d admit to the Athletic in 2020 when recalling that January 2011 transfer deadline day.
“We kept telling Chelsea he wasn’t for sale. Chelsea kept bidding higher and higher, to a point where they got to a figure that we couldn’t say no to because it was written into Fernando’s contract. It was to the amazement of everyone at the club that Chelsea got to that figure.
“The night before deadline day, I had a call from someone who had nothing to do with transfers who said he had just heard from Newcastle that they will entertain the sale of Andy Carroll. We were stuck at the time because Fernando was going and we didn’t know who to replace him with. I agreed a deal with Newcastle that night but when they read in the newspaper the next day how much we were getting from Fernando, they changed the deal and increased the fee by £5million. That drove me crazy.
“At the same time, we were finishing the Luis Suarez transfer. He was in my office with his wife and daughter. At one point, I thought I needed to think about this. I went into Kenny’s office. I thought, ‘Do we do the Carroll transfer? What are the implications?’.
“I emailed the owners and said we needed a conference call. I said, ‘This is the deal, this is what we can do, this is the risk’. Then we voted. We knew we were paying over the odds for Andy but he was young and English. We also knew we were getting incredible money from Chelsea, who were grossly overpaying at the same time. I told them at the time that if things don’t work out, we could sell Andy for £20million to a West Ham or back to Newcastle or Aston Villa. And he was sold to West Ham for £20million a few years later.
“Around five o’clock, we decided to go for it. I got on the phone to the agent of Andy and he starts saying he wants this and that. ‘This isn’t right. If you are paying £35million, then we want more money.’ I said, ‘Look, it’s very simple. This is my offer. The window shuts in six hours. Take it or leave it. It’s up to you. I can’t play games.’ When he called back, it was all agreed and we organised a helicopter.
“I wanted to sign both transfer agreements as I didn’t want anyone to get the blame for it in the future if Fernando ended up becoming a £100million player and Andy ended up being a disaster. I told the club secretary at the time, ‘It’s my responsibility. I’m putting my signature to the paperwork.' It was quite strange to sign a £50million transfer on one side and a £35million transfer on the other side.”
Promoted to director of football the following March, alongside Ian Ayre being promoted to managing director, he would earn further praise from Henry following those January dealings as the club continued to plan for the future.
"In the short time that Damien has been at the club, he has impressed us greatly with his knowledge of the sport, his work ethic and his incisive intelligence,” Henry said following Comolli’s promotion. "He is a clear thinker and understands exactly what is needed to form a long-term, consistent approach with the philosophy we all share here."
"It has been an exciting five months and I think all of us recognise that we have made a great deal of progress in many different areas,” Comolli said. "However, there is a lot of hard work ahead and with the backing of our owners and their commitment to the club, I'm confident we will get it right."
The Frenchman would last just 13 months in his new role.
Ultimately, the impact of summer signings Downing, Jordan Henderson (£20m from Sunderland), Charlie Adam (£8m from Blackpool), Sebastian Coates (£7m from Nacional), Jose Enrique (£6m from Newcastle), Doni (Free from AS Roma) and Craig Bellamy (free from Man City), along with £35m man Carroll, would cost him his job. It was a scathing indictment of such business that Bellamy would be deemed the most successful at the time of Comolli’s exit, though Dalglish would praise his efforts.
"He has been really helpful in every transfer target that we've gone for,” the Scot said. "Everyone who has come into the club since Damien has been here was of my choice.
"Once I made the choice who I wanted, Damien went away and did a fantastic job of bringing them in. It's sad to see anyone leave the football club and he goes with my best wishes."
In truth, despite his pedigree with Arsenal, fans had never been convinced by Comolli’s arrival, with his time at both Tottenham Hotspur and Saint-Etienne ultimately a blemish on his record.
Having been appointed director of football as Frank Arnesen’s replacement in September 2005, he was involved in multiple disagreements with former Spurs manager Martin Jol, with the Dutchman complaining that the Frenchman had recruited a number of players without his consent and that he had left the squad "unbalanced". His signings of the likes of Gareth Bale, Benoit Assou-Ekotto, David Bentley, Roman Pavlyuchenko and Heurelho Gomes raised eyebrows, with the Welshman not exploding into life until 2010, and he was dismissed along with Juande Ramos and his coaching staff after Spurs made a dreadful start to the 2008/09 Premier League season.
Meanwhile his arrival as sporting director at Saint-Etienne in November 2008 led to the departure of manager Laurent Roussey, while he would later walk out on the club to join Liverpool. And co-chairman Bernard Caiazzo would blame Comolli for the financial problems he left the Ligue 1 side in.
Eventually it would be a similar story at Liverpool, with such a record perhaps helping make FSG’s mind up to dismiss him in April 2012. At the time, Chairman Tom Werner would claim the Frenchman was no longer the right person for the club going forward.
"The club needs to move forward and we now have a huge game on Saturday. It is important that everyone joins us in supporting the manager and gets behind Kenny and the team and focuses on a strong finish to the season,” Werner said.
"Frankly, we make these decisions with a great deal of care because it's our track record in Boston to give people authority and we've had great success with our manager, who was there for eight years, and our general manager, so we prefer stability. But when it's time to act, we need to act.
“We're coming close to the end of the season and the transfer window for the summer, and we felt it was important to make this change expeditiously. We feel there is enough talent on the pitch to win and, as I said, we've been dissatisfied, as most supporters have been, with the results so far.
“But we're also talking about the future - we have a strategy we need implemented and we felt Damien was probably not the right person to implement that strategy."
Comolli would later suggest that Henderson’s struggles during his first season at Anfield, which resulted in him nearly joining Fulham in the summer of 2013, had been given to him as a key contributing reason behind FSG’s decision to part company with him. However, he was always adamant he had made the right call.
“I remember the day I was sacked, the owners told me, Jordan Henderson what a massive mistake it was,” Comolli recalled to the Independent in 2019 . “That was about the only thing they told me.”
“Henderson is one of the main reasons I got sacked,” he told talkSPORT in 2016 . “The day I got sacked they told me I had made a big mistake on Jordan and he was a waste of money.
“Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but I think we paid the right price. He was a young English, British player and we know very often that British players are overvalued. But we were more than happy to pay the price because we thought he would become an outstanding player.
“I never said it publicly, but I was convinced he would be the future captain. People will say it is easy to say now, but I was convinced at the time that he would become the Liverpool captain. Now he is and he is also the England (vice) captain.
“I was totally convinced, as was Kenny (Dalglish), that we were doing the right thing for the club. He fitted the profile we were looking for. We knew he was an outstanding person, we knew he had leadership skills, we knew he was totally dedicated to football, to his passion, and we knew he was someone who wanted to improve on a day to day basis.
“We knew his physical abilities - his fitness stats were absolutely unbelievable. We were looking at statistics and we were going through a lot of midfield players in the Premier League and what amazed me and caught my eye was his ability to create quality chances.”
Given how Henderson has since captained Liverpool to Premier League and Champions League glory, and made well over 400 appearances over 12 seasons, Comolli was certainly right about the Reds skipper. And he still believes FSG were wrong to sack him.
“I could see they would be utterly ruthless if they didn’t feel comfortable with something and they were ruthless with me at the time,” he told the Athletic . “I still feel that it was an injustice. We won a trophy [the League Cup] and we got to the FA Cup final as well, so two finals in the same season.
“We had no money. We had to borrow money from them to buy Luis Suarez. I was begging them to give me £21million to buy Luis Suarez. They told me that money you are spending in January is your summer transfer money, so you won’t have it in the summer. I said to them ‘No problem’.
“There was no money and the wage bill was through the roof. We had potential Financial Fair Play issues, too. Everyone knows the story with the previous owners with [Tom] Hicks and [George] Gillett.
“After I left, they changed the structure of the club at ownership level. Mike Gordon took over from John Henry and Tom Werner. He brought stability with how they ran the football club and the rest is history.
“Mike Gordon only came on the scene towards the end of my time there. I connected with him very quickly. You could see that he was the one with the best football understanding. I hear very good things about how he runs the club.
“John Henry is very analytics driven. He’s quite cold, straight to the point. Tom Werner is warm. He comes from the entertainment business. Both are extremely successful at their jobs but different personalities and they complement each other quite well. Managing up was a challenge with the time difference and the distance. They live in different places within the US, as well.”
“When they made the decision to part ways with me, I think they panicked. They lacked experience. We were on the right path — we had the right players and the right ingredients. They sacked me and then John Henry came a week later and had reviews and meetings with my staff.
“Some of my former staff called me and said you won’t believe what he said. In a meeting, John Henry said: ‘Oh my God, I sacked the wrong person’. That stayed with me until this day. When you hear something like that, you either take a cold shower or you go running for an hour and a half to empty your brain!”
Comolli’s transfer record at Liverpool is not viewed as a success looking back, even despite Henderson’s turnaround and longevity at Anfield. Sure, Suarez is one of the Reds greatest ever players but Adam and Carroll were moved on in the summer of 2012, while Bellamy would also leave for Cardiff City despite impressing in his second stint in the club.
Meanwhile, Downing would be sold for just £5m to West Ham, Coates left the following year after just 12 Premier League appearances. Enrique would ultimately prove to be one of his more successful signings, lasting until Klopp ’s arrival, yet he would make just 12 Premier League appearances during an injury-plagued final three years of his contract.
However, from how Comolli tells it, and using Henderson as an example, the Reds’ successful way of conducting transfers in recent years had already been put in place under his watch, and that’s despite working under a much stricter budget than the one in place at Liverpool these days.
“It’s a great story around him (Henderson),” he told the Athletic . “We recruited him mainly using statistics. We were looking at another player and when we put the data together we looked at filters, one of which was chances created.
“Suddenly, this kid from Sunderland, this 20-year-old, a defensive midfielder, was up there with a lot of attacking players in the Premier League. He created as many chances as Steven Gerrard that season. Due respect to Sunderland but he was playing for them, not Liverpool, and he was not Steven Gerrard. I thought, ‘Hold on a minute, we are on to something here.’
“I remember the same day I pulled out his fitness data from playing against Liverpool and it was through the roof. He could run all day. I called our UK chief scout and said, ‘I know you’ve seen Jordan Henderson — just refresh my memory?’. He said, ‘I love him. You need to go and see him urgently’.
“That data flagged him up and it was backed up by scouting observations. Then, Kenny absolutely loved him. When Kenny met him, he was blown away by his personality and so was I. All the boxes were ticked very easily. The funny side of this story is that I had a budget of £15million. I couldn’t go over that. It was very difficult for Kenny and I to get £15million from the owners for Jordan.
“Sunderland chairman Niall Quinn wanted a lot more than £15million. He said I didn’t realise how good he was; his character and personality. He said the last time they played a derby against Newcastle, towards the end of the game, Jordan took a free-kick and the ball flew into the stands and he got a lot of stick from the Newcastle fans.
“He said the following week, Jordan took 300 free-kicks in training because he was so mad with himself. I put the phone down and thought if that’s the type of personality he is, then we should do everything we possibly can to get him.
“I went up to £16.75million to the great displeasure of the owners, who absolutely slaughtered me on the phone. I called Kenny and said, ‘You need to help me on this one’. He said, ‘It’s a great deal. I’ll tell them you did a great deal.’
“I know Jordan had meetings with [Manchester] United and Arsenal but very early, he said it was Liverpool and nothing else.”
Comolli also claims credit for interest in Philippe Coutinho, insisting he had already tried to sign the Brazilian the year before his actual Liverpool move, before finding himself sacked before the Reds could try again.
“In the spring of 2012, the owners told me that we had a limited spending budget per player of €10million and we could only sign players who were under 21,” he revealed in 2017. “I said to the scout: ‘Coutinho becomes our priority’ because we were looking for a wide player to replace Dirk Kuyt. He [Coutinho] was not available because they transferred him to Espanyol [on loan] later on.
“We didn’t even know he was that good: it was difficult to watch him play because he was never playing at Inter. We knew about him, we knew he was good, but it was only when Rafa said he’s going to be world-class. When somebody like Rafa says a thing about a player like this, you listen.
“The head of recruitment said he was the best we could get. But I was sacked, then Kenny [Dalglish] was sacked.”
However, Comolli did get one important signing to Anfield, and one who has made an even bigger impact than Henderson over the past decade - Michael Edwards. The Frenchman was responsible for hiring the ex-Liverpool sporting director back in 2011, and believed when making his own exit from the club, it was only a matter of time before his recruit replaced him.
“I wanted to create an analytics department and I wanted someone with both a football background and an analytics background,” he told the Athletic . “The most difficult thing when you are dealing with data is to be able to make sense of the data but more importantly, to translate the data to the coaches or the players in a way they can make sense out of it so it’s useful to them.
“I actually asked one of the data providers who was working in the Premier League at the time. I said, ‘I’m looking for this type of guy. Who is the best one?’ One of them told me Michael Edwards at Tottenham. Everyone thought I had worked with Michael at Tottenham but that’s not the case. I never worked with him.
“I called Michael, I explained to him the position I was looking to create, we had a couple of meetings and he took the job. He’s a very bright guy. We didn’t work together for a long time but when I left, I told him, ‘You are going to take over’. He said: ‘No way.’ I told him I was sure he would be given more responsibility and become sporting director at some point.
“Then Brendan Rodgers came in and said he would never work with a sporting director, blah, blah blah, which I never believed. I always thought Michael would have to wait a while and then they would recreate that position later on.”
It might be 10 years since Comolli left Liverpool having spent around £120m, but he still has connections with the Reds now a decade on, with the Frenchman currently serving as club president at Toulouse. The Ligue 2 side are owned by RedBird Capital Partners, who bought a stake in FSG in a £533m deal in April 2021.
And while Comolli’s Liverpool spell might not be looked back upon with universal approval and he remains the subject of skepticism, due to his record at the likes of Anfield and White Hart Lane, scratch beneath the surface and it’s clear he did play something of a formative role in putting the Reds back on the right path all those years ago at least. Perhaps the Frenchman now deserves a little more credit.
*A version of this story was originally published in April 2022.
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