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Liverpool Echo

Sport

Dave Powell

Liverpool's £574m gap to Manchester City shows what FSG must do next

Manchester City FSG Swiss Ramble (Person) City Football Group Darwin Nunez Jurgen Klopp Football Neco Williams Sadio Mane EPL

The struggles of Liverpool on the pitch this season has led to significant ire directed the way of owners Fenway Sports Group.

The Reds owners, who acquired the club in 2010, have been at the helm during the Champions League and Premier League triumphs of 2019 and 2020 and were the group that were adamant that Jurgen Klopp was the perfect fit to lead the first team that relied on a more strategic and analytical recruitment model.

But while last season saw the Reds come within a whisker of what would have been a legendary quadruple, there were fears already for how this campaign may play out if investment into some key areas, most notably midfield, wasn't forthcoming.

Darwin Nunez arrived for £72m, as did Fabio Carvalho (£5m) and Calvin Ramsey (£4m), although with the departures of Sadio Mane to Bayern Munich (£29m) and other exits of players such as Neco Williams, a significant amount was recouped through outgoings leaving the Reds with a net spend of around £8m. It is that net spend figure that has long been a cause for anger among some Reds fans, their belief that when compared to their rivals it is indicative of a lack of ambition to press home their advantage from periods of strength on the field.

Manchester City, who have been Liverpool's closest on-pitch rivals in recent seasons, have often been used as the benchmark to compare the Reds approach to. City, owned by the Dubai-based City Football Group, have been willing spenders consistently in the transfer market, with manager Pep Guardiola handed the funds to continually change and adapt his side each season. It is a model that has served them well and seen them, largely, the dominant force in English football in the past five or six years.

But how does their approach and Liverpool's compare over the last two years?

Renowned and respected football finance expert Swiss Ramble shared a thread earlier this week taking a deeper dive into the numbers behind the activity of the clubs over the past two years. With the 2021/22 accounts not yet published the transfer data for the second year was taken using estimates from the Transfermarkt website.

According to the figures presented, Liverpool have a net spend of £60m over the last two years, the gross spend of £164m offset partly by £104m in player sales. Nunez's arrival, the January signing of Luis Diaz for £42m and the summer 2021 acquisition of Ibrahim Konate for £36m from RB Leipzig were the major deals in, with Mane's £29m departure the biggest exit, with Williams' to Nottingham Forest standing at around £17m.

In contrast, Manchester City's net spend stood at a figure of plus £4m net as £266m in purchases for the likes of Jack Grealish (£106m), Erling Haaland (£54m) and Kalvin Phillips (£44m) were offset by £270m in player sales, with Raheem Sterling's £47.5m switch to Chelsea one of the most prominent. They did, however, have greater saleable assets than Liverpool during the period, with Ferran Torres, Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko all commanding large fees to aid the balance sheet.

Swiss Ramble's research identified that Liverpool's gross and net transfer spend have been steadily falling since 2019, down from £223m and £163m respectively, something attributed to the impact of COVID on finances.

Manchester City's net spend has also been in decline, down from its £250m peak in 2018 to the club making £54m net sales in 2022/23.

Cumulatively, Liverpool have had a higher net spend than Manchester City in each of the last two, three and five years, although the period before that saw the Reds heavily outspent. In the 12 years of FSG ownership at Liverpool, the Reds' net spend has been £402m less than Manchester City's, that figure telling in City's approach to make themselves an established title challenger but somewhat skewing their approach over the past two or three years.

Gross spend tells a different story, however. The gross spend over the last three years at Manchester City has been £460m, a sum 53 per cent more than Liverpool’s £300m. A look at the last decade shows that City have spent around £500m more, gross, than Liverpool (£1.6bn compared to £1.1bn).

Liverpool's wage bill has risen from £109m in 2012 to £314m in the most recent 2021 accounts, an increase of 188 per cent as opposed to a 76 per cent rise at Manchester City, from £202m to £355m over the same period.

One particularly interesting part of Swiss Ramble's presented figures is how much both wages and transfer fees have cost clubs, where the true figure is found through adding wages and the amortisation of transfer fees (the annual charge on the accounts for the signing of a player based on the fee divided by the number of years on their contract).

In the last three years that cost has been around £1.4bn for Manchester City and £1.3bn for Liverpool, although Swiss Ramble highlights it is a trend that has seen the gap widen, with the 2021 accounts showing Liverpool 16 per cent behind City in that respect (£422m for Liverpool compared to £500 for Manchester City).

Owner funding is where the difference becomes stark. Since 2012 Manchester City owners City Football Group, through share capital and loans to the club, have provided £684m in funding, a figure some 522 per cent more than what has been provided by FSG at Liverpool, with a £110m figure over the same period.

Of that £604m for City, £604m of it arrived between 2012 and 2015, where the owners sought to invest heavily in both playing squad and infrastructure in order to establish the club among the Premier League's elite year in, year out.

Over the past five years the money has flowed back the other way, with FSG receiving around £34m in loan repayments attributed to an inter-company loan for the rebuild of the Main Stand at Anfield, which was completed in 2016. That loan carried interest at the start but has been interest free since 2019.

The figures paint a picture of approach at both clubs. For City the early heavy spend, while still high when gross spend is considered, has been scaled back to something more measured as the club have followed the Liverpool trend of player sales to offset transfer spend to keep net spend down.

For Liverpool, while the numbers tell the story of an ownership with strong cost control and a robust balance sheet, the lack of investment at key times, as was seen early on with Manchester City, means that they have been more risk averse, something that they could now be paying for with an expensive rebuild required of the first team squad in the coming transfer windows.

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