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Daniel Levy - Former Chairman

SissokoWasGood (BoL) said:
I think so much of Levy’s thinking was also shaped by not ‘doing a Leeds’ because he came into it around the time that they were risking everything and ultimately came up short. I think through his lens, the stadium was ultimately something that would mean the club was on a stable footing for years to come. We could fully maximise the fanbase, and it had the nice consequence of boosting the value of the club.

But he just didn’t look at it like ‘now we’ve built the stadium, let’s push on’. That thinking is really clear to see. And I think it’s just an extremely Levy centric way of looking at things to assume his way was the only safe way to run a club. Liverpool paid Mane a lot of money, and they won the biggest trophies. And they’re still here. There’s definitely a middle ground between the Levy and Leeds extremes, and it’s high time we moved toward it.

The good thing is, because we’ve been so far on the Levy side for so long, there should be plenty of slack to allow us to move toward the middle and still be perfectly safe and sustainable.
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my worry is it will go to their heads and we will do a Leeds, when you spend 25 years doing something that works, stick with it
 
Jurgen the German said:
Liverpool won both the Premier League and the Champions League with Mané playing a central role. I'd say that worked out pretty well. Compare that to Clinton Njie, who was signed because he represented better value.

As for recklessness, where are the PSR breaches? Where are the UEFA sanctions? These clubs aren't gambling their futures; they're investing intelligently and backing their football departments.

I've already named them: Arsenal, Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Atlético Madrid and Inter Milan. They've all won major honours while operating within financial constraints. The evidence suggests they've found the balance between prudence and ambition. We've spent years congratulating ourselves on the prudence part while largely missing out on the ambition.
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but the difference in what we have won and they have won is a rounding error, compared to the difference in spend, from an ROI we are outperforming most of them
 
Baleforce said:
not a proven ready made player no, we should get all of them that we can, but van Hecke is nowhere near that

he's a punt
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A lot of transfers are ultimately calculated risks. Liverpool took one when they paid a world-record fee for a defender in Van Dijk. Arsenal took one when they spent £100 million on Rice. At the time, neither deal came with guarantees. The point is that every major signing carries an element of uncertainty. If clubs only pursued players who were certain to succeed, no significant transfer would ever happen.
 
Jurgen the German said:
A lot of transfers are ultimately calculated risks. Liverpool took one when they paid a world-record fee for a defender in Van Dijk. Arsenal took one when they spent £100 million on Rice. At the time, neither deal came with guarantees. The point is that every major signing carries an element of uncertainty. If clubs only pursued players who were certain to succeed, no significant transfer would ever happen.
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and the game would be better for it, and fewer clubs would get into financial difficulty
 
Baleforce said:
thats a short period of time in the grand scheme of things, and still includes a cl qualification year
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Seven years is not a short period of time. One Champions League qualification in seven seasons for a club built and budgeted for European football cannot be considered a successful return. A manager would not survive at our club with just one top-four finish across seven seasons.
 
Baleforce said:
they pass on players they can't afford too, they don't get everyone in the manager wants

also, Liverpool and Dortmund both came close to financial collapse in the last couple of decades

Munich are bankrolled by the national tech and insurance industries of Germany

there absolutely is a balance, and I think we have been closer to it that any other club in the game over the last 25 years
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We are nowhere near that.

If you say we spent 52 million on 3 players, 2 of which are arguably starters it puts a different spin on it.

Thats before any out goings as well.
 
Jurgen the German said:
How recently did Dortmund nearly go bankrupt? That was more than 20 years ago.

They don't get every player they want, but they don't spend months haggling over every deal either. Liverpool signed players like Mané rather than settling for Clinton Njie. Arsenal identified Declan Rice as a priority target and got the deal done, rather than filling the squad with 18-year-olds who might not be ready for another three to five years.

Liverpool and Dortmund have both won league titles within the last 15 years. Arsenal have won multiple major trophies during that period as well. None of these clubs are reckless, but neither are they paralysed by the pursuit of perfect value in every negotiation.

Sorry, but your last paragraph doesn't hold up. Clubs that have won significantly more than one trophy in the last 17 years have generally struck the balance between financial responsibility and ambition far better than we have.
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Stretching it a bit with arsenal there.
I think it's fair to say that under wenger at the end the board were not really backing him.
They never backed emery, yes they've backed Arteta and yes two can be considered multiple trophies, but six years apart and almost £1b to achieve them.
 
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Jurgen the German said:
A lot of transfers are ultimately calculated risks. Liverpool took one when they paid a world-record fee for a defender in Van Dijk. Arsenal took one when they spent £100 million on Rice. At the time, neither deal came with guarantees. The point is that every major signing carries an element of uncertainty. If clubs only pursued players who were certain to succeed, no significant transfer would ever happen.
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VVD is mentioned a lot in these conversations, what about the lad they signed from Germany that was going to dominate midfield for years, keita (?) something like that.
Spent a fortune on him, played less and done less than ndombele.
There is no guarantees, these clubs can afford to write off their mistakes, we can't.
 
Mikey10 said:
The decision to re-focus on the footballing side seems to have been made over a year ago, and quite possibly lies at the heart of why Levy went. Re-posted below is what Lee McQueen said on LWOS on 5th June last year, originally posted by me on 6th June 2025. Essentially all of the forecasts came to pass, so probably no reason to doubt him on his last point.
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If Ange being stepped down is not a Levy decision then the appointment of Thomas Frank can not be either.
 
glasgowspur said:
Stretching it a bit with arsenal there.
I think it's fair to say that under wenger at the end the board were not really backing him.
They never backed emery, yes they've backed Arteta and yes two can be considered multiple trophies, but six years apart and almost £1b to achieve them.
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I was asked to name clubs that have managed their finances responsibly while achieving greater success on the pitch, or those that have struck a better balance than us. Arsenal are a clear example. They haven’t always got everything right—ironically, they went through a similar phase to us now, with poor recruitment and an acceptance of top-four finishes rather than consistently pushing for the game’s biggest honours.
 
glasgowspur said:
VVD is mentioned a lot in these conversations, what about the lad they signed from Germany that was going to dominate midfield for years, keita (?) something like that.
Spent a fortune on him, played less and done less than ndombele.
There is no guarantees, these clubs can afford to write off their mistakes, we can't.
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Not every transfer is going to be a success. But it wasn’t a lack of ambition that held Liverpool back.
 
Mikey10 said:
Three trophies in 25 years (two of them being League Cups) doesn’t scream success.



Never thought it was.
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Ok great so the “new guys” have made two catastrophic appointments and one potentially good one… I’m not sure we should have that much faith in these jokers
 
Muttley said:
The funniest part is that Jordan could never imagine anyone questioning his own skills as a chairman. He talks as if he was the best chairman ever even though he has to now spend his days working on the periphery of the game on a radio station.

Also, what people forget is the real definition of sales. It is really, really simple. It's about what the vendor is prepared to sell at and what the buyer is prepared to pay. No more, no less. It's the one thing that Levy rarely got in the way he thought about footballers and the reason he drove everyone crazy. There were times when we had players that weren't performing and we couldn't sell. He refused to drop the price and get them off the books. There were also times where he wouldn't pay that little bit extra and land the player. There was also enough smoke over the years to see who the common denominator was.

I'm cautiously optimistic that we will see improvements now he's gone.
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I'll semi stick up for SJ here, he admits he was awful as a chairman quite a bit

From what I've heard anyway!
 
Baleforce said:
my worry is it will go to their heads and we will do a Leeds, when you spend 25 years doing something that works, stick with it
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I think we’ll be ok. The annoying thing about our CEO is that he used to run Arsenal. But for the purposes of this conversation, the good thing is that he used to run Arsenal. He isn’t coming fresh off a club with PSR breaches, he’s not joining from a place that took crazy risks for short term gain. He seems to have a sound head around how to act like a top club, and trust in a strategy over the mid term to ultimately lead to some success.

Besides. Look at something like the Sissoko deal. Who’s to say that he was worth that money at the time? Because Levy said so? What about all the players whose values we let plummet because we didn’t sell them at just past their peak? Was it the most financially prudent way to operate? Or had Levy’s MO of always wanting to be seen to ‘win’ every deal just outlived its usefulness, as the league had moved on and was playing a different game around him?
 
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