Saint Domingo
Player Valuation: £90m
It works the other way as well. Coutinho was pretty average until Klopp came along, sometimes he didn’t even make the Brazilian national team. All of a sudden he then hit an astonishing level where he started to be genuinely compared to the likes of Messi and being talked about as more important than Neymar to the Brazilian team. He then gets an eye watering move to Barcelona where surrounded by better players he suddenly becomes so poor that they loan him out to Bayern who also deem him not good enough for their first team. How do you go from one of the best in the world to fodder in less than a season? Who knows where Emre Can is now but he’s also dropped like a stone from the midfielder Juve moved to get.
The ones that get me the most are the front three though. For other players of that level they’ve been at (Neymar, Messi, Mbappe, Hazard, Ronaldo Rooney Aguero Bale etc. The real best in the world level) the talent of these players is obvious even as a teenager. You can see there’s something special in them and if they fulfill it they’re usually world class by their early 20s regardless of the club they’re at or the pathway they got there. There’s not a single world class forward in that highest bracket I can think of that you didn’t look at at about 23 and think ‘he’s world class’. Even Lukaku who is a level below that was a top player by 20.
Then you get to Liverpool who take a guy from Southampton who was pretty good in his mid 20s, a player who couldn’t make it at Chelsea, and ended up at Roma and was again just pretty good in his mid 20s, and a striker from Hoffenheim who Rodgers couldn’t get a tune out of and was also in his mid 20s and looked ok, and overnight all three of them became not only very good but arguably the three best forwards in world football all at the same time and maintained that level for 2 and a half seasons (at the same time as Coutinho also hit that level)
Seriously though, what other club has this ever happened at? The top clubs weren’t interested in any of these players. So the same scouts who sweep up without fail the likes of Neymar and Messi as teenagers from South America, who saw Ronaldo at Lisbon etc. Not one of these scouts thought Mane or Firmino were good enough for a top club to part coin with even up to their mid 20s when both had been playing in Europe. Chelsea had taken a chance on Salah but was obviously deemed to be not good enough to get Schurrle out the team and only Roma were interested when he was sold.
Yet lo and behold the rest of Europe was wrong and Klopp was right and there were three world class forwards all in their prime all available at market rate that no other top club had noticed. What a genius he is.
Oh and they just happened to arrive as Coutinho went from being so so to having two seasons of also being the best in the world before going back to being so so. Also at exactly the same time that Alexander Arnold came from complete obscurity to be the best right back in the world. At the same time Van Dijk went from Southampton sick note to best in the world, at the same time Wijnaldum went from Newcastle layabout who didn’t turn up away from home to one of the best in the world. What an amazing coincidence to have so many players have a meteoric rise in form all at the same time despite never showing those levels at any other time in their career. Amazing.
Give over. The likes of PSG Madrid and Barca struggle to put a team like that together once in a generation even with unlimited money and their pick of players. Madrid needed Ronaldo Ramos Kroos Modric Bale, literally a collection of the greatest players in the world and some of the best of all time, just to edge a game against the likes of Milner Henderson and Lallana.
No amount of kick and rush tactics or man management or novel fitness regimes can cause that. They doped all of them. You’ll never see the likes of this again and as soon as Klopp leaves the likes of TAA Robertson Gomez Fabinho Jota instead of looking like the best in the world in their positions will suddenly seem like complete carthorses. They’ll end up exactly like Mario Gotze, Niro Sahin, Grosskreutz, Kagawa, Subotic, in that everyone will remember the couple of seasons they were world class then completely disappeared.
