Greame Souness last night revealed he fears for the future of his beloved Liverpool in the aftermath of the Rafa Benitez era.
Hardman Souey, who won five league titles, three European Cups and four League Cups in his seven-year stay at Anfield, reckons the decisions Liverpool make in the next three months may well define their next 25 years.
In a no-holds-barred interview with the Daily Star Sunday, Souness said: “That’s how critical the current situation is for the club.
“Right now it sits teetering on arguably the most crucial tipping point of its entire history and I fear for its very future.
“The bigger picture is finding new owners who can put the club back on a sound financial footing but it’s also crucial they find a safe pair of hands to take over the team from Rafa Benitez.”
Souness, signed by Bob Paisley in January 1978 and one of the brilliant side that included Alan Hansen, Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush, is worried due to all the behind-the-scenes in-fighting between co-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett that has sullied the club’s reputation.
But all the aggro of the past two years means attracting a top boss may not be an easy thing to do.
And Souness warned: “Who the club would like and who they’ll end up getting could be two very different things.
“For the first time since the Bill Shankly era, the Liverpool hot-seat isn’t a job that all the big managers would want. In fact, most of them wouldn’t touch it.
“The club is in debt, their squad of players is poor, they don’t have a major stadium, they won’t be playing Champions League football next year and there’s no guarantee that Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres won’t leave this summer.”
And the man who bossed Liverpool between 1991 and 1994, reckons the money needed to get the club back on track will be an astronomical sum.
He said: “Putting the club back on an even keel, securing the future and ensuring that they challenge for domestic and European honours on a regular basis is a job that could cost nearly a billion pounds.
“They need to spend at least £100million to buy players good enough to challenge for the Premier League next year and the Champions League the season after that.
“After that they need around £300m to clear the club’s debts and at least another £400m to build a new stadium.
“All that money needs to be found in the next two to three years and if Liverpool doesn’t find investors with sufficiently deep pockets, they’ll be dead in the water.
“The new manager who comes in will want his own players but the only way he’ll have any sort of a transfer fund to play around with will be if he sells players like Gerrard and Torres and gets exaggerated figures for them.
“And even if he wants to keep them, the matter might be out of his hands because the club may have to sell them to balance the books or the players themselves may be determined to leave a sinking ship.”
Souness also believes Gerrard and Torres will know in their hearts that the present squad simply is not good enough.
TV pundit Souness, 57, said: “Gerrard and Torres have been training all season with that squad of players and they’ll know that the majority of them simply aren’t good enough to be part of a team capable of winning a major trophy.
“Gerrard is 30 and doesn’t have many more years left to win the medals he covets, while Torres is in the prime of his career at 26 and about to put himself in the biggest shop window of all – the World Cup. He may end up winning a World Cup medal and after a high like that the thought of going back to a troubled club like Liverpool, where he won’t have players like Xavi, Iniesta or Villa to play with, isn’t one he’ll have a lot of enthusiasm for.”
And in a pop at Benitez and his flawed transfer dealings, he rapped: “It’s an indictment of Rafa Benitez’s six years at the club that the team should be so reliant on just two players.
“I don’t think it’s any big surprise he was fired because the thing that defines your time at a football club is how many good players you bring into the club – and Rafa simply didn’t sign enough of them.
“He was there six years and made a net spend of around £140m but only signed two players who I would regard as truly world class – Fernando Torres and Jose Reina.
“To have spent the kind of money he has and only come up with two players is an awful indictment and ultimately doomed him.
“When you look at the squad now, I think it’s actually worse off than it was when he first took it over.
“For a start, Steven Gerrard is six years older and, had it not been for Gerrard, I think Benitez would have gone before now because Liverpool were almost a one-man team for a long time.
“They won the European Cup without being in the top ten teams in Europe at the time, so they were lucky to win it really.
“That success brought him a lot of good grace but were it not for the fact that Liverpool fans are the best and most loyal in the world, he would have gone before now.
“His successor has a huge job on his hands. Finishing seventh this season was seen as a disaster.
“The very future of Liverpool Football Club is at stake and whether it’s a bleak one or a hopeful one may well be determined in the next three months.”
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