Suarez: Sell or Keep?

[FrenchEyeGlass]

 

I disagree.

If they feel there's an example to be made the Premier League/FA/PFA will make it with Liverpool.

 

I think this is different though. It's not refereeing decision or a ban. It's our prized asset.

 

If the PFA/FA/PL want to fuck with us on this, they better get ready for a very long, protracted legal battle.

[bossy]

To all the people saying Suarez has dragged the club's reputation into the gutter.

 

Will top players be more or less likely to sign for us if Suarez leaves?

 

So you don't think he is involving our club in yet more controversy? If he had anything about him he would have just done the proper thing and put a transfer request in as soon as he was banned for biting a fellow pro, apologised to the club and kept his own counsel until a suitable, to both parties, offer came in.

[Nightcat]

See this is the problem when you are becoming a selling club. Your best players want to leave, even for domestic rivals and there is no end to it. The next in line is Coutinho. Same story next summer.

 

The Pandora Box has opened long ago when people remained silent or apathetic when Alonso, Mascherano were sold and especially under FSG with Torres and Meirelis being sold to Domestic rivals. FSG are disgusting.

 

The Fake Scouser Ian Ayre is the worst and most disgusting employee ever worked for Liverpool Football Club. He's been cited by other players (Torres, Meirelis, Reina) multiple times to have "promised" to let them go... No one knows if those promises included or excluded domestic clubs and at the end of the day who gave him the right to talk about selling them, when they sign multi-million contracts. All players need to be told is to respect their contracts and the club.

 

Ian Ayre needs to leave Liverpool Football Club immediately.

 

But Suarez has indeed disrespected, the City of Liverpool, Liverpool FC, King Kenny, Gerrard, his team-mates, pretty much every person who supported him in his unethical behaviour on the pitch.

 

He proved that off the pitch as well as on the pitch, he is a shit person. verbal agreement/promise? What does that even mean and what is the validity of it, in a multi-million written and signed contract? He's lucky he's not employed by an Eastern European oligarch or an Italian Mafia guy otherwise he'd "experience" what it means to honour a contract or...

 

I agree with Jamie Carragher, this is all so sad for Liverpool. Well done FSG, Ayre and Suarez.

Edited August 7, 2013 by Nightcat

[Dr. J]

Sad, indeed. Time to start making lemonade.

 

If United stand firm about Rooney, I can see Chelsea coming in for him. What about 40 million and loaning us Lukaku for the season? I'd jump at that.

[Moo]

I think this is different though. It's not refereeing decision or a ban. It's our prized asset.

 

If the PFA/FA/PL want to fuck with us on this, they better get ready for a very long, protracted legal battle.

 

Look at the Heinze case - his release at a set price was in writing.

The Mancs blocked it, Heinze asked the PL to intervene and guess what, they backed the Mancs based on conjecture basically. Everyone said we were stitched up then, and it's continued regularly since.

[manwiththestick]

I think this is different though. It's not refereeing decision or a ban. It's our prized asset.

 

If the PFA/FA/PL want to fuck with us on this, they better get ready for a very long, protracted legal battle.

 

Yeh, because our club is well renowned for not backing down to the FA, PFA, etc aren't they? Our board are weak and couldn't scratch together a pair of bollocks between them.

 

I'm really wanting to be proved wrong over this but I can't see anything other than disappointment and the horrible feeling of being let down, again.

[thompsonsnose]

Sad, indeed. Time to start making lemonade.

 

If United stand firm about Rooney, I can see Chelsea coming in for him. What about 40 million and loaning us Lukaku for the season? I'd jump at that.

 

Make Lukaku permanent and id bite your hand off.

But i doubt Lukaku is a "Rodgers type" player.(6)

[Guest davelfc]

See this is the problem when you are becoming a selling club. Your best players want to leave, even for domestic rivals and there is no ending to it. The next in line is Coutinho. Same story next summer.

 

I fear any player that appears to be decent with us will look to go or be purchased by top clubs. We have done the same for years, nobody complained when we were doing it then. The hunter becomes the hunted. This doesn't mean we are a selling club, it's just the way it happens. Probably why i am not really that excited over any player we have that is showing some great promise, you just know he will sign for a team that can realise his ambitions.

 

You simply cannot build as FSG plan in this league, players and fans do not have the patience for it. As has been shown, I am only surprised that more have not chosen to go, although the window is not yet closed.

 

Ayre needs fucking off, at the very least back to his sales job. He looks more like comical Ali in his current role as head of propaganda.

 

Look at most of the 'also rans' in this league, we are basically one of them now. The difference is their fans actually realise it, might take quite a while for the penny to drop for most of our fans.

[Lightforce]

To anybody thinking we're going to dig our heels in and reject offers to the point where he's still going to be here when the window closes then I'm afraid that's delusional. If 40 something million is the highest offer we've got and there's 30 minutes left before the window closes, we're taking it. Don't be thinking we're going to go all legal on everybodies arses either, we want the cash, and we're not going to risk not getting it this summer. Time to take it up the arse, Torres style.

[clangers]

Cheeky little...

 

I doubt he'll need to refuse to play because he's going driving a wedge between himself and the club publicly and very effectively.

 

I'd suggest that even if a verbal promise through a 'gentleman's agreement' was made last summer I'd very much it extended to 'Suarez can leave to a club of his choosing, he can dictate terms and even dictate the fee'? This is in effect how Suarez is interpreting the alledged verbal agreement, it's a effectively free for all in his favour. Even if the agreement exists it appears perfectly reasonable for the club to have a say in who they sell him too and the fee they agree. This seems lost on Suarez.

 

Whether we can actually trust Suarez's view of events is another matter. He has form for this sort of behaviour agitating for a move to Ajax. He's already lied about the circumstances of a move when he though he was Madrid bound to apparently escape the awful media he's quite happily pouring his heart out too now.

 

By continuing this behaviour right thought the summer leading to todays statement and I assume transfer request later this week he's deliberately destroying a working relationship with the club whilst at the same time driving down his value.

 

We'll have probably sold him to Arsenal by the weekend for £40 million plus £2!

[thompsonsnose]

I fear any player that appears to be decent with us will look to go or be purchased by top clubs. We have done the same for years, nobody complained when we were doing it then. The hunter becomes the hunted. This doesn't mean we are a selling club, it's just the way it happens. Probably why i am not really that excited over any player we have that is showing some great promise, you just know he will sign for a team that can realise his ambitions.

 

You simply cannot build as FSG plan in this league, players and fans do not have the patience for it. As has been shown, I am only surprised that more have not chosen to go, although the window is not yet closed.

 

Ayre needs fucking off, at the very least back to his sales job. He looks more like comical Ali in his current role as head of propaganda.

 

Look at most of the 'also rans' in this league, we are basically one of them now. The difference is their fans actually realise it, might take quite a while for the penny to drop for most of our fans.

 

 

Nailed it.

[bossy]

 

Nailed it.

 

Nah.

[Moo]

If we do eventually sell to Arsenal for a reduced (less than our value) fee then there better be some scope for adding a massive sell on clause, because I've little doubt that if he goes there he'll be agitating for a move again in a couple of years.

[Dr. J]

We should start being pro-active starting today. There's absolutely no way he can play another match in a Liverpool shirt. If we don't sell, he'll sabotage things by getting suspended - this time probably for an entire season.

 

40 million it is, plus player(s). Holding out for 50-55 million is greed on our part. If you've got a terminal disease, get rid of it. Besides, it's not as if 40 million is a loss.

 

The club would be better off by shopping around at 40 million plus players - the only exclusions being Arsenal or Spurs.

[ngogswilly]

You simply cannot build as FSG plan in this league, players and fans do not have the patience for it. As has been shown, I am only surprised that more have not chosen to go, although the window is not yet closed.

 

 

I think theres certainly some truth to that. I mean in 2/3 years we might all be looking back as we're challenging for a title and say "Jesus, it fucking worked".

 

But I just can't see it. Like you say I just can't see that way of doing it ever working in this league unless we somehow became the Bundesliga and even then it'd hardly be easy.

 

I think its just the unfortunate reality we're living in that to compete with the best you have to spend big and spend well. We've spent big at times throughout the last ten years with mixed results but over the past 2/3 years we've probably seen a lot more misses than hits though the jurys still out on a few.

 

Regardless, the reality is until we push ourselves a bit closer to the top 4 even if just a real proper challenge. We're going to keep being very vulnerable to having our best players poached. And you just can't build for the future in that environment. It'll always be 1 step forward and then the next summer a step back.

 

The only way around it IMO is a decent sized cash injection which is spent really well. That's not me asking for a sugar daddy arab russian bla bla bla... it's just what I think the reality of the situation is.

[Major Tom]

The first thing to understand about Luis Suárez's interview with the Guardian is that he came to us. There was no pursuit this side. It was Suárez's idea, impatient that he was not getting his own way, aggrieved by some of the things he was hearing, increasingly starting to think of that red shirt as little more than a straitjacket.

 

You wonder, does he realise how rich it is he has turned to one of the newspapers he previously blamed for everything? Or whether he particularly cares now it is increasingly transparent how far he is willing to go to get his move to Arsenal and that, next, lawyers will be involved and Liverpool face the ultimate indignity of being reported to the authorities by the player they have cherished and protected and defended, often to the point of ridicule.

 

Suárez being Suárez, the story is littered with imperfections. It does not seem to register that Liverpool, after the battering their reputation has taken, might deserve better than this kind of mutiny. There is no apparent shame, or even recognition, of all the times when he has expanded on why he will be staying at Anfield come what may, or any form of appreciation that some people actually believed it.

 

And it boils down to this: can we actually trust a single damn thing he says? That is the difficult part here. Can we put our faith in a man with his previous for bluff and spin and downright deception when, at the heart of his complaints, he wants us to believe Brendan Rodgers promised he would be let free if Liverpool did not qualify for the Champions League? Or will it transpire that it is just another Suárez con-trick, more evidence that morality does not even come into it, and we are talking about someone who operates in a world where it is fine to play dirty, just as long as it means getting what he wants.

 

"I spoke with Brendan Rodgers several times and he told me: 'Stay another season and you have my word if we don't make it then I will personally make sure that you can leave,'" Suárez says. "I just want them to abide by the promises made last season."

 

If that is true, Suárez has legitimate reasons to be aggrieved. Yes, he appears to have forgotten, with alarming haste, the phenomenal support Rodgers and Liverpool have provided but a broken promise is a broken promise and, before anything, his manager surely has to clear up whether this is truth or fiction, on the record and with no incongruity.

 

Bucking the modern trend, there is also something to be said about the fact Suárez has at least had the gumption to say what he thinks, the old-fashioned way, rather than hiding behind an assortment of men in suits, in the style of Wayne Rooney and Gareth Bale, and employing people to get his information out, drip by drip, but with nothing attributed.

 

He also makes a valid point about the Champions League because it is true that a player of these gifts, in his prime years, should crave a place in Europe's premier club competition. For Liverpool, this is the cold reality of modern life. Suárez is just bringing it home what it is like to be permanently playing catch-up. And this, unfortunately for one of the great bastions of the sport, is what can happen when a club is approaching a quarter of a century since their last championship and finished 28 points and a country mile from the summit last time around. The best players want more. They don't remember the days when Liverpool ruled. It's history, another century.

 

What about loyalty, you might ask. Yet only if you had missed the fact that the modern-day football man does not share the same characteristics of the fan. The truth - and it appeals to nobody - is that it doesn't work like that, whether we like it or not, and there is little point expecting it to be different because doing so brings only one thing: disappointment.

 

Rodgers has talked of the need for Suárez to show loyalty and nobody has reminded him that in 2009, as Watford manager, he provided some of the answers himself. "People are questioning my integrity and one thing I have mentioned is I always have integrity," Rodgers, asked about the fact bookmakers had slashed the odds on him taking over at Reading, said back then. "I am loyal and find it disloyal when I am asked about other clubs when I am the Watford manager." Within two weeks, he was Reading manager.

 

Suárez, however, is a particularly spectacular example when you think back to those days when he talked about vendettas, mistranslations, miscarriages of justice, a media "controlled by Manchester United", and there would be a stampede of fans running to his defence, like ants, lapping it all up and blindly attacking anyone who saw him for what he was (incidentally, it will be a pretty bleak day when the Press don't criticise someone for using racist language).

 

Maybe, without wishing to generalise too much, this is just the psyche of the football fan. Just watch how many Arsenal supporters will start to use the same old lines about Suárez - you know the ones: "misunderstood," "victimised," etc etc - if that unlikely marriage with Arsene Wenger happens. Not all of them, granted. But there is something particularly revealing about the reaction the Arseblog website has experienced after it dared oppose the move on the grounds of morality.

 

"Objecting to the signing of Suárez has led to some of the most virulent abuse I've ever received," Arseblog's Andrew Mangan wrote recently. "There have been veiled threats of violence because I'm honest about the fact I'd prefer if we didn't sign him.

 

"But what I find most dismaying is the revisionism that's gone on since our interest has become public knowledge. I don't remember too many Arsenal fans defending him when he was banned for eight games for the Evra incident. I don't remember too many Arsenal fans saying that biting somebody isn't really that bad when you think about it. I don't remember too many Arsenal fans who said anything other than Suárez, for all his talent on the field, was a pretty despicable person whose antics, cheating and nasty play made him one of the most loathed characters in the game. Yet now, people are falling over themselves to make excuses for him."

 

At Liverpool, all the brainwashing, the blind loyalty, the partisanship - call it what you will - is fast wearing off. Liverpool's supporters had, for the most part, liked to think that Suárez saw Anfield as more than just another workplace, that there was a special bond, that he was one of their own. More than anything, they believed in him. Suárez has made it incredibly difficult now to imagine him playing in front of the Kop, where pride is everything, again. Perhaps that was all part of the plan.

 

"I have to put my career first," Suárez says. "People say Liverpool deserve more from me but I have scored 50 goals in less than 100 games and now they could double the money they paid for me. It is not as if I am asking to move to a local rival."

 

Yet Arsenal are just that if Liverpool have serious aspirations about clambering back into the Champions League. And everything Suárez says - a mix of ambition, frustration, selfishness and that familiar persecution complex - is contained in the threat of an impending legal battle.

 

The clause in Suárez's contract, leaked to Arsenal and resulting in them going a pound over what they believed was the £40m release fee, is clearly ambiguous to some degree. What is absolutely clear is that Suárez is going to be as proactive as he can to make sure he gets his way. He is "happy" to go to the Premier League if a formal transfer request does not do the trick. He has already enlisted the support of the Professional Footballers' Association. These are statements that must make Liverpool's fans yearn for the days when everything was so much more simple and innocent.

 

Arsenal, in the meantime, can sit tight and see how it plays out. They will deny it, of course, but they may have known what Suárez was planning in advance. And if it was all part of a strategy - strengthen Arsenal's position, weakens Liverpool's - it has probably worked. Rodgers, until this point, has argued that Liverpool are bigger than any player then repeatedly acted in a way that completely contradicts that view. Now it must surely be about trying to extract as much money as possible and rushing through a replacement before the transfer window clanks shut.

 

In one way, it would represent a wretched episode for the modern Liverpool because of what it says about their place in the order of English football these days, and the knowledge that players of this ability, like rare butterflies, do not come along that often. In another sense, it might be a blessed relief when Suárez becomes someone else's problem. If "problem" is the right word for someone who can score goals from any distance or angle. "My record shows that I'm not the kind of player who wants to change clubs every season," Suárez says. No, this would be his fourth transfer in eight years. So, to clarify, every other season. That kind of player.

 

 

Luis Suárez has shown Liverpool fans the kind of player he really is | Football | theguardian.com

[Baltar]

I would prefer to keep him tied to his contract for the next 3 years playing reserve team football. Would be hilarious to see him waste away his best years in the reserves. But unlikely to happen. Hope we just fuck him off asap for as much money as possible. Can't believe how much we defended this ugly little rat. Fuck off and die Suarez.

[tenner]

I would prefer to keep him tied to his contract for the next 3 years playing reserve team football. Would be hilarious to see him waste away his best years in the reserves. But unlikely to happen. Hope we just fuck him off asap for as much money as possible. Can't believe how much we defended this ugly little rat. Fuck off and die Suarez.

 

Would be nice but get as much as we can for him to buy a decent replacement.

[Funkasy]

Edit: Bye bye Suarez. You dont deserve us.

[cartman]

He can fuck off now

[The Great Jacko]

I think Daniel Taylor is generally a cunt but that's a decent article to be fair

[cartman]

Sell him, get 55 mill, don't sell him to Wenger, buy two or three ace players.

[SCOUSE TAPAS]

People keep saying we will sell for £40 million but how can we. Since the start of this we have said we are in charge he isn't for sale or we want £50 million.

The club and us have lost enough face through this slime covered piss stained lying turd already.

To sell for less than £50 million would make the club appear weak and full of shit. I have to say I don't believe a word that comes out FSG as they say one and do another. Brendan though I have no reason to totally mistrust apart from his obvious intent to of started a auction for Suarez.

It should be noted also John Henry s amazing timing in picking his first game in 13 months to attend as the story came out in the press.

The club knew full well about the story coming out hence Henry s arrival, Though we still don't no to what extent him coming over means yet.

[DanDanShaw]

So Suarez really wants to leave? Well I've wanted to stop paying my £22.95 per month gym membership for a while but my contract hasn't expired yet.

 

I'm sick of the way we are bullied. We've become a weak football team in every aspect. We are bullied by the media, our own players, agents, other clubs (buying and selling), the FA, etc...

 

It's becoming a fucking joke, we act like the Swansea’s and Fulham’s of this world when in actual fact we're one of the biggest clubs in world football. I can't be arsed looking it up but isn't Suarez 26? He's got a 4 year deal, for once let's get a backbone.

 

He can fucking sit on our bench and if we need him he can play, if he moans or under performs fine him and make him travel with the reserves. Let him run down his contract and leave for free, when his peak years have been spent on our bench.

 

When and IF we sell him, it should be for the asking price WE want and to a club that aren't in our league. If nobody comes in with the money we want from abroad, well then in 4 years time they can have him for nothing.

 

For the sake of £50m (I'm aware it's alot) we need to put our foot down and stop taking all this shit. When did we become so fucking spineless.

[SCOUSE TAPAS]

So Suarez really wants to leave? Well I've wanted to stop paying my £22.95 per month gym membership for a while but my contract hasn't expired yet.

 

I'm sick of the way we are bullied. We've become a weak football team in every aspect. We are bullied by the media, our own players, agents, other clubs (buying and selling), the FA, etc...

 

It's becoming a fucking joke, we act like the Swansea’s and Fulham’s of this world when in actual fact we're one of the biggest clubs in world football. I can't be arsed looking it up but isn't Suarez 26? He's got a 4 year deal, for once let's get a backbone.

 

He can fucking sit on our bench and if we need him he can play, if he moans or under performs fine him and make him travel with the reserves. Let him run down his contract and leave for free, when his peak years have been spent on our bench.

 

When and IF we sell him, it should be for the asking price WE want and to a club that aren't in our league. If nobody comes in with the money we want from abroad, well then in 4 years time they can have him for nothing.

 

For the sake of £50m (I'm aware it's alot) we need to put our foot down and stop taking all this shit. When did we become so fucking spineless.

Around the time John Smith left the club.