Repeating the usual misconceptions I see! Here's a link that I doubt you will bother to read; appears youe ego has too much at stake to risk re-educating or giving up your rigid opinions. Still you are entitled to your opinions. http://lfcstats.co.uk/rafatransfers.html
There is no point for the tribal Cabal inside the players camp to agitate and do piss all on the pitch because they hate the latest manager because they know he is off. He knows he is off so he is freed up to rotate them and drop them if out of form without worrying for his job when they go and moan to Roman over dinner.
Rafa gets a lot of credit for that Mourinho-esque performance and Mourinho-esque result. Not a great swashbuckling performance by any stretch of the imagination, but we ground that one out, like we used to, and won away from home when we needed to. Something that Arsenal failed to do AT home, when THEY needed to.
If anything your link backs up his argument. Of all the players Benitez signed, only 7 or 8 of them can be classified as hits. It's also funny seeing the massive £84M net spend when people argued he was never backed by H&G.
He did bring in a fair amount of players but part of the reason was because the budget he was working under meant he had to take a fair amount of 1-2 mil risks hoping to unearth a diamond! If you actually looked at the details you could also see that a very large percentage of his players were sold for profit! Yes there were a few duds, Morientes (but many thought he was great before he arrived), Pennant who again was a fantasypremierleague kind of buy, Aquilani was possibly the worst, although in his 10 or so games won a fair few MOM's. Robbie Keane who alledgedly was a board signing, which does make sense considering Benitez rarely played him and was shipped out the next window. Regardless if true Keane was on fire when bought and part of the reason for Berbatov's and Bent's goalscoring form. On the flip side he brough Lucas for 5mil, the like's of Agger, Skrtel, Reina, Johnson, who are all mostly regulars still. Great buys in Alonso, Mascherano, Sissoko, Garcia. And made a massive profit on Torres which doesn't reflect in that 83mil net spend (as well as the likes of Kuyt who's 9mil got us years of service but little sell on fee), which incidentally is still only an ave of 16.6mil a year. Not bad considering we had a lot of work to do shifting the French contingent, and you could argue Owen went for way less than his worth due to running his contract down. Like I said he DID bring in a lot of players...... but a lot were free signings (over 20!) , 6 were less than a mil, and 6 were 2mil or less, with a lot of swaps and undisclose which were in reality likely to be low fees being scandinavian or spanish youngsters. Thats the reason there is so many buys, trying to develop youth and unearth some diamonds because the money was not there to bring in quality in every area. Still I suppose you can draw whatever conclusion you WANT to see from the link I posted. Edit Mourinho made 24 signings in 3 seasons at Chelsea, an ave of 8 per season with an ave spend of 75.25mil a season Benitez 76 signings, an ave 12.6 a season, ave spend 38.1mil!!!! Consider that the net spend is heavily on Benitez side and the fact he could rarely afford the luxury of making a loss, I think he did exceptionally well!
It doesn't matter if he made loads of £1M signings, there was no gun to his head forcing him to take pointless gambles. At the end of the day he spent £84M net which is a lot of money and over the course of his tenure at Liverpool was the 2nd highest in England. There is no point comparing his net spend to Mourinho, Chelsea spent an extraordinary amount of money compared to other teams and they have won the most trophies in England since then to back it up. Rafa has nothing to back it up with apart from the FA Cup, he won the CL with Houllier's squad.
Comparisons matter because the original argument was he had spent heaps, signed loads of 'duds', and had a ratio of 1 good signing for every 3 said dud. When accusations are made they must be in relation to an average or standard, otherwise there would be nothing to argue against!!!!! What Rafa did achieve was a fantastic Champs League record, and left us with players who will probably bring in good profit still. The like of Reina, Lucas, Agger who was muted to be attracting interest from City last year, Skrtel etc... and not forgetting the 25-30mil Torres profit. 84MIL over 6 seasons whilst challenging for the Champs league is peanuts. When you look at what it has cost Chelsea and Man City to challenge it puts those figures in to perspective. Every club in the league will generally have a negative net spend on players. Utd were lucky with the stability which has enabled them to compete, Arsenal to a lesser extent but then they won less than Liverpool! To use you guys as an example; with an already fantastic squad with some cracking players, for you to really challenge the 2 Manchester clubs you probably need 1 or 2 CB (depending on where Luiz is preferred by the new manager) = 30mil? A new CM in the likes of Modric or Alonso 15-20mil? and a new CF such as Lewandowski or Falcao @ 30mil. Thats with the great squad you have already! Potentially 70-80 mil still, puts an average 16.6mil in to some perspective!!!! Its hard to define to non Liverpool fans though. What must be also taken in to account (but rarely is) is the starting point of the inherited squad. Somebody coming in to Chelsea or City will obviously have less to spend to challenge than the likes of the squad Rafa inherited at Liverpool, hard to quantify but in my opinion has to be taken in to account.
And your link proves that to be the case so why are you arguing something you yourself have proved to be correct? You'll be claiming this season was a step forward next even though your win percent last year was 47% and this year it is 44% and Rodgers spent over 40m to do it
