Liverpool ´back on our perch´ after Champions League success

Liverpool are “back on our perch” after winning the Champions League, according to the club’s chief executive Peter Moore.

The Reds beat Tottenham in Madrid in June to lift the famous trophy and make amends for their loss in the 2018 final.

Manchester United’s legendary boss Alex Ferguson famously said on his arrival at Old Trafford that he wanted to “knock Liverpool right off their perch” with the Anfield club then the dominant force in English football.

While Liverpool are still yet to win the title in the Premier League era, Moore feels Liverpool have now usurped their old rivals, who have struggled since Ferguson’s 2013 retirement, thanks to their steady growth and the work of their manager, Jurgen Klopp.

“We lived through some dark times of a difficult ownership period,” Moore said at the World Football Summit in Madrid. “The fans stood up against those owners and said this not what we want for the way Liverpool Football Club should be run.

“Fenway Sports Group now, it was New England Sports Ventures, came in and acquired the club and have sat back and invested patiently and built a long-term strategy for success. They’ve rebuilt a major part of the stadium so that we can drive revenues.

“[They] Have eventually got Jurgen Klopp, have invested in the squad, in the backbone of the squad with Alisson in goal, with Virgil van Dijk. I would argue we have the most exciting forward line in football. All of that has come over a period of seasons.

“To the credit of those stewards, of Fenway Sports Group, they’ve gone through some difficult times up and down, yet have stayed the course, have never taken a penny out of the football club, but rather have invested.

“Invested in new main stand in the stadium, just finishing up the finishing touches, Melwood will be closed and we’ll all move to Kirby so finally all of the football teams for Liverpool are on one facility.

“But we need to be, we’re back on our perch as we famously say and we need to have capital investment throughout the club, the squad and making sure we have a world-class training centre and that’s what we will have in Kirby, starting next season.”

Congratulations, Jurgen Klopp 

Winner of #TheBest FIFA Men’s Coach 2019 #TheBest | #FIFAFootballAwards pic.twitter.com/H9Qzlc2DHJ

— FIFA.com (@FIFAcom) September 23, 2019

Klopp was crowned The Best FIFA Men’s Coach this week, beating Pep Guardiola and Mauricio Pochettino to collect the trophy.

“Jurgen is one of the more holistic human beings you will ever meet,” Moore said of the German. “Is he the best coach in the world right now? FIFA think so and that was the award he picked up in Milan the other night.

“He will sit down and he will say at times, ‘it’s only football’, because he is a man of the world, he’s cosmopolitan in his views, he’s liberal in his outlook, he loves the players.

“But he has this mentality, the old Liverpool saying – don’t love us when we win if you’re going to hate us when we lose. So you’ve got the broader picture and in his mind he was already thinking about, ‘right we’re going to get back next year’, and we did and we won it.

“Jurgen’s view is that you’ve got to raise the players. You can’t leave the players in the doldrums. It was a bad night in Kiev [when Liverpool lost to Real Madrid in the Champions League final], it was an awful night in Kiev. Not just that we lost, but the nature of how we lost.

“Fast forward 12 months later, what a wonderful night in Madrid. However, what most Liverpool fans will say is we actually won that game at Anfield three weeks prior. That was the night when you thought we can get this done. No disrespect to Tottenham, but that was the icing on the cake.

“The cake was baked against Barcelona in one of the greatest nights, if not the greatest night in Anfield football history, in the semi-final second leg.

“You look to Tottenham’s credit what they did against Ajax in that second leg – arguably two of the greatest second legs in Champions League history – but what Jurgen’s able to do is keep that ship going straight. To motivate people, not just the guys on the pitch but his staff, his coaching staff, his sport science staff, the people that travel with the team, the backbone of the backroom staff, and he keeps everybody in an even keel.”