Gerard Houllier is one of those former Liverpool managers that Reds fans are never really too sure about.
He did help the club get out of a terrible funk at the end of the nineties, but he also got rid of Robbie Fowler, signed El Hadji Diouf instead of Nicolas Anelka, and by the end of his term in charge some of the players were well below the standard.
However a season after he left Liverpool had won the European Cup under Rafa Benitez, and they were once again challenging for the title in the following seasons.
Now that Jurgen Klopp has taken over the hotseat at Anfield, Houillier has been speaking to the secretfootballer.com about where it all went wrong for Brendan Rodgers.
And he’s come up with a simple answer that a lot of Liverpool fans will find it hard to disagree with,
“Regarding Liverpool’s recruitment strategy, I would say that their main mistake is that they signed too many players. You need to have cohesion in your team, to keep the players. They lost Luis Suárez and brought in too many strikers. They took Mario Balotelli, they took Rickie Lambert.”
Rodgers signed 31 players in his four seasons at the club with many of the players barely featuring or being shipped out on loan.
Houllier also discusses his own transfer mistakes and references the purchase of El Hadji Diouf that quickly turned sour.
The Senegal man has been in the news recently having accused Steven Gerrard of racism, but Houllier has defended his 2002 big money signing, and says that the player was massively talented but did have a major attitude problem
“Diouf is an outstanding player. It is not about his football qualities – he’s top class. But his attitude sometimes, particularly his spitting habit, caused us problems. Maybe I should have been more wary of that because, I remember, that he did that once or twice when he was warming up for games.
“I remember a match at Anfield when he had some problems with West Ham fans. And, of course, what happened at Celtic, when he spat at a Celtic fan, was totally out of line. He was fined and banned for that.
“Diouf’s skills were fitting in well, there was no problem with his work, but his attitude and his personality were not fitting into Liverpool’s philosophy. We could have done better in terms of recruitment, obviously. But we lacked time to check and do the usual homework that we do before recruiting a player.”
