Damien Comolli breaks his eight month silence over his departure from Liverpool

Philby · December 14, 2012

He talks a good game but you can't have oversight of the shocking set of transfers that he had and not expect some blowback.

Interesting to hear that Kagawa, Giroud and Demba Ba were on the list of targets for the Summer just gone had Comolli & Kenny stayed.

Damien Comolli breaks his eight month silence over his departure from Liverpool

Damien Comolli has broken his silence over his dismissal by Liverpool with an admission that he remains “frustrated” and “annoyed” at the way his brief tenure as director of football was brought to an abrupt end.

Comolli was removed from his post in April, with Tom Werner, the Liverpool chairman, adamant that it was “time to act”, having determined that the Frenchman “was not the right person” to implement the strategy that the club’s owner, Fenway Sports Group (FSG), had put in place.

Privately, FSG cited misgivings over Liverpool’s transfer policy under Comolli’s direction, with their chief accusation being that he had failed to achieve value for money in a number of transactions, most notably the £35 million deal that resulted in Andy Carroll moving to Liverpool from Newcastle United in January 2011.

Comolli, though, maintains that judgment was passed far too early and selectively, with insufficient time being given for Jordan Henderson, José Enrique, Stewart Downing and the like to prove their worth and not enough credit being given for signing Luis Suárez, from Ajax, in particular. Comolli recently won a wrongful dismissal case against Liverpool, having reluctantly taken his former employer to court. FSG flew Ed Weiss, its American-based general counsel, to Merseyside for the tribunal, but his costly trip did not prevent it from settling in Comolli’s favour.

But eight months after he was ousted, the 40-year-old’s sense of disappointment remains, not only as a result of the way he feels he was treated but also because of FSG’s decision to dispense with the services of Kenny Dalglish in May, despite the Scot guiding Liverpool to Carling Cup success and the FA Cup Final in his first full season as manager second time around.

“First of all you need to look at the big picture,” Comolli said. “We did 26 deals, and to think we would not make any mistakes in such a huge number of deals in and out would be totally unrealistic. I don’t think we made any mistakes on the players going out, and whether we made mistakes on the players who came in I think, first of all, time will tell.

“I am very uncomfortable for players to be judged after six, eight or even 12 months. Sometimes it takes two or three years. In two or three years you can say, ‘Damien and Kenny, you were wrong.’ Or you can say, ‘They just needed time.’

“I don’t know if my reputation has been damaged by what happened. I speak to people and they ask, ‘What about that deal?’ I explain and they say, ‘OK, I see where you’re coming from.’ ”

John W. Henry, Liverpool’s principal owner, has gone on record saying that the fee for Carroll was dependent on how much Chelsea paid for Fernando Torres, with Liverpool seeking a £15 million profit, which they secured, on the two transactions. But with Carroll spending this season on loan at West Ham United, having failed to live up to his transfer fee, it has put pressure on Comolli to justify the most expensive signing of his own career.

“If you want to talk about the Carroll deal, the situation was quite clear,” Comolli said. “The way we looked at it, we were selling two players, Fernando Torres and Ryan Babel, and we were bringing two in, Luis Suárez and Carroll, and we were making a profit and the wage bill was coming down as well. It was a four-player deal.

“Chelsea kept bidding higher and higher [for Torres], until we got to a point where the difference between their first and final bid was double. They [FSG] asked me what the risks were and I said that if things don’t go well you’ll lose something on Andy, but it is difficult to measure whether you will make money if things go well because Liverpool aren’t a selling club and he could be here for ten years.

“They asked Kenny and myself if we were happy to do the deal. We said ‘yes’ and they said they were happy to take the risk because Fernando had to go.”

Comolli missed Carroll’s most significant contribution as a Liverpool player because of his decision to fly home to France two days after losing his job. Instead of being at Wembley for the all-Merseyside FA Cup semi-final against Everton, Comolli was on a flight to Nice and was not even aware that Carroll had scored the game’s decisive goal until he landed and turned on his mobile phone.

“I made sure I took off when Liverpool kicked off in the FA Cup semi-final versus Everton — I couldn’t watch that,” he said. “I landed in Nice, saw the texts that they had won. I saw Andy had scored the winner. I thought, ‘We know he is a good player, but we will see where he is in a few years.’ It’s not one game — good or bad — that would let me think we were right or wrong. You have to look over the length of their career.”

Even as Liverpool were celebrating at Wembley, Dalglish’s future as manager was in doubt, with FSG’s dissatisfaction over a struggle for goals leading to questions being asked of their manager’s ability to take the club forward.

“I went to Florida in March to stay at John Henry’s house for three days,” Comolli said. “They weren’t happy about the fact that we were not scoring enough goals. They thought we were not playing enough positive football, so we had a discussion about that.

“Tom Werner said, ‘Do you think Kenny is the right person?’ I said, ‘Definitely.’ John Henry agreed with me. Kenny deserved longer and I told that to the owners many times. I never felt it [sacking him] was the right thing.”

The plans that Comolli and Dalglish had for this season — Shinji Kagawa, Olivier Giroud and Demba Ba are understood to have been their main transfer targets as they sought greater firepower — did not come to fruition and Comolli regards that as a missed opportunity, particularly given the progress he feels had been made.

“We had three players lined up,” he said. “One player who could play attacking midfield and on the right, with a very good scoring record, and we had two strikers. It was up to us to pick one. We knew where we were looking. The big turning point was the game against Arsenal the week after we won the Carling Cup. If we could win, anything would be possible. We missed a penalty and lost in injury time.

“But you were still looking at progress. Look at the academy. We signed fantastic young players, the owners said it was what they wanted, but I kept saying that it was a five-year plan.

“Getting a trophy in year one, getting to the FA Cup Final, I think financially we were in a very good position. We managed to lower the wage bill a lot. The owners were delighted with that. I still struggle to watch Liverpool. I’m p***ed off, frustrated and annoyed because there is unfinished business.”

Comolli has had job offers since his 17-month stay at Liverpool, but he awaits an opportunity that suits him and he believes that his future lies in the Barclays Premier League, which he expects to go from strength to strength in the coming years.

“When you look at the economic situation that the leagues in Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Holland are in, it is very tough,” he said. “With the new TV deal, the Premier League will take off and leave everyone behind, except maybe Germany. The future is here.

“I’m not talking about money for myself. I’m talking about the ability to run the club, scout good players, have good facilities and being able to sign good players thanks to those resources. I’ve been talking to clubs in different countries, but staying in the Premier League would be ideal.”

Comolli on Luis Suárez “Suárez is an incredible player. Suárez is in a group of players behind Messi and Ronaldo. If you take those two out of the frame and then consider how much we could have got for him then he is in that second group of players. He is a top player, a top person. It is rare to see someone who creates as much as he does and scores as many as he does. When we signed him I said he is a 15 to 18-goals-a-season player in the Premier League, but then he will give you so much more in terms of what he creates.”

Comolli on the partnership that never was — Suárez and Torres “If you look at the stats, Luis scored 41 in 44 games with Ajax before we bought him. I knew that was not going to happen in England with anybody. We never saw him as a finisher who would replace Fernando. I kept saying to Fernando ‘stay here, we are signing a very good player who is going to play with you,’ but he said he was going anyway. I said ‘you want more support, we are bringing a top player who will create for you’ but it didn’t matter. But we signed him to play with Fernando and I would have loved to have seen those two play together.”

Comolli on Jordan Henderson “I am convinced with what Jordan Henderson has done at Sunderland, with the under-21s and also at training there is so much more to come from him. He has so much ability. Time will tell. I am comfortable with Jordan all the way.”

Gerry · December 14, 2012

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