All is not right at Liverpool

So suddenly Steven Gerrard has decided he wants to stay at Anfield. He snubbed a 100,000 pound a week offer only to turn around and accept it again. Hmmm. He claims he realized how much the club meant to him but I’d say he miscalculated the fallout and has decided to stay on.

100k a week is fair value to me. That makes me question further Gerrard, or his management’s motives.

As much as I like Steven Gerrard, I get the distinct impression he’s marrying as a duty. I think the lion heart’s heart lies elsewhere.

Gerrard also admitted that he did want to leave the club at one point, albeit in a fuzzy way.

Struan Marshall, Gerrard’s agent could be the root of the problem. Gerrard’s defense of his agent did little to convince me. Unfortunately in terms of agents, there are more bad seeds than good ones, so you can’t use the argument that a few bad seeds destroy the bunch. It’s the other way around.

Agents lie to get more value for their players. Greed makes it easy to blur the lines but football and business are strange bed-fellows. Clubs hemorrhage money. Would your company survive that way?

Let’s face it, reporting a breakdown in talks might have attracted new buyers, or a host of other ways out of Anfield.

Agents are manipulators. They look to add value to their players without consideration of the supporters of the club. I think we saw a calculated stunt.

To an agent, in the loose football climate we have today, planting stories is more normal than abnormal. And remember: no transfer means no cut of the transfer fee for the agent. Robinho’s agent just got 10 million euros!


The media compliments this, rumors are easy stories for reporters, like this whoozer I saw today that says Figo has signed for Liverpool.

Whatever motivates a rumor, be sure that there is a motivation behind it. But today’s word is clouded with word salad, isn’t it? And ‘motivation’ is now a code word for ‘lie’. When you start a rumor, your motivation is to lie.

This time it’s clear the breakdown rumor came from the Gerrard camp. Liverpool had no interest in losing the player, 100k is a lot of dough, and Gerrard’s face said it all.