Michael Edwards has left Liverpool. Again.
The club’s statement described his departure as “part of a planned transition following the completion of key strategic priorities.” Edwards himself put it rather differently: the project, he said, “evolved differently to how we had envisaged it.”
Those two sentences cannot both be true. A planned transition doesn’t happen a year before the end of your contract, and you don’t complete your key strategic priorities while simultaneously conceding the project didn’t go the way you imagined. The corporate wallpaper is back out…!
The first Fenway chapter had a mission. The second doesn’t.
Rewind the Fenway Sports Group story.
For the first eight or nine years of their ownership, FSG had a driving mission that everyone inside the building could recite: get Liverpool winning again. Win the Premier League. Win the Champions League. Restore the club to what it was. And they did it, in glorious style. That first chapter was overseen by Edwards as sporting director, assisted by Ian Graham as director of research, and those two were rightly seen as central to the resurgence.
Then the objectives were achieved, and the architecture quietly dissolved. Edwards and Graham stepped aside. Klopp accumulated more power, in retrospect, probably not a good thing, and then Klopp left. Into the void, Fenway floated a sale, decided against it, and pivoted instead to a multi-club vision: FSG as a football group, buying clubs, building a network. Edwards was brought back in 2024 as group sporting director to lead that brave new era.
That was the job he came back for. Not Liverpool. The bigger project.
The project that never happened
Here’s the problem, and it’s the critique we’ve been levelling at Liverpool for months: the multi-club era never materialised. But nothing else was put in its place either. No new mission replaced the old one. The result is an organisation with no clear answer to the most basic strategic questions: what are we trying to do, and how will we know if we’re doing it?
Seen through that lens, Edwards leaving is not a shock. It’s what happens when you take a job that promises one thing and delivers another. Edwards delivers the honest ‘McCullum’ approach; Liverpool the back foot corporate ‘all part of the plan’ narrative.
Meanwhile, on the pitch: last season was a colossal underperformance. Liverpool were the highest spenders in the Premier League and finished 25 points off the pace. Slot paid for it with his job. Iraola arrives with a huge job to do on and off the pitch.
Will they be better next season? Probably. Does that matter?
The interesting question is: does this look like an organisation about to go and win things? And the honest answer is no. Winning organisations know what they’re for. First-chapter Fenway knew exactly what it was for. Current Fenway is between stories.
The one caveat: you can build a convincing case against almost every leading Premier League club right now. Arsenal, for instance, have a core of players (Saka, Rice, Madueke, Saliba, Ødegaard, Merino among them) who have gone very deep into a draining World Cup, with the season starting in a month. Man City: No Pep…anything could happen? United: Have they really turned a corner or will Carrick fall victim to the Solskjær/Di Matteo fate? Chelsea: Pfttttt.
But that’s an argument about who wins the race. Our point about Liverpool is about something more fundamental. They’re in the most feared state of elite sport: stasis. The point of continual improvement runs through the greatest sporting institutions that combine legacy with success in the present. Drift is comfortable, it’s quiet, and it doesn’t show up in a single bad performance cycle. It shows up two years later, when your returning chess master quietly walks out the door and the press office reaches for “key strategic priorities” met.
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