I put the mess we're in at the moment down to a combination of players, manager and owners.
We have an exceptionally talented squad of players. We had the most players of any club at the semi final stages of the World Cup last year. The players in this team though over the years have seemed to lack killer instinct, footballing smarts and the ability to learn from their mistakes. If you go back to our breakthrough of sorts season of 2015/16, there was a succession of missed opportunities - a failure to show up in games like Newcastle at home, away to West Ham, failing to hold onto a 2-1 lead at home to Woolwich (which would have put us top of the table in the month of March for first time since the 60's), failing to see out leads at home to West Brom and away at Chelsea by conceding late goals.
In 2015/16 we put it down to a young team, a young manager and these issues attributable to the inexperience of youth would be ironed out. It never happened. History has kept repeating itself time and time again in the three and a bit seasons since, taking certain opposition for granted when we should be on red alert for an ambush, failure to kill of games we were in the ascendancy in by getting that second or third goal or failure to see out a game by conceding late and sloppy goals.
Our managers game management skills have never really evolved and same tactical shortcomings keep happening, again and again.
We've still effectively got the same team we had in 2015/16 and 2016/17 which was peak Pochettino. He inherited the likes of Lloris, Walker, Rose, Vertonghen, Dembele and Eriksen. Dele and Dier were signed for 2014/15 season, Toby and Son for 2015/16 season. Harry Kane getting his big chance back then and emerging under Poch was like a new signing too. Walker and Dembele have moved on but the rest there are still largely the core of our team now.
Since then, out transfer policy and signings haven't really added a whole lot. The board are obviously culpable too here. In 2016/17, we brought in Sissoko, Wanyama and Janssen. In 2017/18 Aurier, Llorente, Davinson Sanchez and Foyth and Lucas Moura arrived in January. Some of those players have had their moments but not much by way of week in week out game changers there. We fished around for those £20/25 million signings and none of then every really worked out. Last season, we obviously didn't sign anyone and so far this season, the dividend from our four new signings so far has been very underwhelming.
I can't help feeling, we've missed a huge opportunity with the group of players we had. What we needed was to add even one big game changer of a player ever season since 2015/16 but we never did. Its an era as well, where Man U have been in disarray post Sir Alex, Woolwich were dying a slow death for a decade under Wenger and Chelsea drifting as Abramovich lost interest. With the players we had, it was a big opportunity for us. Its frustrating to look at Liverpool now. We finished ahead of the dippers in each of Poch's first four seasons and even prior to the Tim Sherwood season of 2013/14, ahead of them for 4 seasons prior to that. That was 8 of 9 seasons. They went out and addressed two big problem areas in their team goalkeeper and central defence by spending the money they needed (largely financed by sale of Coutinho). No stop gap solutions or hoping for the best on a £20/25 million signing. A lot of their players are no better than what we have. They've learned from their mistakes though, have learned to kill off games, see out leads and unlike Poch, have a ruthless manager in Klopp.