Liverpool’s 2013-14 season was a triumph. Brendan Rodgers created a thrilling, quick-breaking team
built around Luis Suarez, Daniel Sturridge, Philippe Coutinho and a teenage Raheem Sterling.
They rode their scintillating form to within touching distance of the Premier League title,
playing some wonderfully watchable football along the way.
But they fell at the last. Steven Gerrard’s famous slip led to a devastating home loss to Chelsea and
when a 3-0 goal lead was frittered away to Crystal Palace in the penultimate game of the season,
the collapse was complete. Manchester City caught and passed them, snatching the title.
Still, it might have only been the beginning for that team. As it was, it was really the end.
Luis Suarez would be sold that summer and the club’s attempts to replace him
would bring about a terrible slump and, eventually, Rodgers’ departure.
But what happened to the players who arrived that summer?
Suarez was unequivocally Liverpool’s best player in 2013-14 season.
31 goals in 33 Premier League games was an extraordinary return,
and the Uruguayan won both player of the year awards in England.
He would be sold to Barcelona for over €80m, still an enormous fee in the pre-Neymar-to-Paris
Saint-Germain era, but that necessitated a huge rebuilding project that would see them finish
a lowly sixth in the Premier League in 2015 and suffer a group stage exit in the Champions League.
Eight major signings were made, three of them from the south-coast of England.
Two years after promotion back to the Premier League,
Southampton had become one of the division’s upwardly mobile sides.
Inevitably, they were looted. The same summer that Mauricio Pochettino left and headed for Tottenham,
Liverpool paid a combined €62m for three of the tenets of a team that had finished 8th.
Adam Lallana was the jewel. A homegrown player who had grown
up between the Southampton and Bournemouth academies,
he had worked his way up the Football League to become an England international. An elegant,
but hard-working and high-pressing player, he looked like an ideal component for Liverpool.
And he was. Eventually. Lallana’s languid style and passing may have offered a contrasting mood
to the heavy metal expectations, but he suited Jurgen Klopp’s style of football extremely well,
was highly coachable, and became particularly valuable during the journey towards where the
club was ultimately headed. He was talented but brittle. He wouldn’t leave Liverpool until 2020,
when he joined Brighton at the expiration of his contract, but his last three years and ability
to challenge for a first-team place were limited by injury and a succession of hamstring problems.
Dejan Lovren was an aggressive personality and player, who left Southampton acrimoniously after
just a single season and invited plenty of schadenfreude in being so militant about it.
In a post-Virgil van Dijk world, his defensive abilities may appear modest,
but he was an excellent passer and a good one-on-one tackler, albeit someone whose
demeanour could unsettle the players around him. His highs were extremely high – the late
winner against Borussia Dortmund at Anfield, for instance – but his lows were very low indeed,
best characterized by a miserable day at Wembley against Harry Kane and Tottenham.
But he was a first-team regular for a long time and played almost 200 games
for the club before leaving for Zenit in 2020.
Rickie Lambert wasn’t a first-team regular, but he was never meant to be.
He was born in Kirkby, in Merseyside, and had grown-up as a Liverpool fan. Having been released
by the club as a teenager, he ground his way back up the leagues and eventually to an England cap.
When he retired, he would do so having played – and scored – in
every professional division in England. Not bad for a player who, having been released by
Blackpool earlier in his career, had had to work part-time in a beetroot factory.
He would only last one season at Liverpool, making seven Premier League starts and a
handful of Champions League appearances, but would leave the club a year later having scored
in both competitions and – more importantly – completed his journey to the top of the game.
By 2014, Balotelli’s stock was on the wane. Via a troubled spell at Manchester City and mixed period
in Milan, the glimmer of his potential was being replaced by reticence towards his personality.
We actually covered Balotelli’s time at Liverpool,
in full and including its many episodes, in a separate video.
Origi was – and really remained – a very sound investment.
He had come to mainstream attention with a winning goal for Belgium
against Russia in the group stages of the 2014 World Cup, and Liverpool reportedly
beat off interest from Tottenham to sign him. Ironically so, given that he would score the
clinching goal in the 2019 Champions League final against the side that he nearly joined.
Origi would spend the first year away on loan and would never really establish
himself as a starter when he came back, but rarely has a peripheral
player become either so popular or so entwined with as many important moments.
He left the club in the summer of 2022 as a very unique sort of Liverpool legend.
Lazar Markovic did not become a legend. He was a YouTube star from a very early age, though,
and his Partizan Belgrade compilations – with their little bursts of acceleration
and pieces of smooth skill – remain a tale of what might have been.
He would actually spend five years at Liverpool, but make fewer than 20 appearances,
spending four of those seasons out on loan. He wasn’t the biggest fan of Brendan Rodgers,
either, complaining after he left the club that he had been shunted into different positions within
what had become a 3-4-3 formation, and never given the opportunity to play in his best role.
He's still just 28, but now back in his native Serbian with Partizan.
Emre Can arrived as a 20 year-old with a reputation and he was relatively successful.
Defensively resilient, but technical and talented, Can was – and remains – a very versatile player,
and – initially – that helped make him valuable within a changing Liverpool system.
Over time, that uncertain definition seemed to count against him; he was an adequate
centre-half and a potentially excellent no.6, but he seemed to aspire to be a no.8. His conviction
in his ability certainly seemed to change depending on where on the pitch he was used.
He had good seasons – he was particularly excellent during the 2016 Europa League
campaign – but he left the club in 2018 on a free-transfer to Juventus.
He’s back in Germany today, playing for Borussia Dortmund. Tellingly, he still carries that jack of
all trades perception which likely prevented him from having a better defined Liverpool career.
Alberto Moreno is also remembered for the 2016 Europa League run,
but for different reasons. He was culpable for the first and third goals conceded that night,
to his former team no less, and his reputation never really recovered.
He was a good player before he joined Liverpool and would return to being one again once he left,
in 2019, and headed back to Spain to join Villarreal. Whether he was suited to English
football was another issue. He was a dynamic attacking full-back, but without the ball
he had a wild tackling style and was prone to hacks and miscues which, because of their volume,
would come to define his time at Liverpool and cast him as a liability.
Now 30, he’s still playing for Villarreal, most recently
being part of the side that beat Manchester United in the Europa League final of 2021.