Richard Hughes gone, awful Liverpool plan can follow him out the door

Richard Hughes has left Liverpool as sporting director. Now an awful plan can follow him out of the door.

It's the end of the Richard Hughes era at Anfield. He's no longer the Liverpool sporting director and the Reds will move forward with new ideas running the show.

The Hughes era will go down as a strange one. One of the strangest, in fact, as Liverpool tore up a title-winning team and replaced it in controversial fashion. The remaining squad looks unbalanced and has three nine-figure signings in it - a strange combination to say the least.

But the gameplan under Hughes has been strange. Liverpool moved away from their model that saw them sign players for the positions they needed them - or rather, where Jürgen Klopp needed them.

Instead, the 'manager' role became the 'head coach' role. The club signed the 'best' players available and then asked a coach to make the best possible team out of them, something Arne Slot found impossible last season.

And looking at this current squad, it's difficult to believe that this is the best possible squad for Iraola to get a tune out of. Is having four natural left-wingers better than having a fit right-back and a natural defensive midfielder?

That was never the case under Klopp. Go back to his last summer in 2023 and a desperate search for a defensive midfielder saw Liverpool land a surprise signing in Wataru Endo. Not a player who would have been anywhere near the shortlist this summer.

But Endo was brilliant in that campaign and brought exactly what the manager needed.

Overall, though, there are conflicting ideas at play. Liverpool hired Iraola because they wanted someone with his style of play, with a system that works, and felt he was what the team needed.

Then, however, they sign players without a set system in mind and ask him to adapt. Why hire a manager with a certain style of play if what you actually want is incredible levels of pragmatism? People have spent all summer talking about 'Iraola' style players but the club don't appear to have cared whatsoever about that idea.

And Iraola says this himself.

“I think we’ve preferred at the end to have the best players, probably, than a player that maybe is specifically for that [right-sided] position," he said, per the Guardian.

That's a plan that doesn't make sense at the top level. The most successful clubs in recent years have been Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal. Three clubs who all saw the benefit of having managers in place with a strong say in transfer direction.

In fact, no other club has mounted a serious title challenge in nearly a decade. The only way the idea makes sense is with a series of pragmatic coaches who will happily adapt their way of doing things to suit whoever the club sings, i.e. Carlo Ancelotti.

But Liverpool don't want that kind of coach, either. They want someone with a style of play they can rally behind - but not sign players specifically for.

Putting faith in the manager or head coach, letting them have the players they need to make things work, and that being how the sporting director shines - finding those players - is a model that currently dominates the Premier League. Liverpool moved away from it under Hughes and now is their chance to fix that.