The final league match of the season can either be viewed in one of two ways.
It’s either a defining fixture that can make or break a campaign for a club, with pretty much everything on the line. Or it’s a relatively low-key affair with not much to play for for both teams and both sets of supporters.
For Liverpool, the latter very much applied to their final premier League fixture in 2016. On this day that year, the Reds faced West Brom at the Hawthorns in a game which had very little bearing on how the campaign would be viewed.
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That season was, of course, the campaign that Jurgen Klopp came to the club mid-season and tasked with a job of transforming the sleeping giant that was Liverpool. While this contest against West Brom may not seem like much on the outset, based on what followed it could have been a sign of Klopp thinking well ahead.
Liverpool’s starting line-up for that trip to the West Midlands read: Adam Bogdan; Martin Skrtel, Jon Flanagan, Brad Smith, Lucas Leiva, Joe Allen, Cameron Brannagan, Kevin Stewart, Jordan Ibe, Sheyi Ojo, Christian Benteke. Off the bench came Danny Ings, Jordan Henderson and Sergi Canos.
Jordon Ibe scored for Liverpool as they were forced to settle for a point in a 1-1 draw against Tony Pulis' Baggies.
Of course, even seven years ago this was far from Liverpool’s strongest line-up. What must be factored in is this game came just three days before the Europa League final against Sevilla in Basel, so Klopp wisely rotated his squad.
While this game may have been seen as a throwaway without any real consequence, what followed that summer may prove things differently.
After finishing eighth in the Premier League, without a trophy and no European football of any kind to look forward to, Klopp and his team were forced to work hard on the transfer front. Bringing in talented players without the attraction of competing in Europe was no easy task, but Klopp also had the job of getting players that were surplus to requirements off the wage bill.
This brings us back to that match against West Brom. Of those 11 starters at the Hawthorns, seven of them had either been sold or allowed to leave on loan mere weeks later.
While Klopp’s team selection that day at the Hawthorns may have been just purely for rest and rotation purposes, it could have been the case that the Reds boss was casting his eye on who he wanted to keep and who he wanted to let go.
In the process of letting the 10 players who started that match go, Liverpool banked £84.7million. If you include the players who were on the bench and were subsequently sold, that figure rises to £120m.
It’s further proof that however things may appear from the outside, Klopp is usually several steps ahead of everyone else with his decision making at Liverpool. Even with this case going back to the early days of his reign, the signs were there that the club was going to be in safe hands.
