Wolves manager Bruno Lage has hailed both Manchester City and Liverpool and said the gap to the two clubs could take 10 years to fill.
Wolves head to Anfield today knowing that Man City must slip up against Aston Villa if Liverpool are going to win the title. But both City and the Reds are 19 and 18 points clear of third placed Chelsea respectively. The two sides combined have won 55 out of 74 games and scored 187 goals at a rate of 2.53 goals per game which demonstrates their superiority. The Premier League title race this season has been a fascinating battle and is reminiscent of the 2018/19 season where Man City ended with 98 points and Liverpool 97.
And Lage was in envy of the dominance of the top two teams in the league but believed their success is a result of a long process. “City finished third in their first year with Pep [2016/17],” Lage said ahead of Sunday’s clash. "So it takes time to build that kind of team. You can have a lot of money but you don't build a successful team in one year.
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“There are maybe 50, 60 'top of the top' players and some are at Real Madrid, some at Atletico, Milan, Inter and PSG and some of them are here, at Liverpool and City. These are the main teams with the main players so it takes time and ability to arrive at this point.
“So sometimes it takes five, six, seven years. Who were the best teams 10 years ago? Man United, Chelsea? The other teams were working for the future. Look at City. They arrived and grew up in 10 years. So, you can see how they have grown in those 10 years.”
Lage was also full of praise for Liverpool’s transfer business and believed that without astute work in the market, their triumphs over recent years wouldn’t have been possible. He said: “You cannot miss the younger players too. You need to find those targets, and not sell them. Liverpool and Man City are doing that – they renew, every chance they have.
“At Liverpool, they know Mo Salah and Sadio Mane are very good, but two years ago they bought Diogo Jota, now they've bought Luis Diaz from Porto. These are the kind of things to be aware of. Sometimes it's hard to convince the players to move from these top teams to improve others.”
For Lage and Wolves, backed by wealthy Chinese owners, they have ambitions to compete with both Liverpool and City. When they took over the club in 2016, they unveiled a ten-year-plan which included competing at the ‘highest level in the world within 10 years’. With Wolves currently in eighth place, that vision looks a long way off but Lage believes it is possible.
He said: “I asked Jeff [Shi - Wolves’s Executive Chairman] ‘how many people do you have working here now?’ And he said in the Championship we started with 200 and now in the Premier League, we have 300. These are the kind of steps we need to make to improve.”
