Michael Edwards – the Liverpool visionary FSG simply cannot live without

This is an updated version of an article first published in June 2020.

Perhaps the best place to start is the story Harry Redknapp tells when he is asked about Michael Edwards and the remarkable chain of events that first took a frustrated IT teacher from Peterborough to a position of power and influence at Liverpool.

Redknapp had been Portsmouth manager when Edwards — or ‘Eddie’, as he is commonly known — was given his big break in football and, over a decade since they last worked together, he got back in touch a while ago to request a favour.

“I’d met a guy who had only a few weeks to live,” Redknapp says. “This poor guy was in his early forties. He had been married only a couple of years and he knew he was dying. Someone had got in touch and said, ‘Harry, he’d love to meet you. He’s football mad’. So I went round to his house one Sunday and spent a couple of hours with him, his wife and his in-laws. He was an amazing boy, so strong, and he told me it was his dream to go to Liverpool.

“I rang Michael Edwards and, straight away, he went, ‘Harry, not a problem’. I arranged a car, I got a driver. Eddie sorted everything else. There wasn’t any of the, ‘Oh, Harry, I’m sorry, mate, you know how busy I am’, that you can get sometimes.

“He put himself out, he organised the full day and treated him incredibly. We have to remember we are in a position where we can make a difference to people’s lives. Sadly, this guy died four or five weeks later. Eddie had got him into the directors’ box, introduced him to everybody — Kenny Dalglish, Jurgen Klopp — the boy had the best day of his life. Loved every minute of it.”

It was all done with no publicity, of course, because Edwards had a strict understanding with Liverpool that, as far as the media are concerned, he would rather keep everyone a long arm’s distance away and speak about as regularly as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Edwards was the sporting director who identified Klopp as manager and brought in, among others, Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mane, Alisson and Virgil van Dijk.

It was the collection of players that helped Liverpool end their 30-year wait for a league title and turned a drifting giant into the champions of England, Europe and the world, surpassing even the achievements of the club’s sides from the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet the paradox, at a time when one of the banners on the Kop read “Champions of Everything”, was that Edwards did not even have a Wikipedia page. If you typed in his name, the first result was that of an ex-pro from Notts County.

A lot has changed since then for the University of Sheffield graduate, who has just been persuaded to return to Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s American owner, nearly two years since leaving the club. Edwards will be returning to a new, bigger role as FSG’s director of football operations.

He will have a prominent say in choosing Klopp’s successor and his influence will quickly become apparent when he brings in Richard Hughes, formerly Bournemouth’s technical director, to fill the vacant sporting director position at Anfield. Liverpool, once again, will be relying on Edwards to work his magic behind the scenes.

There was a long period, however, in his first spell on Merseyside that the only photograph of Edwards in the media’s possession came from a Just Giving fundraising page for the 2018 Manchester half-marathon, for which the list of donations included £5,000 from a certain Mr J Klopp. Edwards could freely walk around Anfield without anybody recognising him and that was exactly how he liked it.

“He isn’t the most stereotypical football director,” Redknapp says. “In fact, he is probably the most un-stereotypical. You won’t often see him in a suit. He isn’t a go-getting, big-personality kind of guy. You look at him, he used to have this spiky hair… a very inoffensive, quiet guy. You’d probably think he should be standing behind the goal.”

Don’t be mistaken, though. Others talk about Edwards as a fiercely driven, intelligent and ambitious individual who possesses the streak of ruthlessness that is often required to reach the top in football.

Edwards has upset a few people along the way and was one of the three members of staff from Anfield cited in the alleged hacking of Manchester City’s scouting system in 2013. Liverpool offered a £1million ($1.3m at today’s rates) settlement, including a legally binding confidentiality agreement, to stop the matter going any further. As relations between the two clubs deteriorated over the following decade, Edwards’ presence was one of the reasons there was only a thin veneer of cordiality at boardroom level.

Not that Liverpool’s owner, John W Henry, or his colleagues at FSG, will have cared too greatly about that detail when they finally got wind that Edwards was, after all, open to the idea of leading the club into the post-Klopp era. 

Edwards was a youth and reserve-team footballer at Peterborough United who never fully made the grade and, having been released at the age of 18, trained to be a teacher before getting his first job in a local high school. He is the lorry driver’s son who grew up in Fareham, Hampshire, and developed a fetish for numbers and statistics. The “laptop guru” as he was called in one headline.

There is one story that should make it clear how highly the 44-year-old is regarded at Anfield. It goes back to the night — June 25, 2020 — when Manchester City lost 2-1 at Chelsea and the defeat meant Liverpool had won their first title since 1990. 

When the final whistle sounded at Stamford Bridge, the Liverpool chairman, Tom Werner, pulled out his mobile phone to get in touch with the people who had made it happen.

And the first person to receive a congratulatory text from Liverpool’s chairman? Klopp, perhaps? No, it was Michael Edwards.

After everything that has happened since Klopp arrived on Merseyside, it can feel like a trick of the imagination that Liverpool gave serious consideration to hiring Eddie Howe rather than the man who, eight and a half years later, counts as Anfield royalty.

Howe was on a three-man shortlist with Klopp and Carlo Ancelotti for the manager’s position and it was part of Edwards’ job, then as Liverpool’s technical director, to determine who had the outstanding credentials to replace Brendan Rodgers.

Ancelotti passed all the criteria in terms of his record in the Champions League and the statistics relating to his teams at Juventus, AC Milan, Chelsea and Real Madrid, but his transfer record counted against him because the system devised by Edwards and Liverpool’s analysts deliberately placed less emphasis on a manager’s recruitment in his first year.

Their theory was that a manager might not have the ultimate say when it came to transfer business during his first season but, in years two, three, four and five, that manager’s influence would be greater and signings would not happen without his input.

A lot of Ancelotti’s recruits were deemed to be on the older side and that jarred with Liverpool’s thinking. Edwards wanted players aged 26 or under who were approaching their peak years and would still have a re-sale value three or four years later.

Howe, now at Newcastle United, was managing Bournemouth and had a reputation for developing younger players and playing attractive football.

He had also been a player at Portsmouth when Edwards was starting out at the south coast club. Their friendship, however, never came into it. Howe did not have the experience of competing in the Champions League, whereas Klopp ticked every box in terms of achievement, transfer business and playing style. Edwards made his recommendation to FSG and left them to get on with the business of making it happen.

Since then, perhaps the best indicator of Edwards’ influence is to consider Klopp’s line-up for his first Liverpool game — a goalless draw at Tottenham Hotspur on October 17, 2015 — and compare it to the team that is now taking on Manchester City and Arsenal to win the title.

Simon Mignolet was Liverpool’s goalkeeper that day behind a back four of Nathaniel Clyne, Martin Skrtel, Mamadou Sakho and Alberto Moreno. Lucas Leiva, Emre Can and James Milner formed the midfield and the front three had Adam Lallana and Philippe Coutinho on either side of Divock Origi. Liverpool’s substitutes were Adam Bogdan, Kolo Toure, Jerome Sinclair, Joao Carlos Teixeira, Connor Randall, Jordon Ibe and Joe Allen, who never did fulfil Rodgers’ description as “the Welsh Xavi”.

Edwards helped Klopp build virtually an entirely new XI but, first of all, he had to get the confidence of the manager and create a relationship where they fully understood one another.

“It is a very good relationship,” Klopp said. “He is a very thoughtful person. We don’t always have to have the same opinion from the first second of a conversation, but we finish pretty much all our talks with the same opinion. Or similar opinions.”

It was Edwards, for example, who pressed Liverpool to sign Salah and convinced Klopp to disregard the fact the Egyptian had struggled previously with Chelsea.

Klopp’s preference was said to be Bayer Leverkusen’s Julian Brandt, a future Germany international he knew well from his time managing Borussia Dortmund, but Edwards persisted in his belief that Salah was the better option. Klopp listened, took it in and decided to trust his colleague. Salah has since established himself as an authentic Premier League great and a serial breaker of scoring records.

Edwards’ success cannot just be measured by the players Liverpool have signed when some of his more spectacular business has revolved around the ones the club have moved out — and his ability to get some huge transfer fees.

Coutinho’s £142m transfer to Barcelona was the biggest deal, but Liverpool also raised significant sums by offloading fringe players. Ibe and Brad Smith went to Bournemouth for a combined £21m. Kevin Stewart moved to Hull for £8m. Leicester City paid £12.5m for Danny Ward and Crystal Palace paid £26m for Sakho.

All this was masterminded, to a large degree, from Edwards’ first-floor office at Liverpool’s training ground. His door was always open. It was directly opposite Klopp’s office and the poster-sized “Class of Melwood” picture on the wall was because every year the entire staff — from the security and kitchen workers to the first-team players and manager — posed for an all-in-it-together photograph.

Edwards and Klopp, the older man by 12 years, were described by one colleague as “kindred spirits”, freely wandering in and out of each other’s offices. During the transfer window, Edwards’ television would be switched on to show the rolling news coverage. The two men swapped opinions, they debated and sometimes they disagreed. They also spent many lunchtimes playing padel after getting hooked on the sport during a winter training camp in Tenerife. They even arranged for a court to be built at the training ground.

The two men, it is understood, were no longer as close by the time Edwards announced his departure in the form of an open letter that surprised many people given he had never wanted to speak publicly before.

“I had always planned to cap my time at the club to a maximum of 10 years,” he wrote. “I’ve loved working here, but I am a big believer in change. It’s good for the individual and, in a work setting, good for the employer, too. Over my time here, we have changed so many things (hopefully for the better) but someone new brings a different perspective, new ideas and can hopefully build on (or change) the things that have been put in place beforehand.”

Edwards went on to eulogise about his assistant, Julian Ward, who was taking over as sporting director, while praising his other colleagues in the recruitment department as “geniuses… without doubt the best in their field in world football.” And Klopp? “Being manager of Liverpool is probably harder than playing (the shirt hangs heavy, so they say), but he has delivered so much joy to the fans and reasserted so many of the club’s historical values that he w