by Simon Hughes
He pauses for reflection, then continues: ‘At times, I believe we were the best team in Europe. We were not lucky enough to win the Premier League, though we were so close. We also lost in a Champions League semi-final. I think the team was great. You can see that by the players. One moved to Real Madrid [Xabi Alonso] and another to Barcelona [Javier Mascherano], and these players are still playing at the highest level.
‘We had a team to dream about but one that still needed building. The spine was there. Providing we kept that, I knew we could compete with anyone: Reina, Carragher, Agger, Skrtel, Alonso, Mascherano, Gerrard and then me. It was strong, very powerful. We were difficult to beat and nobody wanted to play against us. We were not far away from being champions of England and champions of Europe. But we needed to keep the team.
‘Everything changed when the owners started talking about selling. The mindset of the club went in a different direction. Alonso was sold, Mascherano was sold, Benítez went too. Not all of the money went into new players. The club was saying, “We still want to be the best and we want to win” but doing the opposite.’
He says that Atlético has always been his club.
‘I left my club to win,’ he continues. ‘By the time I left Liverpool, when everybody was leaving, I did not have the feeling that I was going to win there. It was hard because I had been so happy. I’d never felt happier than during my time at Liverpool. But then I felt betrayed. That’s the truth.’
Torres admits he is not blameless in what happened. And yet he ended up taking ‘máximo responsabilidad’ for the outcome.
Torres reveals that in July 2010, he was aware of interest from Chelsea and Manchester City. He explains that late that month he met with Christian Purslow, Liverpool’s managing director, to discuss his concerns about the direction the club was moving in. The season before, Liverpool had finished seventh under Rafael Benítez, which contributed towards his leaving. Purslow was hired by Tom Hicks and George Gillett in 2009 in the aftermath of Rick Parry’s departure, with a priority of renegotiating the £350 million loan the club had outstanding with Royal Bank of Scotland and to assume overall management of the club until a new permanent chief executive could be appointed. Purslow had emerged from Cambridge with a degree in modern and medieval languages. A career in investment banking followed.
‘Benítez was not there: the club sacked him. I finished the World Cup and I talked with Purslow on holiday. He came with Roy Hodgson, who was keen to speak to me. I told them my view on what was happening at the club: that we were so close to winning and now good players were leaving. What was our future?
‘Purslow explained that Liverpool were in the process of being sold to new owners and that nobody could leave in the summer because the club had a higher value with the players they had at that time. “We cannot sell you,” he told me. I told them we would not win without investment and that it worried me we’d fall behind very quickly. I explained that when I joined the club, the mood was totally different and that Benítez’s ambition had taken me to Liverpool. Purslow told me that nobody would leave but as soon as the club was sold he would speak to the new owner and try to find a solution. If I wanted to leave then, I could.
‘Nobody ever said to me, “We want you to stay and be like Stevie.” The message was: “We’ll sell the club and you can leave.” That means to me the people running the club did not really care about Liverpool, only themselves. They wanted to save themselves. And then Mascherano was sold anyway.’
Torres understands that Hodgson was appointed into a difficult position, one where maybe even he did not appreciate the full facts of the bleak outlook at Liverpool. Torres says he liked Hodgson even though on the outside it may have seemed their relationship was not close.
‘It was a pity because Hodgson was a great coach and a great guy,’ Torres says. ‘They didn’t let him work. They brought in all these Australian people [a new medical team] who controlled everything: who could play, who could not. He wasn’t able to use the players the way he wanted. From that pre-season to the January when I left, it was a nightmare. Not just for me but for everybody, for Hodgson too. He was not allowed to work properly – the situation was more difficult for him than it was for anyone else. Everything was a mess. We were not good enough. In the middle of that, they finally sold the club.’
Though he realizes Liverpool was rotting from the head, Torres recognizes that Hicks’s and Gillett’s money took him to Liverpool in the first place. He had no relationship with either of them.
‘I don’t think it’s so important the owners are in England, in Liverpool,’ he says. ‘What I think is important is that they put someone in charge who is in Liverpool – the right person who understands what Liverpool means. I am sure most owners have many businesses. The only thing they have to do in football is give the money that you need to compete with others. Whatever name you want – the president or the sporting director – they need to understand Liverpool, the feelings. He has to listen to the fans and listen to the players and do a job that is up to the level of the club, meeting the standards that have been set through history. You need someone there who understands what Liverpool is, because for the owners it is just a business and without someone telling them the right information it will fail. OK, if they are in Liverpool it will help them but if they are not, put someone in charge who is there and understands football and the club.’
Boston-based investment firm New England Sports Ventures (later to become Fenway Sports Group) acquired Liverpool in a move that Hicks described as ‘an epic swindle’. Both Martin Broughton, the chairman, and Purslow stepped down from their roles at that point, though Purslow remained as an adviser for a while longer. Liverpool would be structured in a different way, with a sporting director taking on some of Purslow’s responsibilities: primarily dealing with recruitment and sales. Damien Comolli, a Frenchman, was appointed to the role, having achieved varied success at Tottenham Hotspur before.
‘I went to talk with Comolli and told him about my concerns and what had happened. He said the same as Purslow: “No, no, you cannot leave because we do not have any other players to play.” Again, he was not telling me, “You cannot leave because we need you for the project.” It was, “OK, we will find someone else, then maybe you can leave.” It said to me that they did not want to keep me, really. They wanted to find someone else. But first they wanted to wait until the summer. Comolli told me Liverpool were going to buy Luis Suárez but because Suárez was not a goalscorer I needed to stay until they found one. “Suárez is the player to play behind; he is not going to score too many goals,” was the message. You can see they signed Suárez thinking he could not score goals . . .’
Torres affords a light smile recalling this memory, insisting that history has since proven that Suárez deserves to be considered one of the game’s best modern strikers alongside Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
‘Comolli told me that the new owners [FSG], they had an idea of how to spend their investment. They wanted to bring in young players, to build something new. I was thinking to myself, This takes time to work. It takes two, three, four, maybe even ten years. I didn’t have that time. I was twenty-seven years old. I did not have the time to wait. I wanted to win. Here we are five years later and they are still trying to build – around the same position in the league as when I left.’
With Liverpool mid table, FSG’s next big decision was to sack Hodgson at the start of January 2011 and replace him with Kenny Dalglish until the end of the season. A reflection of Hodgson’s shattered relationship with Liverpool’s supporters by the end was the sound of the ‘Hodgson for England’ chants from the away end in a game at Blackburn Rovers. His reign proved to be the shortest of any permanent Liverpool manager in the club’s history.
Dalglish, meanwhile, was viewed as the greatest Liverpool player. He had also led Liverpool to their last league title nearly twenty-one years earlier. He is someone whose status on Merseyside is at a papal level.
In the week that followed, as Liverpool negotiated privately with Chelsea and as they inched closer to an agreement that would make Torres the subject of the highest transfer deal in English history, stories began to circulate in the press claiming that Torres had ‘verbally’ requested a transfer. Torres believes this came from a leak at the club, a deliberate attempt to sully his name before the conclusion of the inevitable: making him take ‘maximum responsibility’ for the transfer when really the club were happy to make it happen.
‘When Chelsea made their first offer before the game at Wolverhampton, I spoke with Dalglish and Steve Clarke [the assistant manager]. I think Comolli wanted to be at the meeting but I told them I only wanted to speak with the coaches. Again, I told Dalglish and Clarke that I only left my club to win and now we were so far away from winning. I told them I felt as though I’d been lied to. Despite telling me they would not sell the good players, Mascherano was sold. I told them that the Chelsea offer was a good one and it would allow me to keep improving and the club would receive a huge financial reward. Dalglish told me that he did not want me to leave – he was the only one. “I need you here,” he said, although he never spoke about his reasons, so they may have been the same as Comolli’s.
‘Before leaving the room, I thought we had an understanding. It might have been a difficult conversation but there was respect on both sides. It was no pasa nada [no problem]. Dalglish told me he’d always be grateful for what I’d done for Liverpool and that hopefully I’d stay.
‘Whether I stayed or left, the idea was to continue as normal. I wanted to do everything the right way. I scored twice at Wolverhampton, then played OK against Fulham three days later at Anfield. Dalglish had told me he did not want me to leave but at the same time I knew Liverpool were negotiating with Chelsea, so maybe this was not the truth.
‘What I did not expect was what they did with the media, changing the way it looked. They tried to show that I was the guilty one, el único [the only one]. I’d gone face to face with Dalglish to explain the situation so that everything was clear. I did not use my agent. He knew how I felt: I wanted to win but at Liverpool it did not seem as though that was possible for at least a few years. And you can see what happened in the few years after – I was not wrong.
‘I told him City had a great team, United were still winning things, then there was Chelsea as usual and Tottenham. We were so far from them. I told him about my conversations with Purslow in the summer and that I stayed then because I did not want to be responsible for Liverpool not being sold.
‘I explained to him that nobody ever wanted me to stay for the right reasons – reasons only related to football. I told him Comolli had told me I could leave at the end of the season. He was not interested in me staying for ever. I told Dalglish I had the chance to leave then – in January – and I did not know whether Chelsea, City or Bayern Munich would come again. I knew the season was not going to be very good – we had been in the bottom half of the table. Who knows what is going to happen? I had the chance to go and it was a great offer for the club also. But if you want me to stay for ever, tell me that. If Liverpool were going to build a great team again, I wanted to stay, there would be no reason to leave, though I did not think this was going to happen, because I did not believe in Comolli’s ideas. I wasn’t sure whether he really cared about Liverpool at all.’
By selling Torres, Comolli would potentially have more money to play with, more money to exert influence on the club in his first few months in the job. It is Dalglish whom Torres feels most let down by, though.
‘My respect for him was huge. I knew that Dalglish was one of the best players in the history of the club, that everyone loved him. But I think he had the power to change the situation. I don’t know why he didn’t do so. If he had asked for money for players, I think they’d have given it to him. If he had insisted to the owners that I stay, then I would have stayed. He came and the team started playing better. I started scoring more goals. The way he wanted to play was much better for the players we had. Steve Clarke was a fantastic coach and he did a great job too.
‘Stories appeared in the press about me demanding to leave, though. This made it difficult for me to stay and to trust the people at Liverpool. Someone must have told them. Because I did not.’
I remind Torres that a similar thing happened with Javier Mascherano when he left for Barcelona at the end of the previous August. After a man-of-the-match performance against Arsenal on the opening day of the season, it was reported that he had refused to play against Manchester City. I wondered whether Liverpool were in the business of discrediting a departing player’s name so the club looked better and the parting of ways was made more acceptable to supporters.
‘The stories that appeared in the press changed the view of everybody including myself. It was not the truth. The truth was that I moved from my home to a club that was ready to win. When I left, there was not a single piece of the winning culture left.
‘What’s so hard for me is that I felt the relationship between myself and the club was really close. That’s why I tried to go and talk to them straight. I will say this again: I did not use my agent. I went first to Purslow, then to Comolli and after to Dalglish – all face-to-face. I tried to explain to each one of them why I left Atlético to go to Liverpool in the first place. I tried to explain that you couldn’t expect to win if you sold your best players. Nobody could give me a straight answer, a football answer.
‘It looked like I wanted to leave for Chelsea and I did not love Liverpool any more. It looked like I did not want to train and play and that’s why I asked for a transfer request. It was presented as if I was a traitor. It was not like this in the discussion. Liverpool could not admit they were doing something wrong with the whole team. They had to find a guilty one.’
Liverpool supporters saw his choice to join Chelsea as treason. Torres viewed it as his only option.
‘I feel sorry for the fans, because they are always going to love Liverpool. The club is bigger than any player. That’s why it was so hard to decide to leave and why it was so hard to see the facts getting twisted, for everything to be pointed at me. I can understand the supporters, because if I read everything that was in the media and believed it, I would feel the same way. But I will tell you again: nothing will ever change my feelings for Liverpool, for the fans and for the city. From day one until the last, they were fantastic towards me.’
There is a sense from Torres that the situation either got out of control very quickly or someone at Liverpool achieved what they wanted in the end. While Dalglish had been out of front-line football for longer than a decade and was landed in a situation that was not of his making, FSG, whose principal owner is John W. Henry, had no previous experience in dealing with such political transfers. FSG have always admitted to taking council from mysterious-sounding ‘pre-eminent advisers’.
During the long-running battle between Mill Financial, former owner George Gillett and Royal Bank of Scotland, it was revealed in 2016 from a New York courtroom that back in 2010 when Mill were competing with FSG to buy the club, both Torres and Pepe Reina were viewed by FSG as being ‘probably beyond their primes’.
‘John Henry was the last person I spoke to and he was great to me, I cannot say anything bad,’ Torres says. ‘He told me he did not want me to leave. If I did want to leave, he told me that the price had to be very high. I told him that I did not want to talk about numbers; that was for him to decide and I would respect whatever decision he came to.’
The discussion with Ste
ven Gerrard about the situation was the one he dreaded most.
‘I went to him before speaking with Dalglish. We were in the dressing room at Melwood alone, sitting together. I explained there had been an offer from Chelsea and that the team was not going to be good in the years to come. I asked him what he thought I should do. Stevie told me not to go, never to leave Liverpool. But he realized too I had to do what was best for me; he understood that my situation and his were different. These were words from the best captain.
‘I know that Stevie was devastated when I left. I was as well, in some ways. I remember the flight from Liverpool to London. I did not know what to feel. I was not happy, I was not angry; I was empty. I was on a helicopter and it was getting dark, flying over Liverpool below. I began to feel sad. I was so happy there, so, so happy . . .
‘After a few weeks, I went back to Liverpool to get my stuff. My son was born in Liverpool. Usually, the house would be busy and he’d be greeting me at the door. But the house was silent. That was hard too . . .’
Torres struggles to describe his emotions when he made his debut for Chelsea the following weekend against Liverpool. He performed that day as if he did not want to be there.
‘To play against Liverpool was never something I liked,’ he admits. ‘There were so many memories and feelings. The reaction of the fans was something I expected but it was still too much for me. I did not react in a good way. Again, it was so, so hard . . .’
His mind drifts to a game at Anfield in 2014 when victory for Liverpool would have put them two more wins away from the club’s first league title in twenty-four years. Steven Gerrard slipped, enabling Demba Ba to score Chelsea’s opener, and in injury time Torres – sent on as a substitute – raced through on goal. He could have made it 2–0 but elected to pass to Willian. During the course of this interview, it is the only question he dodges: the one where I suggest it seems as though he could not contemplate scoring, that he couldn’t bear to stop Liverpool achieving a feat he never accomplished with them.