'Thirty years without a title? We didn't see what was coming' - Molby laments Liverpool's decline

For Jan Molby, there was never any doubt.

“I thought Liverpool were an absolute certainty this season,” says the former Reds midfielder. “But then, I thought they’d win it last season too!”

Molby has watched, like the rest of us, as Jurgen Klopp’s side have taken the Premier League by storm. With 27 wins from 29 games, and 25 points clear of their nearest challenger, Liverpool were on the brink of their first title in 30 years before the coronavirus crisis hit.

If, or rather when, football resumes, they will require just two more victories to be crowned champions, and Klopp and his players will be assured of their place in Anfield history – even more so given the nature of the campaign.

“It’s been coming, hasn’t it?” Molby says. “It hasn’t happened overnight; this has been four years in the making. Ever since Jurgen came to the club, it’s been building towards this.”

It is a long time since Liverpool could call themselves Kings of England. Though they were the dominant force of the 1970s and 80s, their crown slipped dramatically in the 90s, their decline coinciding with the arrival of the Premier League and the emergence of Sir Alex Ferguson’s great Manchester United teams.

Molby was part of the last Reds side to win the league championship, back in 1990, and witnessed first-hand the fall of the Anfield empire. He saw Sir Kenny Dalglish’s shock departure in 1991 and watched his replacement, Graeme Souness, try and fail to usher in a new era. He left the club in 1996 as Roy Evans, the last member of the famous Anfield ‘Boot Room Boys’, sought to bring back the glory days.

Few ex-footballers speak with such clarity and precision as Molby. His memory is flawless, and common sense permeates each and every point he makes.

“As a club, we didn’t see what was coming,” he says. “Yes, you could look at the squad which won the league in 1990 and say it needed a couple of additions, but 30 years with no title?! Nobody thought that.”

Hindsight, of course, tells us that the cracks were appearing.

Liverpool lost the FA Cup final to rank outsiders Wimbledon in 1988, and surrendered the title to Arsenal in an epic final-day showdown a year later. In 1990, Dalglish’s side regained their crown but were upset in the FA Cup semi-final by a Crystal Palace side they had beaten 9-0 in the league a few months earlier.

“Each year, layers were being taken off,” says Molby. “We were losing games we had to win, and that hadn’t happened for a long time.”

Off the pitch, of course, the club was coming to terms with the enormity of the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 supporters lost their lives at the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest in April 1989. The fallout from that tragedy, naturally, would cast a long shadow.

“It did, but as players we honestly never discussed it,” Molby says. “Even when we lost to Arsenal in ‘89 [just six weeks later], it was never talked about as a reason. It's only later when people started to wonder what kind of impact it had.”

Dalglish, in particular, suffered in the aftermath of Hillsborough. Plenty believe the Scot, in the months and years afterwards, displayed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. When he resigned as manager in February 1991, he was, in his own words, “unwell”, unable to make even simple decisions.

His body was covered in a rash which doctors believed was caused by stress. “I had to get out,” Dalglish wrote in his autobiography. “The alternative was going mad.”

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His exit came with Liverpool at the top of the old First Division. By the end of the 1990-91 season, though, they had been overtaken by Arsenal. Souness had been lured down from Rangers, and things would never be the same again.

“History told us that if we didn’t win the league, we’d win it the next year,” Molby says. “We didn’t think it was over for us when Arsenal won the league [in ‘91].

“But when recruitment isn’t quite what it used to be, it goes on a bit longer and you start thinking ‘Hang on, we need a rebuild here.' And when was the last time Liverpool, the great Liverpool, had needed a rebuild?”

Molby had been close to leaving Liverpool for Barcelona shortly before Dalglish’s departure, and would now watch as other members of the great 1980s side departed, to be replaced by inferior footballers.

Souness sold Peter Beardsley, Ray Houghton, Steve Staunton and Steve McMahon early in his reign. Beardsley, Staunton and Houghton would all go on to give excellent service elsewhere.

Meanwhile, his relationship with Ian Rush and Bruce Grobbelaar was strained, while the brilliant John Barnes picked up an Achilles injury which would force him to fundamentally change his game. Gone was the winger who had lit up the English game, to be replaced by a classy, but far less explosive, midfield controller.

At the same time, the likes of Ronnie Whelan, Steve Nicol and indeed Molby, meanwhile, were coming to the end of their shelf life.

Liverpool had promising youngsters coming through – Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman and Jamie Redknapp in particular – but the players brought in, towards the end of the Dalglish era and into the beginning of Souness' reign, were simply not up to scratch.

Many – Jimmy Carter, Istvan Kozma, David Speedie, Torben Piechnik – remain among the club's worst ever signings.

“It had been an incredible strength of Liverpool’s, getting big decisions right,” Molby says. “They would move players on five minutes before their time was up.

“I don’t think there was anything wrong with Souness’ thinking. To keep the fire burning, he felt he needed to do something. But he ended up doing it in a manner which he looks back on now and knows was wrong.

“The biggest thing wasn’t the players he let go, it was the players he bought. It was the players we got that killed us in the end."

He continues: “From one day to the next almost, you could see the decline. At Melwood we had a very simple way of training, but it was always done to a level. All of a sudden, you look around and think ‘How can we play the way Liverpool want to play on a Saturday, if this is the level we are producing in training?’

"Everything changed. We bought a left-back called Julian Dicks. A left-back who served balls into the front man. We never played like that. We played through the middle and we created overloads.

"We never played with two strikers, we played with one up front and one off the front – Kenny or Beardsley – but all those things changed overnight.”

Liverpool finished sixth in Souness’ first full season in charge. It was their lowest league placing since 1965, and the first time they had finished outside the top two since 1981. The following year was the first of the Premier League era, and Liverpool finished sixth again.

Manchester United were champions, their first success since 1967. A new dominant force had arrived.

“Football was changing, and as a football club we were probably always a little slow to follow suit,” Molby says. “We were still holding onto what had been successful in the 70s and 80s, while football around us was accelerating into a new era.

“Once that train left, we weren’t on it. And it took forever for us to catch up.”

Souness, and later Evans, would try to rescue the situation. Liverpool spent heavily, but the likes of Dicks, Dean Saunders, Mark Wright, Paul Stewart, Nigel Clough, Phil Babb, Neil Ruddock, John Scales and Stan Collymore – a British-record buy in 1995 – were unable to get the club back on top.

“Sometimes, the first step a club takes when they start to think things are going awry is to spend money,” Molby says, matter-of-factly. “We just didn’t spend it very well.”

Molby believes that despite some good moments under Evans, it took until Gerard Houllier’s arrival in 1998 for Liverpool to begin to emerge from their slumber. "The quicker you realise you have problems, the more chance you have of putting them right,” he says.

“To start off with, though, I don’t think we realised we had a problem. We thought it was a blip, that we’d spend, and things would click into place.

“Roy Evans was a good appointment at the time, but I never thought that team in the mid-90s would win the title. Liverpool realised they had to do something different, they realised where they were at, and that was when Houllier came in.”

Houllier would enjoy success in cup competitions, as would his replacement Rafa Benitez. There would be near-misses in the league too, notably under Brendan Rodgers in 2013-14, but it would take the arrival of Klopp in 2015 for Liverpool to emerge as consistent challengers.

“It’s amazing to think back to that Spurs game in 2017, when we lost 4-1,” Molby says. “And what happens? We build a team and they build a stadium. And that’s kind of modern football. It’s about the decisions you make as a club. We can’t get NFL games at Anfield, but we have a team that’s winning trophies.”

And looking to the future, he concludes: “Five years ago, there was a list of great players who you’d say would never, ever come to Anfield. That was a given. Now? Who is off limits, really? Not many.

“And compare us to somebody like Manchester United – we don’t have to pay a premium for our players anymore, whereas they do. They can’t offer what we do. They have to pay 20 per cent on top, like we did in the 1990s and 2000s."

However this season is resolved, one thing's for sure. After three decades in the shadows, Liverpool are very much back in the spotlight.