Does Rafa Benitez deserve more credit for what he achieved at Liverpool?

The Spanish head coach is a somewhat forgotten figure in the Anfield club's history, following Jurgen Klopp's Premier League success with Liverpool. But how do the two stack up?

Last week Rafa Benitez was on the wildly popular Sky Sports Stick to Football podcast and amongst the expected anecdotes about that famous Champions League win in Istanbul and the tedious discussion about how world class Steven Gerrard really was, the former Liverpool manager unquestionably set out his stall and got to work on defending his legacy at the Anfield club. And in many ways underlined how quickly modern football moves on from its heroes. 

After dreadful spells at Celta Vigo, Everton and an ill-advised stint in China prior to that, Benitez clearly felt like he had to use this moment in the spotlight to set a few records straight over his legacy in the Premier League. There was an extensive discussion about his inability to keep Xabi Alonso at the club and why the wives and girlfriends of his star players were always angling for a move to London, but the theme that the Spanish tactician kept coming back to was the uphill struggle he faced at Liverpool in competing with the Premier League’s biggest clubs in the transfer market. 

“My budget was £20 million and six years after it was £17 million with [Tom] Hicks and [George] Gillett… The budgets were low because we didn’t have the money. The chairman was telling me that they didn’t have the money to compete against the other teams – Chelsea and Manchester United. You have a 75,000 stadium [Manchester United] and we had 44,000, so they had £50 million extra every year, so we have to compete.”

Whether this is just Benitez making excuses will likely depend on your point of view. It’s worth finding the full episode on YouTube and making up your own mind on it all. But, for me, it felt like Benitez was making a number of fair points in a desperate plea to a fanbase that had long since moved on from his success at Anfield and have perhaps forgotten what he achieved, following what many would argue pales in comparison to the success Jurgen Klopp then brought to the club. So I decided to take a look at how both managers stack up alongside one another. 

When we plot Benitez and Klopps’ records in the Premier League alongside one another we get a graph like the one above, which clearly shows that both coaches struggled for consistency at Anfield. But there’s also little doubt as to which one managed higher highs with the club. Obviously, fans of the club will note Klopp’s title win in 19/20, which remains Liverpool’s highest points tally ever in the Premier League era. But it’s also worth noting that Klopp’s second-place finishes in 18/19 and 21/22 are also the club’s third and fourth best finishes ever. Benitez’s best record in the English top-flight - the second-place finish in 08/09 - ranks tenth in the club’s history books, but at the time was the sixth best return ever and the best points tally in 21 years.

This also clearly underlines why Klopp sits above Benitez in any discussion over the greatest ever Liverpool managers. But when we consider the Spaniard’s aforementioned fiscal arguments, there certainly is a case to be made. For example, over the course of his six seasons at Anfield, Benitez’s Liverpool spent €356 million on new signings. That is considerably less than the €1.06 billion Liverpool spent during Klopp’s nine seasons at the club. And, interestingly enough, when we then consider how many league points each manager won in the Premier League, it works out at Benitez spending €820k per league point, while Klopp spent almost twice that amount at €1.5m per league point. 

Even if we factor in the money raised through selling players and using that income to buy new players - a big factor in both managers’ tenures at the club - we find that Benitez’s net spend at Anfield stood at €146m, while Klopp’s stands much higher at €423m. Naturally, that’s down to the latter spending more time at Anfield, but when we filter it down to once again look at how much each league point cost each manager in the top-flight we once again find Benitez working on almost half his predecessor’s resources, with the Spaniard spending €340k per league point and Klopp spending €600k per point. 

But this is where things get tricky. Yes, Klopp spent much more money than Benitez did and undoubtedly worked for a far better-equipped club than the one that his Spanish predecessor inherited from Gérard Houllier, but he was also competing in a far tougher league. And by that I don’t just mean to draw comparisons to the Manchester City/Pep Guardiola rivalry Klopp endured for his entire tenure at Anfield or the way Benitez had to compete with Chelsea, Man Utd and Arsenal. What I mean is that while Liverpool may have gotten richer in the five years between Benitez and Klopp, so too did the Premier League as a whole. 

For example, as the graph above shows, of the clubs that Benitez’s Liverpool were competing against in the Premier League, only three had a higher net spend than the Anfield club: Tottenham (1.4x Liverpool’s net spend between 2004 to 2010), Chelsea (1.9x) and Man City (2x). While that is certainly a lot and perhaps overlooks the value already invested in Man Utd and Arsenal’s squads prior to Benitez arriving at Anfield, it undoubtedly pales in comparison to what Klopp had to deal with. 

While many will acknowledge that the former Liverpool manager often valiantly upset the odds against Guardiola’s star-studded teams, Man City weren’t even the biggest spenders in the English top-flight during the German’s reign at Anfield. As we can see, Man Utd spent 2.58x more than Liverpool, while Chelsea even outspent Man City to rack up a bill 2.38x the net spend of Liverpool in that time period. In fact, over the course of his successful spell at the club, no less than seven Premier League clubs spent more than Klopp’s Liverpool. Which not only underlines the remarkable job he did but also puts Benitez’s complaints into perspective. 

Ultimately, Benitez was never trying to suggest that he did a better job than Klopp. Nor should we really be pitting either head coach against one another in some odd winner-takes-all contest. Both tacticians were tasked with upsetting the odds against richer clubs and to the delight of Liverpool fans they both more or less did exactly that. It’s just that Klopp went one step further and won a league title to sit alongside his European trophy. 

However, from the outside it certainly seems like an almighty gulf exists between the adoration Klopp enjoys among Liverpool fans and whatever admiration still remains for Benitez. Whether it was that long-awaited league title or Benitez’s terrible decision to take a stab at bringing success to Everton that has led to that gulf isn’t entirely clear, but neither should it entirely blot out the Spaniard’s time at Anfield. He wasn’t Klopp and he didn’t win a league title. But he also wasn’t too far off it. And 14 years on from his last game as Liverpool manager, under the bright studio lights at Sky Sports, Benitez unquestionably made it clear for all to see that he feels like we’ve all forgot exactly that.