The amount of hate surrounding Liverpool’s potential signing of Mason Mount is quite frankly ridiculous. The fact that most of the vile discourse thrown at the England international is centred around his work rate, and that coaches point towards his selfless nature and tactical awareness shows that the haters simply don’t understand football.
To build a successful team it takes more than 11 technically gifted football players because, like it or not, what someone does off the ball is probably more important than what he does on it.
If you have ever watched a top class Futsal game or seen the street free stylers go at in the park, you will notice their technical ability with the ball is beyond that of many Premier League players. So why haven’t they made it in the pro game? Well there are two reasons for their perceived failure . For starters they are more than likely lazy and secondly are almost certainly tactically inept. They believed from a young age that their skills would be enough to see them through at each level and early on on this may have been true. But as you progress through the various age groups you need more than flair to be the best.
History is littered with players that had bags of potential or were labelled as naturally gifted footballers at a young age, only for them to fall by the way side because of a questionable work ethic or a failure to carry out simple managerial instructions.
Freddy Adu and Ravel Morrison are just two names that had the football world drooling over what they could do with a football only to become stand in jokes of the game.
The idea of work rate and tactical awareness being important isn’t one that has just been made up and can be backed up by hardcore stats. The average amount of touches a footballer has in an English Premier League game is around 42. Lets say that each of those touches lasts for around five seconds. That would mean each player only has the ball for around 3.5 minutes per game. Even if you doubled that amount of touches or the amount time taken with each touch it would still only give a player seven minutes to positively affect the game.
Of course the dream for any manager is to have players that offer both and for many critics this is where Jordan Henderson falls short. Yes his work rate is up there, yes he sacrifices himself tactically but he doesn’t have the technical ability when in possession to hurt the opposition. However, in Mason Mount there is a player that can do both. Not only does every coach he’s worked with praise him for his off the ball work, but he has also delivered on the biggest stage for Chelsea when it matters most.
Now I am not saying he is better than Jude Bellingham and I am not saying he should be Liverpool’s only addition this summer. But if people can’t see what a quality addition Mason Mount will be to a re build at Liverpool then there is no hope for any of you.