Luis Suarez: Liverpool title win in 2013/14 would have been bigger than now

Luis Suarez

The Uruguayan came agonisingly close to clinching the club’s first league championship since 1990 during the 2013/14 campaign, before a late-season collapse ended their hopes.

Jurgen Klopp’s side are currently one point behind leaders Manchester City in the table with three rounds remaining, as the Anfield club look to finally end their long wait for another championship triumph.

Suarez is set to come face to face with his old club when they meet in the Champions League semi-finals next week, and insists that Klopp has built a team that is no longer an outsider for major honours.

“I understand what they’re going through and it can’t be easy but I think with us it was different because it was: ‘now or never’, a one-off,” Suarez told The Guardian.

“When I was there, it was very different. We were on the verge of the Premier League with a squad nowhere near as good. They didn’t spend as much as they’re doing now.

“Any player would like to go to Liverpool now; it was different then. If we’d won the league, I think it would have been an even bigger achievement than if this team do.

“The front three are very quick, technically gifted, so much talent; they’re players who make the difference and Liverpool’s results depend on them.

“The kind of players you’d love to play with, with the level you’d expect for a club like Liverpool, built to win the Premier League and the Champions League.

“They also know how to approach games. Maybe we didn’t handle that so well. What happened with Stevie was bad luck, but take Crystal Palace: these days, you’d say: ‘No, play calmly, we’re 3-0 up, City have to win in midweek and the weekend.’

“But we felt that urge to score, we went forward thinking we could be champions on goal difference. That was the mistake of being ‘too young’.”

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Alasdair Mackenzie is a freelance journalist based in Rome, and a FourFourTwo contributor since 2015. When not pulling on the FFT shirt, he can be found at Reuters, The Times and the i. An Italophile since growing up on a diet of Football Italia on Channel 4, he now counts himself among thousands of fans sharing a passion for Ross County and Lazio.