How ‘Being: Liverpool’ changed modern football – and destroyed Brendan Rodgers’ image | OneFootball

Long before ‘All or Nothing’ ushered in an era of football managers as philosophers, Brendan Rodgers was delivering TED Talks in a tracksuit.

The football and media landscapes were very different back Being:Liverpool hit our screens back in 2012.

Netflix still sent you actual physical DVDs in the post. Nobody had heard of xG. Simpler (better) times.

Narrated by Clive Owen, produced by Fox and aired in the UK on Channel 5 – charmingly low rent, in hindsight – audiences weren’t quite sure how to receive the all-access look at Brendan Rodgers’ first year in Merseyside.

“I just think this show comes across as American schmaltz,” Liverpool legend Mark Lawrenson wrote in The Mirror, an opinion shared by many.

“It’s totally ill-advised and some of the stuff that I have seen so far in the first three episodes is cringeworthy.”

And it wasn’t just the old-school proper football men who gave the documentary a kicking.

“This is not up there with the Graham Taylor documentary Do I Not Like That, or the brilliant recent QPR film, The Four Year Plan,” Sam Wollaston wrote in his review of the documentary series for The Guardian.

“The Anfield bosses probably saw those two documentaries and were very careful about where they allowed the cameras to go, and who they pointed at.

“There’s a more guarded, stage-managed feel to it all.”

We weren’t to know it at the time, but that observation would prove particularly astute for the wave of documentaries that arrived years after Being: Liverpool.

Forget the analytics revolution. Forget Moneyball, data, Ian Graham, Michael Edwards and inspired recruitment.

Where FSG were really ahead of the curve was seeing a football club akin to Disney, a vehicle for ‘storytelling’, ‘brand-building’ and ‘content creation’ (pass us the bucket). Just look at Wrexham’s Netflix-powered rise up the Football League.

It would take a while for others to catch up, but within 10 years we’d have Amazon’s All Or Nothing series, with instalments on Man City, Tottenham, Juventus and Arsenal.

All of them essentially repackaged an in-house puff piece as a genuine documentary. Ken Burns or Adam Curtis, they certainly ain’t.

Clubs like Leeds United, Burnley and Birmingham would follow suit with their own attempts that left you with the feeling each club’s head of PR was sat alongside a poor editor, Waylon Smithers style, to make sure every ounce of personality or controversy were left on the cutting room floor.

In this age of every club giving you a behind-the-scenes look at their process, Wollaston’s complaint that Being: Liverpool felt stage-managed now feels quaint.

It feels a lot closer to the fascinatingly, toe-curlingly warts-and-all Do I Not Like That and Sunderland ‘Til I Die (note for documentarians: that’s why they’re actually good) than the slickly produced advertorials we’re bludgeoned with today.

You know for a fact that were Being: Liverpool produced in the 2020s, it would look very different. You don’t even have to imagine it – Amazon’s Doubters to Believers couldn’t be more of a contrast.

Today’s editors might well have looked at Rodgers having a giant portrait of himself as ‘a bit weird’ or ‘not a good look’ and left that bit out.

Has Rodgers’ reputation ever quite recovered?

Call it collateral damage of Being:Liverpool being ahead of its time. Never quite nailing the ‘make us look good’ remit. A hilarious, fly-on-the-wall insight into David Brent for the LinkedIn generation.

“I felt a bit sorry for Brendan Rodgers,” Jamie Carragher told The Athletic in an in-depth retrospective.

“I don’t think it did him any favours.

“He didn’t have the power to say ‘no’. He had only just got the job and probably felt a great debt to the owners.

“I think if Jurgen Klopp had come in at that time he would have just said ‘I’m not doing that’ and the owners would have accepted it. But Brendan probably felt that he was in no position to question it.”

Rodgers has proven himself a capable coach, taking Liverpool within a whisker of the Premier League title, leading Leicester City to the FA Cup, and lifting numerous silverware at Celtic.

But being a good salesman – selling yourself, in particular – is a huge part of what it is to be a top coach in 2025.