Players like Alberto and Aspas were not a success in the Premier League, which is a factor here.
There was no harmony between the recruitment team and Rodgers. It's easy to take one side and blame the other, but ultimately it stems from FSG hiring a manager in line with how we want the club to play and ensuring that remains constant. Rodgers may have been, to begin with, but when he was coming under increasing pressure, he wanted to rely on the Prem has proven signings route to provide some security over his future and lacked imagination or understanding of how to successfully incorporate Firmino into the side. Both sides were culpable to an extent, but it felt more like a top-down strategy failure as FSG tried to get up to grips with running a football club.
The sorts of compromises we allowed Rodgers should never have been agreed to by the club - it led to a two-tiered approach to targets and then it just got messy. Logically speaking the club should have binned off Rodgers at this point, but I suspect we had an eye on Klopp and it was not worth the upheaval.