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Before Liverpool brought in Brendan Rodgers to replace Kenny Daglish, Fenway Sports Group apparently approached then Ajax manager Frank de Boer for the gig. De Boer was, and still is, seen as an up-and-coming manager, although he has yet to prove himself at the highest levels.
“I would love to manage (in England),” de Boer said in an interview with the Daily Mail. “But the project has to be right. I told Liverpool I was honored but I was only one year in at Ajax, it was too soon. I needed to achieve more, and I did.”
And he did. At the time he was in the middle of a four-year tear through the Eredivisie, winning it twice more before moving on to Inter Milan this campaign. Milan, under de Boer’s leadership, are currently on pace to match last-season’s 4th place finish, which would not be good enough to return the side to the Champions League for the first time since the 2011/12 season.
Whether de Boer could have done better than Rodgers is an open question, but then maybe we wouldn’t have landed Jürgen Klopp and that would have been the worst.