It is just over a decade since Rafael Benítez was appointed Liverpool manager on the back of what has become one of the most famous quotes in modern football. “I asked for a table and they brought me a lampshade,” the Spaniard said in criticism of the transfer restrictions imposed by the board at Valencia, the club he led to two La Liga titles and the Uefa Cup prior to swapping the Mestalla for Merseyside in June 2004.

As he embarks on his third campaign at Liverpool, Brendan Rodgers could be forgiven for mulling over those words, and wondering if in light of the departure of his best player to Barcelona they now apply, and could well shape, his own spell in the Anfield hotseat. Rodgers is not one to panic or moan but it cannot have escaped his attention that his plan to take Liverpool one place better than last season and become Premier League champions suddenly has a rather large Luis Suárez-shaped hole in it, and that the club’s record of signing players since he arrived in 2012 hardly suggests the void will be filled successfully.

To put it in Benítez’s terms, there have been more lampshades than tables arriving at Anfield in the past two years, making the success Rodgers has instigated in that time particularly remarkable. Indeed, the team that started the final-day victory over Newcastle two months ago, one that sealed second spot for Liverpool and not only restored their place in the Champions League but also the hope among supporters of better times to come, contained just three players bought during the Rodgers era – Simon Mignolet, Joe Allen and Daniel Sturridge – with another two, Philippe Coutinho and Aly Cissokho, coming on as second-half substitutes. And of that quintet, only Sturridge and Coutinho have proven they truly have what it takes to make it long term at a club where low times have not dimmed high expectations.

Mignolet and Allen showed enough last season to suggest they too can reach that level, as did Mamadou Sakho, the France defender signed from Paris Saint-Germain a little over a year ago, but the same cannot be said of the rest, most of whom also arrived in the buildup to the 2013-14 season: Luis Alberto, a £7m capture from Sevilla who didn’t make a single league start for Liverpool and has now joined Málaga on a season-long loan deal; Victor Moses and Cissokho, who both came on loan and did nowhere near enough to make their moves permanent; Kolo Touré, who went from cult hero to comical defender during the campaign; and Iago Aspas, the Spanish forward who arrived from Celta Vigo amid much anticipation but ultimately became more renowned for his appalling corner taking than his goals, of which he scored just one in 15 appearances. Aspas, like Alberto, has returned to Spain on a loan deal, joining the midfielder’s former club, Sevilla.

Fabio Borini, who was signed for £11m in July 2012, showed during his own loan spell at Sunderland last season that he could yet prove a shrewd acquisition for Liverpool, as did the young Portuguese defender Tiago Illori during his time at Granada for the final four months of the campaign. But overall there is no doubting that during Rodgers’ time at the club, the incomings have been far more miss than hit. Little wonder there is concern among Kopites that the £75m their club has acquired for Suárez will not necessarily be spent making up for the loss of the hugely influential Uruguayan.

As manager, Rodgers must take a significant amount of responsibility for the failings in Liverpool’s purchasing decisions, and it can be argued that the 41-year-old’s biggest mistake was agreeing to the formation of a transfer committee, which has made him part of a recruitment team that includes the chief executive, Ian Ayre, the head of analysis, Michael Edwards, and the head of recruitment, Dave Fallows.

Upon taking over at Liverpool in June 2012, Rodgers made it clear that he would not work alongside a proposed director of football – with the newly installed Manchester United manager, Louis van Gaal, widely tipped to take the role – insisting instead that he wanted to be in charge of “one vision and one mentality” at Anfield. Yet he did agree to the wish of the club’s owner, Fenway Sports Group, for the transfer committee to be established, which effectively has created the director of football model between them.

“What we believe is that you need many people involved in the [transfer] process,” Ayre said last year. “That doesn’t mean somebody else is picking the team for Brendan, but Brendan needs to set out with the team which positions we want to fill and what the key targets would be for that.”

In fairness, many of the targets identified by Rodgers and “the team” have proven to be high-level talents – the only problem is that they’ve done so at other clubs. Liverpool wanted Henrikh Mkhitaryan, but he joined Borussia Dortmund, they also wanted Willian and Mohamed Salah, but they joined Chelsea, while a move last summer for Diego Costa, who has just joined the Stamford Bridge club from Atlético Madrid on the back of finishing as top scorer for the La Liga champions, also came to nothing.

Liverpool are generally, then, targeting the right players but signing the wrong ones, and there exists a view that the policy of buying-by-committee has played a role in that. Rodgers insists he maintains the “first and last call” on all purchases, but a consensus still has to be sought on targets and on how much the club is willing to spend on transfer fees and wages, something that can only slow down the process. Certainly the moves for Mkhitaryan, Willian and Salah dragged on for ages before Dortmund and Chelsea respectively stepped in and paid the going rate.

An obvious stumbling block Liverpool have faced in regards to nailing their primary transfer targets during the Rodgers era has been an inability to offer Champions League football, but questions can be asked about how hard the club, and Ayre in particular, have “sold the dream” to those with the talents to restore the team to the Europe’s elite competition. And if the hard sell was tried and ultimately failed, why have so many of the alternatives failed to make the grade? (The list also includes Samil Yesil and Oussama Assaidi.) Indeed, Liverpool’s own recent history shows that a combination of savvy scouting and shrewd negotiating can lead to stellar signings even when Champions League football is not on the table, most notably in the summer of 1999 when the club acquired Sami Hyypia, Stéphane Henchoz and Dietmar Hamann for less than £15m. All three were instrumental in the club’s cup treble success of 2001, with Hyypia and Hamann also playing key roles in the “miracle of Istanbul” four years later.

Liverpool are now back in the Champions League and yet targets are still being missed, with Alexis Sánchez, who excelled for Chile during the recent World Cup, preferring to join Arsenal from Barcelona rather than being part of the deal that took Suárez to the Camp Nou. In fairness to the transfer committee, that had more to do with Sánchez’s desire to live in London rather than any failings on their part and it is hardly as if they have been idle this summer, with four players having already been added to the squad; Adam Lallana and Rickie Lambert, who have arrived from Southampton, Emre Can, who came from Bayer Leverkusen and, most recently, the Serbia winger Lazar Markovic, who cost €25m to take from Benfica.

None of those signings are likely to excite Kopites greatly, certainly not in the way Sánchez would have done, and, given Liverpool’s recent record in the transfer market, fans would be forgiven for being sceptical of the impact the new arrivals will make. But at least the additions show a desire by the Anfield hierarchy to get deals done quickly, with the arrival of Lallana and Markovic particularly interesting given Rodgers’ comments’ after Liverpool’s 2-1 loss to Brondby on Wednesday, in their first pre-season game of the year, that instead of trying to directly replace Suárez, the club will target players “who can add things to our game”.

For the defeat in Denmark, Rodgers deployed a 4-3-3 formation, one that brought him great success at Swansea and that he regularly used at Liverpool before a need to fit Suárez and Sturridge into the same team led, among other factors, to adjustments in the team’s shape and approach. With the former now gone and Sturridge having shown last season that he is more than capable of playing as a lone forward – most notably in February’s 5-1 destruction of Arsenal when the England forward, positioned as the principal striker in a three-man attack, delivered a superb, scoring performance in what is widely regarded to have been the team’s best display of the season – now appears the moment that Rodgers has decided, or at least could decide, to return permanently to his favoured shape.

Certainly, Sturridge deserves his chance to be Liverpool’s principal striker. Signed from Chelsea for £12m in January 2013, the 24-year-old has been the best piece of business done by the club under Rodgers, with his haul of 21 goals last season making him the best English goalscorer in the Premier League and second overall behind his just departed team-mate. Rodgers, it appears, is preparing to build his team around Sturridge, with Lallana, Markovic, Raheem Sterling and the 18-year-old Jordon Ibe, who excelled against Brondby, competing for the two advanced wide attacking roles.

But with the transfer window still open for another five weeks and £75m having been deposited into the bank, there is naturally a desire among Liverpool fans for the club to at least attempt to attract a player who can get their pulses racing in the way Suárez did almost every week during his three-and-a-half-year stay on Merseyside.

Liverpool’s recent purchasing record suggests they will struggle to get even close but, with Champions League football back at the club and the transfer committee showing a new-found decisiveness in getting deals done, there can at least be hope among the Anfield faithful that a standout signing will be made before the new season truly gets underway.

History should also provide them with optimism. In 1977, Liverpool also lost a No7 who was crucial to the team and adored by the fans. Kevin Keegan’s departure to Hamburg appeared a big blow for a club that had just won its 10th league title and first European Cup and many felt there was no way Bob Paisley could replace him adequately. The manager, in turn, went out and spent £440,000 on a player to do just that. His name? Kenny Dalglish.