Before Liverpool’s 6-1 defeat at Stoke on the final day of the season Brendan Rodgers had already announced that he was “150% certain” he would remain in his job next season. As with so many aspects of Liverpool’s mutable, oddly unquantifiable progress in the last two years, it might just be best to double-check the figures on that one. By Sunday night, Liverpool’s manager had recalculated. “I’ve always said if the owners want me to go, I go,” he reasoned, pirouetting on his heel with a lithe, finely-balanced sense of sure-footedness that brought to mind something almost entirely unlike Emre Can.

Rodgers is the kind of manager you can’t help wanting to believe in, even just a little bit. If only because of the memory of Liverpool’s best period in his three years to date, that thrilling surge in the previous season when a run of one defeat from January to April was marked by fast starts and sublime, fluent attacking interchange between three players who have, for different reasons, been largely absent this season.

Rodgers has always presented himself as a seductively modern creature, a “process manager” with a fully tooled-up range of coaching neologisms, from state-of-the-art fluent passing football, to his urge to mint new positions, subvert the dominant paradigm, play a false No9 and 3/4 and all the rest of it. Plus, of course, there is that alluringly sonorous Liverpool-shaded persona, in the good times at least, a kind of Shankly-lite mash-up of the magnetic personality, the ringing tones, the grand gestures.

And then, of course, there’s the Liverpool team. Like Rodgers himself, the side have been a little obscured in recent times, hard to get a decent look at. The bald facts are that three years on, and with £210m spent, Liverpool have won no trophies and enjoyed one disappointing Champions League season. And yet in a sense Rodgers has been protected a little through this by the distracting effects of three competing wider narratives.

The first of these we might call the Suárez Distortion. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that not only is Luis Suárez a brilliantly decisive footballer, he is also phenomenally good at helping other players shine. Last year it was Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling at Liverpool. This time it’s Neymar and the recalibrated genius of Lionel Messi. By extension he’s a tonic for managers, too: with the world’s most selflessly, relentlessly intelligent centre-forward in his team Luis Enrique has also been transformed into a revered attacking technician.

The net result is that after three years in which Liverpool have finished seventh, second and sixth it is tempting to conclude that what happened in that middle year is not that Liverpool managed to come second; but that with the outstanding Premier League player of the last six years in their team they failed to come first.

Luis Suárez was so brilliant for Liverpool maybe we should be asking why Brendan Rodgers failed to win the title with him in the side last year. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

It was always likely Liverpool would miss the 55-goal contribution of Suárez and Sturridge this time round. But even before the invertebrate defeat at Stoke there was a more profound, systemic feel to the team’s congealment.

Liverpool have competed in five competitions this season. The manner of their exit from the running in each has been genuinely disappointing. The Champions League campaign brought just one win, at home to Ludogorets in the opening game. In both domestic cup competitions the big games – semi-finals or against the game’s better managers – continued to elude Rodgers.

The Premier League season disintegrated after the home defeat by Manchester United in March, the first of six losses in 11 games to cap a season that saw Liverpool go from 84 points last season to 62 this.

If Rodgers has been a little lucky it is in the fact the mechanics behind this falling away have been drowned out to a degree by noises off the pitch. First there has been the ongoing furore of Raheem Sterling’s wanderlust. This has undoubtedly been appallingly handled by his agent. But it has also been allowed to encroach as far as possible, to play out as disruptively as any saga anywhere in recent memory.

This is not a first. Star players will always want to leave. Young players often have their heads turned. Rodgers has been unlucky with the way this one has played itself out. But how would Shankly, or Sir Alex Ferguson or José Mourinho have handled it? Or even, in Rodgers’ favour, a manager with a little more obvious on-site support from his board and owners?

Similarly Steven Gerrard’s protracted farewell tour has overhung a large portion of the season. Just as man inevitably hands on misery to man, Gerrard’s sentimental departure has been transformed into exactly the same distracting shadow of the past that has shadowed his own career. Bring me lucky generals, Napoleon said. Rodgers has been the opposite, forced to fight simultaneously on three fronts, only one of them strictly footballing. And yet for all that a great part of managing has always been managing problems, coping with bad luck, funnelling the right kind of energy your own way.

The gripes against Rodgers’ micro-management are well rehearsed. A tendency to lose the big points. A habit of fiddling tactically, a fixed-gear zaniness that is at times more a sign of stubbornness than flexibility. But really what might just do for him now, a mark of underachievement that can’t be obscured by any wider narrative, are his dealings in the transfer market.

Mario Balotelli is far from being Brendan Rodgers’ only expensive mistake in the transfer market. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA

The manager must take a degree of responsibility both for the signings and subsequent progress of Fabio Borini (£10.5m), Joe Allen (£15m), Adam Lallana (£25m), Lazar Markovic (£20m) Dejan Lovren (£20m), Mamadou Sakho (£18m), Mario Balotelli (£16m), Iago Aspas (£7.2m) and Rickie Lambert (£4m). Not to mention various expensive add-ons and loanees whose merits have so far remained obscure. For all the good business that may have gone the other way, it is a vast expense in a short time. Juventus, by comparison, have spent no more on a single player in the last few years than the £14.5m they gave Real Madrid for Álvaro Morata.

There is simply a sense of wastage there. Liverpool are the ninth richest club in the world, richer than Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Milan and Atlético Madrid. But can they really afford to trust the same manager with another three seasons’ worth of transfer budget? Not least when the club is currently still in a transitional phase in its modern existence, working at a level where the margins are still fine, where every decision must be the right one, where every drop must be wrung from the playing assets.

Meanwhile there is a naturally corrosive quality to the churn under Rodgers. Perhaps we saw a little of this in the collapse at Stoke, a degree of emotional exhaustion at the end of three unsettling years, and a period of oddly fascinating, strangely wasteful stasis.