Transition, transition, transition. It is the curse of modern football and also its great excuse. Whenever a club are underperforming, it is because they are in transition. To which it is tempting to reply, “Well, stop signing so many players then.” It is not, of course, as easy as that, partly because the club that are not in transition tend to be perceived as in stagnation (and that leads to boredom, which is the worst crime of all in the soap opera morality of the Premier League), and partly because, if you’re not one of the absolute elite, other clubs keep buying your players.

For Brendan Rodgers, though, the excuse, whatever validity it may have, is sounding increasingly tired. Anfield is ripe with the stench of resignation. Rodgers arrived at Liverpool in 2012 with a philosophy. He wanted to play the possession-based football that had served him so well at Swansea City. He offloaded Andy Carroll at a significant loss because he did not fit in. Liverpool finished seventh.

He recognised that in Luis Suárez, Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling, he had three attacking players of tremendous pace and so he changed the style to something more direct. For a while Liverpool’s football was breathtaking but then they naively fell into José Mourinho’s trap. But still, they finished second.

But then Suárez left and Sturridge was injured and Rodgers had to rethink. A raft of new players arrived, he fiddled around, came up with a 3-4-2-1 and the results achieved in the first flush of that experiment propelled Liverpool to sixth. Then Sterling left and a raft of new players arrived and Rodgers is fiddling around again, his problems exacerbated by the loss of his captain, Jordan Henderson, with a broken bone in a foot. Rodgers has played 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 and, last Sunday, there was a return to a back three against Norwich City with a 3-4-1-2.

The fiddling is looking increasingly desperate. Liverpool did eventually beat Carlisle United, sparing Rodgers a Roy Hodgson and Northampton Town situation, but one goal from 47 attempts in two hours against a League Two side suggests both a lack of fortune and a lack of precision. Luck is turning against him. Losing Christian Benteke for a couple of weeks just when they need results is unfortunate; it is doubly so that the toothlessness against Carlisle should come in a week in which Mario Balotelli and Iago Aspas, two players who did not succeed at Liverpool, should score goals for their new clubs.

Yet in the first half away at Arsenal, they looked excellent. At other times they have looked stodgy. It has, in other words, been just what you would expect from a new team finding its way. A lot of getting to know you, with occasional moments at which it all clicks. But after six league games, Liverpool have won only twice, against Stoke City thanks to a screamer from Philippe Coutinho, and against Bournemouth thanks to a goal that should have been ruled out for offside. Add that to the dismal end to last season and Liverpool have taken only 16 points from their past 15 Premier League games. There is an understandable restlessness about Anfield, a sense that the pattern is repeating.

Liverpool over the past three seasons have had the fifth highest average wage bill in the league. Their average position in that time is fifth. This is what they are. It is reasonable to ask, given how many flops they have had, whether they are investing their money as wisely as they should be (might there not have been more of a plan before making the signings? Was Danny Ings really bought to play on the left? What does Roberto Firmino do?) but it is equally true that without regular Champions League football and with their level of spending (on transfers and wages), the players they sign are never going to be fully formed. They are shopping for B+ players who may develop or be inspired rather than A-grade stars.

They are trapped in their economic reality but the charm of Rodgers is that he makes interesting tactical changes. He doesn’t just plod along accepting Liverpool’s place in the hierarchy. He tries to change things. He still believes a bright manager can transcend finance. He does things that are different. He does not deny the intellectual side of the game but revels in it. And often this is not a practical application of a theory – it is not like the time Howard Wilkinson used Pythagoras to demonstrate Steve Hodge had not actually encroached at a free-kick – but a love of theory itself.Now that Sam Allardyce has gone, there is no manager in the Premier League happier talking about how he won a game.

Which is good, or it should be. Rather that than the endless whining about referees and the construction of self-serving conspiracy theories that characterise so many post-match press-conferences. The problem, often, is one of tone. Victories often become about him rather than the team when traditional wisdom suggests managers should let the players take credit for victories while deflecting attention away from them when things have gone wrong.

Take the 3-0 win at Tottenham Hotspur on the third weekend of last season when it appeared that Liverpool might be able to mount another title challenge. Balotelli played well in tandem with Daniel Sturridge and was understandably the subject of much discussion. Rodgers was happy to play along with it, happy to play the role of the horse whisperer who had tamed the Italian. He told a story about how he had made him mark at a corner in training. No manager, apparently, had ever made him do that before. None had the courage to look Balotelli in the eye and tell him to do the basic stuff others would do as a matter of course. He was encouraging but firm, giving the kid a chance but marking out the boundaries. He was Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.

It brought a lump to the throat and a prickle to the eye, or it would have done if it hadn’t been such obvious nonsense. No one had asked Balotelli to pick up at a corner? Not even, say, Mourinho, who is not exactly noted for letting players duck their share of the defensive responsibility? Or, perhaps, Roberto Mancini? What were all those fights on the training ground about if they weren’t about Mancini trying to get Balotelli to do things he couldn’t be bothered to do?

The problem is often one of tone. Football is indulgent of certain faults but, as Steve McClaren found as England manager, it has little time for those who have read a guide to getting ahead in business and are applying those ideas too blatantly.

It’s surely those manuals that led Rodgers to such excruciating gimmicks as his three envelopes in a drawer, or to the time when he met for the first time a journalist noted for his left-wing beliefs and greeted him, not with his name, as Dale Carnegie would have advised, but with the word “Comrade”.

None of that makes Rodgers a terrible man or a terrible manager, but it does undermine much of what he has done that is positive. Last season, after Liverpool had gone 13 games unbeaten following his switch to three at the back, there came the stories about how he had come up with the system after long nights of fretting, sustained only by tea and toast.

The tactical change was a triumph: no one would deny that. It shored up the rickety centre of defence, it got Coutinho and Adam Lallana playing in pockets opponents found it hard to fill and it created space for Sterling. But then Rodgers, or somebody he had authorised, briefed a couple of journalists on how the scheme had been devised. It was as though Rodgers was already imagining a key scene in the biopic he assumes they will inevitably make of his life. And of course the next day, Manchester United won 2-1 at Anfield, Steven Gerrard was sent off and Liverpool began the slump from which they are yet to escape.

Perhaps the timing was unfortunate, but there was also a sense of Rodgers setting himself up for a fall. There are too many determinants in football beyond a manager’s control for him always to claim credit when things go right because if he does then he must also logically always be to blame when they go wrong.

Another age might have been more forgiving. Matt Busby, for instance, finished second four times and fourth once in his five seasons at Manchester United before winning the league, the fault of luck and, the goalkeeper Jack Crompton believed, of a lack of resources; their reserves weren’t quite up to the job. These days the questions would have become deafening long before that victorious sixth season: did Busby have the toughness required to carry them over the line?

Now resources, greater than ever before and so the differentials more pronounced, mean Liverpool are doomed to haunt the outskirts of Champions League qualification. Whoever is manager of Liverpool will find themselves constrained by the same economics.

Although a different approach may attract more sympathy, there is nothing Rodgers can do about that, but the modern way is to blame the manager, replace him and begin another cycle. The ousting of Colin Pascoe and Mike Marsh from his coaching staff at the end of last season felt a significant step towards Rodgers’s exit. He feels even closer now.