Soccer:Liverpool chairman Tom Werner has admitted owners Fenway Sports Group decided director of football Damien Comolli was not the man to deliver their vision for the club.
But manager Kenny Dalglish has been told his position is not under immediate threat.
"We've got great confidence in Kenny," Werner told Liverpool's website. "We feel the team is going to make strides in the future and he enjoys our full support."
When they bought Liverpool in October 2010, the Americans were keen to implement the 'Moneyball' theory to transfers which had been so successful at their other high-profile acquisition, the Boston Red Sox.
However, the owners have forked out the best part of £125million - with a net spend of about £70million - on big-money purchases like Andy Carroll (£35million), Luis Suarez (£22.8million), Stewart Downing (£20million) and Jordan Henderson (£16million) with limited success.
"We've had a strategy that we have agreed on. There was some disconnect on the implementation of that," said Werner, confirming they had made the decision to remove Comolli and also Peter Brukner, the head of sports medicine and sports science.
"That strategy is a strong one and it will continue. We need to build a strong system under the first team. We're hard at work identifying transfer targets and we will be better next year.
"Frankly, we make these decisions with a great deal of care because it's our track record in Boston to give people authority and we've had great success with our manager, who was there for eight years, and our general manager, so we prefer stability.
"But when it's time to act, we need to act. We're coming close to the end of the season and the transfer window for the summer and we felt it was important to make this change expeditiously.
"We feel there is enough talent on the pitch to win and I would say we certainly have the resources to compete with anybody in football.
"But we're also talking about the future. We have a strategy we need implemented and we felt Damien was probably not the right person to implement that strategy."
Comolli's departure does not, however, mean the director of football role has been abandoned entirely, although it may be return under a different guise.
"We're still confident the structure we've discussed is the right structure," Werner added. "That doesn't mean we won't look at tweaking it, but we feel a collective group of people making football decisions is healthy.
"The debate is healthy. Part of the reason we made this decision now is because we want to start the process of finding an excellent replacement."
Principal owner John Henry's target at the start of the season was to make it back into the top four, but their recent run of poor results scuppered those chances.
"We've been dissatisfied, as most supporters have been, with the results so far," said Werner of Liverpool's current position of eighth in the Premier League.
"We feel we are a club that needs to be perceived as the strongest club in football and we want to get there."
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/YVIRIOZQ35EWRPZXR27KGMO6YU.png)