Rafael Benitez's future at Liverpool remains delicately poised after he was told by the club's American owners that he will have to raise his own transfer money next month.
Liverpool moved to present a united front on Monday after their Spanish manager emerged from Sunday night's meeting with Tom Hicks and George Gillett with his job safe for the time being.
But although the three-hour meeting was understood to be amicable, Benitez is having to come to terms with the news that he will have to sell before he can spend significantly when the transfer window opens in January.
Benitez's prime target is AC Milan's Georgian central defender Kahka Kaladze but it appears that he will have to offload someone like midfielder Momo Sissoko, attracting interest from Everton and Juventus, or England striker Peter Crouch to generate the money.
The Liverpool manager has also been told that the £17million it will require to turn Javier Mascherano's loan deal into a permanent move will not be available until the summer, leaving the Merseyside club vulnerable to approaches from elsewhere.
Although Benitez was untypically sanguine about the matter as he left Anfield late on Sunday, it remains to be seen whether the dispute that continues to surface about the club's direction will crop up again soon.
In an address to the Liverpool Former Players' Association at a city hotel just hours after talks with Benitez, Gillett admitted: 'The transfer window opens soon and we might use the option that gives us, or we might not.
'But Liverpool is a great club. We are well aware that we have something very valuable on our hands. Liverpool is not our club, it's your club. The supporters' club. It's always been that way and it will always be that way.'
'This dispute wasn't supposed to happen, but it has happened and now the focus has to be on finding a common platform to continue our co-operation.
'Rafa is the one we want as a manager and we have faith in him. I've been married more than 40 years and have first hand knowledge about how to solve an argument. We concentrated on getting an overview of the situation, and I felt we accomplished that.'
