Brendan Rodgers named Wednesday’s Premier League opponents Tottenham as the club Liverpool should imitate to return to Champions League football.

The Londoners have gone from strength-to-strength during the course of the last few seasons, making themselves one of the top teams in English football.

The Reds lost two transfer targets, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Clint Dempsey, to the White Hart Lane club during the summer and Rodgers has commended the work being done in North London:

"Over the course of the summer they (Spurs) invested something in the region of £55m in terms of everything they were putting into the group," he is quoted by SkySports.

"But it is not just in the last window, Tottenham have been building the group steadily and have worked their way up the league to become challengers for those Champions League positions.

"We are trying to arrive in that position and we see that what sometimes it takes in order to do that.

"Of course Liverpool want to be in for the top players and top talents and this is a club which will bring those players here.

"But obviously a lot of players want to be in the Champions League so if they want to come in here that is an area we want to get into in the coming years.

However, he does believe that the Merseysiders are almost ready to challenge for a place in the top four:

"We know we are not too far away and are very close to be arriving in that zone that we want to be in."