“I’ve said openly to Steven and his representatives, as have Brendan and the owners, that we see Steven as part of the family,” he told Liverpool radio station City Talk. “The fact that he’s leaving at the end of the season doesn’t mean it’s the last we’ll see of him at Liverpool. What that means, the details aren’t known yet, but we will keep a regular dialogue with him and I hope we will see him here again in the long term.”
He also admitted that they may go for loan move in next January, when all the MLS clubs have off-season.
Ayre said: “It’s conceivable. It happens a lot in MLS and it’s something we talked to Steven and his representatives about. You can’t have someone who has so much of the club’s DNA in them and just expect that it will go away.”
Ayre also stated that even if they would have offered him a contract earlier in the year it wouldn’t had made any difference as he thought Gerrard had a change of heart which was inevitable.
“Let’s assume that we’d made that offer [in the summer] and that he’d signed it. I think we’d still be in the same position today,” he added. “Just like any player, at any club, if he all of a sudden isn’t playing every week, they maybe start to think: ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for me now’.
“Steven may have signed that contract but we may have been sat round now in the same position. We’ve had that before with very senior players. I had one come to me and say: ‘I don’t really fancy this any more’.
“Who knows how it would have played out? But I think Steven made the point last week that it [not playing every week] doesn’t appeal to him. So the fact that he would have signed a contract last season actually doesn’t make any difference.
“His point was that after playing every week, playing a bit-part role is not how he wanted to finish his career. He wants to finish on a high and I am sure he will.”
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