Jurgen Klopp Liverpool
Jurgen Klopp is expecting a subdued transfer market across world football this summer and says Liverpool will be made to wait before concluding their business. The Reds boss also isn’t anticipating the likes of Jadon Sancho, Erling Haaland or Kylian Mbappe to make blockbuster moves of their own this year. Klopp says that is once more likely to be Liverpool’s way of operating as he played down intense speculation over the futures of Mbappe, Sancho and Haaland, three players who have been tentatively linked to Anfield.
Jurgen Klopp said “Do I know what we have to work with? Yes, not a lot, anyway. We cannot speak for years and years about our structure or whatever, it is always how it is. It depends to the business, what happens, if someone wants to leave or if players want to go, if we sell, so we can never really plan early. But not playing in the Champions League doesn’t help, but it is not our biggest problem because the market will be really strange. I hear a lot about big-money moves, I don’t know if Kylian Mbappe is going or not, whether Haaland or Sancho will, these kinds of players. I don’t see that happening this summer because the football world is still not in the same place it was before. Getting the injured players back makes us already better. These are our first transfers. We don’t know exactly when that will happen but it will happen at one point. All the rest we have to see. If we don’t go to the Champions League it is not good, but first and foremost there is still a chance and as long as there is a chance we should not speak about it as if we have no chance. But if not, then we have to deal with that.”
Liverpool’s financial results that were released at the end of April saw them post a pre-tax loss of £46m for the year ending May 31, 2020.
Club owners’ Fenway Sports Group’s recent deal with RedBird Capital saw the Boston-based organisation offer up 10 per cent of their portfolio for around £536m. That injection of capital will help Liverpool compete in the summer market, but Klopp is still expecting a fairly low-key window as football continues to adjust to the restraints brought on by a season without paying fans in attendance.
Jurgen Klopp said “Can we challenge Man City next season? And Chelsea. And Manchester United. City and Chelsea have always had [financial] advantages in this and we still won the league and the Champions League, so it is our situation to work like we work and I never look at other clubs and say ‘we can’t do this’ or ‘we can’t do that’. The only thing I am interested in, and I said this earlier when I arrived here, I am not interested in being the coach of the best team in the world. I am interested in being the coach of the team who can beat the best team in the world. If two or three of them play in our league then we will try to beat them and some others as well so we have enough points to win something. It is absolutely not the situation to moan or cry. I am not going to cry about our situations. Our situation is fine. A year ago people didn’t know exactly how football would go on. Only one year later we speak about what we can do in the transfer window. People talk about changing the football structure completely, the German model, I can tell you the budget will go down massively. So changing the structure of the ownership model and [then] signing Haaland for £150m or whatever, that doesn’t work together. We have to use our situation better than we did this year. We had bad luck, definitely, but the thing I am concerned about is this was not the season when we could have become champions. There was just no chance. But we could have had five, six or seven points more in this moment with exactly the same situation we have been in this whole time? Yes. I think we should have and we don’t. And that is something I don’t like too much. That situation would improve our position a little bit for the last few games, but we would have to win all our games because the other teams could too. But that is it, really. Nothing to moan about, nothing to cry about, just the situation is better than I would have thought a year ago, but the financial situation is where everyone suffers. And then we ask about signing players for this and that. We will see how the market develops but it for sure would not be an early market, that is for sure.”
With the Premier League season now into its final few days, Liverpool remain outside the top-four spots and will likely need to collect maximum points from their last four fixtures to have any chance of usurping Leicester. The Foxes’ 2-1 win over Manchester United on Tuesday means Brendan Rodgers’ side need just four points from their final two games against Chelsea and Tottenham to confirm a place in next season’s Champions League at the Reds’ expense. No Champions League football next season will be a significant blow to Liverpool’s hopes of recruiting the top talent when the transfer market opens. The financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic is also still being felt at Anfield with the club understood to be dealing with an overall loss of around £120m since March 2020. The club were made to wait until after the Premier League campaign was underway to make a splash last summer when they signed Diogo Jota and Thiago Alcantara for a combined fee of around £70million in mid-September.
