Jurgen Klopp has clarified what he meant when he recently said Liverpool were ‘lucky’ to have missed out on expensive midfielders such as Jude Bellingham, Moises Caicedo and Romeo Lavia last summer.
The Reds were in desperate need of midfield reinforcements following a testing 2022/23 season which saw them finish outside the Premier League’s top four for the first time in seven years.
Though they were not expected to shift many of their senior options, Liverpool received significant offers for Jordan Henderson and Fabinho from clubs in the Saudi Pro League and chose to sell the duo for a combined £52m.
That sped up Liverpool’s midfield rebuild, signing Alexis Mac Allister from Brighton & Hove Albion and RB Leipzig’s Dominik Szoboszlai by early July.
Liverpool, however, had failed in their pursuit of Real Madrid-bound Bellingham earlier in the year and instead switched their attention to Brighton’s Caicedo and Lavia at Southampton. Despite agreeing a £111m fee with the Seagulls, Caicedo opted to join Chelsea, with Lavia following the Ecuadorian to Stamford Bridge.
Ahead of Wednesday’s meeting with Chelsea at Anfield, Klopp explained why he recently said at a fan event that Liverpool were “lucky” to have missed out on Caicedo, pointing to the form of late summer signing Wataru Endo.
“It was this night, I come in the stadium, the kids are playing and crowd is cheering – I forgot for 10 or 15 minutes I am a public person. So I thought: ‘Oh no, that will create a lot of headlines’,” Klopp said of his Caicedo comments.
“We were interested in Bellingham and realised it would not happen.
“The whole market for number sixes went up. Two number sixes left our club. The market heated up. We thought we could maybe do Caicedo. We’d already done Mac Allister before. So we went in, he had an emotional agreement already with Chelsea and [Mauricio] Pochettino. Then Lavia had his own reasons. So we were there.
“Then we found our top solution. That’s what I meant [when I said], ‘we are lucky’. We found Wataru. All the time in our mind we had Stefan [Bajcetic].
“It was not clear at that moment he was so badly injured he could not feature at all. We already knew Macca could play the position. Dom was always on my radar.
“If one of the £100m [targets] had worked, there’s no chance to do another. So that door was open. That’s how it went. That’s what I meant when I said we are so lucky. Everything in the ‘if not’ scenario worked out.”
In addition to Mac Allister, Szoboszlai and Endo, Liverpool also completed the long-term signing of Bayern Munich midfielder Ryan Gravenberch prior to the summer deadline.
