James Pearce of The Athletic recently joined host Gav Doyle on the LFC Daytrippers podcast to discuss all things Liverpool and the new book titled ‘At The End of The Storm’.
The book is a collection of stories from the club’s extremely successful 2019/20 campaign in which they were crowned champions of England for the first time in 30 years. Aside from discussing that however, Pearce shared his views on the most recent transfer window and was full of praise for a number of key figures at the club. Here is what he had to say:
“The big thing for me when you look back on that [transfer] window just gone for Liverpool was Michael Edwards, again, had to be incredibly clever and shrewd with the way in which he went about his business because money was pretty thin on the ground.
“The Thiago [Alcantara] deal and the one for Diogo Jota, the big attraction for Liverpool which enabled them to get those deals done was that it involved very little in terms of down payments. The one for Thiago was £5m and £4.5m for Jota.
“The Thiago saga went on a long, long time but with the benefit of hindsight you think, actually, despite Bayern’s best attempts to try and create a bit of an auction for Thiago, there wasn’t one. Because Klopp had done an absolute number in terms of convincing Thiago that Liverpool was the best place for his development.”
TIF Thoughts on James Pearce’s comments regarding Michael Edwards and Jurgen Klopp’s work during the transfer window…
It’s clear from the above responses that the journalist feels as though Liverpool were willing to do significant business despite the global pandemic due to the fact they were able to get the aforementioned deals done without having to outlay significant sums of money upfront.
Were you pleased with the business Liverpool did during the last transfer window?
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He also praised Michael Edwards and suggested he, along with the manager deserve much praise for what, in our view, could be argued as having been a successful transfer window. Klopp’s big influence in persuading Thiago to swap Bavaria for Merseyside is well known and in our view, securing his services for a reported fee of £19.8m (as per Transfermarkt) represents a fine bit of business.