Report: Why Liverpool didn’t pursue Guehi this month despite summer deadline day collapse
After months of speculation linking him with a move to Liverpool, Marc Guehi is instead set to join Manchester City.
Fabrizio Romano delivered the bombshell news on Friday afternoon that Pep Guardiola’s side have had a £20m offer accepted by Crystal Palace, with talkSPORT’S Alex Crook subsequently claiming (via X) that the England defender will earn a gargantuan weekly wage in the region of £300,000.
The Reds thought they’d landed the 25-year-old at the end of last summer’s transfer window after agreeing a £35m fee with the Eagles, only for the south London club to pull the plug in the late hours of deadline day as they hadn’t time to sign a replacement.
Why didn’t Liverpool push to sign Guehi in January?
Liverpool fans have understandably been seething over how the Guehi transfer saga has concluded, and reliable reports from a local source won’t do anything to quell Kopites’ discontent.
The Liverpool Echo reported that that Anfield chiefs didn’t view a move for the Palace captain in January as a market opportunity compared to last summer and next, and are ‘thus unlikely to change their stance over resisting a late effort to gazump City’.
Liverpool’s stance on Guehi has backfired horribly
It seems bizarre that LFC would be prepared to sign Guehi for £35m on deadline day four-and-a-half months ago but not have the same willingness to try and land him this month when, as Man City have shown, £20m may well have been sufficient.
Yes, the defender’s contract is due to expire at the end of this season and FSG may have sought to hold their nerve and wait until the summer to get him on a free transfer, but that patient approach was always fraught with danger that a more proactive club would beat them to the punch, and so it has proven.
We can understand Liverpool making a wage offer which wouldn’t have met City’s reported £300k per week – according to Capology, only two Reds players are on more than that – but the fact that the Merseysiders didn’t even try in January is thoroughly disappointing.
At least if Richard Hughes had attempted to sign Guehi this month but had his approach trumped by the Manchester outfit, we could accept that he tried to get a deal done but was simply outbid. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
In recent years, LFC have gotten it spectacularly right more often than not when it comes to transfer dealings, with many near-misses which felt like hammer blows at the time ultimately proving to be bullets dodged.
We can only hope that the failure to land the Man City-bound defender will come to be viewed in the same sense in future years, and that – more importantly – Liverpool are sufficiently proactive to move on from this disappointment and bring in an alternative centre-back sooner rather than later.
You can watch Slot’s full pre-Burnley press conference below, via Empire of the Kop on YouTube:
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