Jude Bellingham could win the Champions League with Real Madrid this week. He has been speaking about Kylian Mbappé, who has long been linked with Liverpool.
Liverpool has been willing to spend big sums of money on players during the FSG tenure at Anfield. When the right player has been available, the money has been there for Jürgen Klopp to splash.
But not everything has gone the way of the Reds despite them having an excellent track record in the market, driven by the data and the expertise of those behind the scenes including Michael Edwards. Sometimes, things haven’t worked out as might have been ideal.
Last summer, Jude Bellingham chose to move to Real Madrid instead of Liverpool. As a result, the Reds brought in the likes of Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai instead.
Bellingham has been in fantastic form for Real Madrid and he could win the Champions League at Wembley before heading the summer’s European Championship with England. And he isn’t the only superstar expected to wear the famous white shirt of Los Blancos next season.
“I don’t pick the team and I certainly don’t make the transfers but Kylian Mbappé — what a player. Who wouldn’t want to play with someone as good as him?” Bellingham said, via Sky Sports News. The Frenchman will move to Spain as a ‘free’ transfer with his PSG contract having run down.
“I don’t want to put any more pressure on the situation — for him, it’s probably difficult having everyone always talking about him — but it would be really nice.” Spreading the praise around a little, he added: “There’s a lot of great players in the world at the moment but I’ve said it before — I think [Vinícius Júnior] is the best.”
Mbappé has constantly been linked with Liverpool for years but as soon as he exploded onto the scene with PSG, it was never likely to be financially possible for the Reds to snap him up. Even without a transfer fee, the wages and signing-on bonuses would be huge. He would be anything but a ‘free’ transfer.
Liverpool did try to sign him before he would have cost the earth, though. According to L’Equipe, John W Henry had a two-hour meeting with Mbappé in 2017 in an attempt to convince him to move to Anfield. But instead, he chose to stay in France after leaving AS Monaco and moved to the capital.
Klopp was always open about his admiration for the player, though that should hardly be a surprise given he is arguably the best in the world at the moment. Mbappé, on his part, was freely full of praise for Klopp too, as well as revealing that his mother was a Liverpool supporter. That, though, was never going to be enough for a deal to happen.
Amid Bellingham’s comments about relishing the idea of playing with Mbappé next season, there might be Liverpool fans wondering what might have been.
For the pair to be playing at Anfield, though, it would have taken either a great deal more money than the Reds were prepared to spend, or a transfer intervention well before their price tags and wage demands rocketed.
