Liverpool are finally going to see what their 2015 signing can do in the Premier League

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Liverpool will finally get to see what Taiwo Awoniyi can do in the Premier League. The Reds signed the striker in 2015.

After seven years of trying, Taiwo Awoniyi is a Premier League player. He joins Nottingham Forest from Union Berlin in a club-record transfer. The Athletic puts it at £17.5m.

And this is a particularly interesting one for Liverpool, of course. The Reds sold Awoniyi to Union a little under a year ago and put a 10% sell-on clause in the deal. That means they take home a chunk of cash with this transfer – the Echo says it’ll actually come to around £1.5m.

While Awoniyi is a player Liverpool ‘gave up on’, it wasn’t because they didn’t rate him. Instead, the Nigerian just never got a UK work permit, essentially forcing the Reds into a sale. Forest managed to secure one but only because Awoniyi scored 15 Bundesliga goals last season, proving his worth as a valuable foreign player.

And so seven years after initially signing him, Liverpool will get to see what Awoniyi can truly do in the Premier League.

Taiwo Awoniyi in the Premier League

It’s incredibly hard to predict how players will take to English football, particularly when joining a newly-promoted club. No one knows how Forest will handle the Premier League, let alone their new signing.

But this is one Liverpool will watch closely. It’s telling that after signing Awoniyi in 2015 and struggling to secure that work permit, the club persisted with him for six years before moving him on. They clearly knew that the striker would either earn that permit or shoot up in value one day.

And Liverpool were right, clearly. Awoniyi did enough on loan to earn a £6.5m transfer last year and nearly trebled that value in one permanent season with Union.

The question now is will Liverpool maintain their own transfer interest in re-signing Awoniyi? We’d have said there was no chance before Darwin Nunez arrived but Jurgen Klopp is seemingly on board with a more traditional, physical no.9.

So if Awoniyi takes to the Premier League as he did the Bundesliga, expect Liverpool to be the first club linked.