Jurgen Klopp has claimed suggestions he wanted to sign Julian Brandt instead of Mohamed Salah at Liverpool have been overblown.
Ever since Salah hit the ground running at Anfield after signing in 2017, rumours have done the rounds to say that Klopp had pushed to sign his countryman instead.
The story goes that it was only the intervention of Michael Edwards and the Liverpool recruitment team who stopped the then Reds manager from making a costly transfer error. After Salah confirmed he is set to leave Liverpool this summer, though, Klopp has finally set the record straight.
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Klopp was ‘100% convinced’ by Salah signing
Although his conviction in choosing Salah over Brandt has often been held up as an example of just how valuable Edwards has been to Liverpool, Klopp has told The Anfield Wrap that everyone at the club was actually ‘convinced’ about the Egyptian.
“There’s always a story that I wanted to sign, I don’t even know exactly one… Julian Brandt,” says the former Liverpool manager.
“The situation with that is you go for a winger, you talk to seven or eight [players] if you’re lucky.”
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“Yes, we spoke to Brandt, but we spoke to Mo Salah. It was not ‘he did not want, so we took him’, whatever people think, I don’t care.
“In the moment, we were 100% convinced he was the one, even more convinced than he was.”
There is little question that Liverpool made the right decision in going all in on Salah. Brandt is a good player, but, as he has shown over the past nine years, he would not have been capable of anything like the impact of the Reds’ Egyptian King.
Sadly for Klopp, he may never be able to escape suggestions that his success at Anfield owed much to the genius of Edwards behind the scenes. Nevertheless, after almost a full decade of false claims, this embellished story can finally be put to rest.
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