Klopp: I have the final say on transfers

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has made it clear that the club will not sign any player without him agreeing to it.

Speaking at his pre-match news conference, and quoted by the Mirror, ahead of the Reds’ FA Cup third round replay with Exeter City, the German was asked exactly how transfers work at the club which has a much-scrutinised system in place that includes a transfer committee, and he insisted that he will always have a final say before the club bring in a player.

Klopp said:

How we said on the first day when I came here, it’s like I used to work. Sometimes my staff and myself has an idea for a player we know. There are players our scouts bring in. If I don’t want a player to come here then he will not come. If the player I want doesn’t fit the budget, he will not come too.

Obviously with the January window open, talk is often focused on the arrivals of potential new players, and Liverpool’s recruitment process was once again brought into focus after former manager Brendan Rodgers was interviewed on Sky Sports Goals on Sunday where he suggested that the club ended up signing Mario Balotelli when they missed out on Alexis Sanchez, even though Rodgers had ruled out a move for the Italian just a few weeks earlier.

Rodgers said:

After a friendly against AC Milan, I was asked the question and I felt Mario wasn’t someone who suited the profile of what we were after.

But come the end of the summer when we were struggling to get in the type of player we wanted, the ownership thought this was perhaps a player I could develop.

He’s a wonderful talent, there’s no doubt about that; you see him on the training ground every day – tall, strong, great touch. They were thinking this is a £50m player we could maybe get for £16m.

When the owners are wanting you to go down that route and there’s no other option, you give it a go. The huge blow was that we thought we were getting Alexis Sanchez and that he’d be a like-for-like replacement in terms of how he pressed the game, his aggression.

We thought he’d be perfect, it’d be a smooth transition and Rickie Lambert would come in and be an option if we needed something else in the game. But we didn’t get Alexis Sanchez and, bless Rickie, there was a lot of pressure on him when really that wasn’t the plan.

So we had to bring in someone, Mario has big talent – I wasn’t thinking I’d be any different in terms of managers who’ve had issues with him – and at that moment, we didn’t really have another option. It was something that didn’t quite work for us and it cost us.