Carragher reveals Liverpool star who Klopp ‘didn’t want to sign’ as he praises Reds business | OneFootball

Jamie Carragher during his role as a Sky Sports pundit.

Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher has praised the Reds for competing with Manchester United and Manchester City despite “having less money” to recruit players.

The Reds have made a loss of £218.29m in the five-year net spend table, while Man City have spent £314.28m more than they’ve brought in and arch-rivals Man Utd have a huge net spend of £608.9m.

Liverpool have done well to compete with Man City’s success during that time as title rivals, while Man Utd have struggled to make steps in the Premier League or the Champions League.

And Carragher insists that Liverpool have been able to keep up with Man City and Man Utd in the transfer market as they “haven’t panicked”.

Carragher said on the Stick to Football podcast: “Liverpool have competed with Manchester United and Manchester City over the past seven or eight years with Jürgen Klopp, having less money. The big thing that they’ve done is that if they haven’t got the man that they wanted, they haven’t panicked and gone and got someone else.

“That’s what Manchester United did with Casemiro, they wanted De Jong all summer and in the last minute they overpaid for someone.”

Carragher thinks Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp is a perfect example of conducting transfers the right way with the Reds overruling the German over the transfer of Mohamed Salah in 2017.

The Liverpool legend added: “When Jürgen Klopp first came to Liverpool there was talk of a transfer committee – FSG came in and said, ‘we don’t want to buy players left, right, and centre, we want a director of football.’

“The director of football or footballing CEO, they’re thinking about the long-term for the club, whereas a manager is thinking of the short term – how long is a manager there? Maybe two years.

“However, when you get to situation, like Jürgen Klopp, when he’s now been at the club for eight years, he comes in initially with the transfer committee and its successful, but the longer he’s there he becomes almost like the sporting director.

“He’s never going to be sacked and he’s probably going to be there for another two years, so he is actually in there for the long haul. He gets that power as the time goes on.

“When he initially came in, an interesting one was Mohammed Salah and Jurgen Klopp is open about this. He didn’t want to sign him, he wanted Julian Brandt.

“Liverpool had tried to sign Salah before he went to Chelsea and the people behind the scenes at Liverpool were still there and Salah then went to Roma, and they were very adamant that they had to sign this player.

“You look at what Mohammed Salah has done, but it could have easily gone the other way. I do feel that this idea that managers should buy every player isn’t right, but a manager shouldn’t have a player pushed on him. I don’t think a manager should just be able to do what he wants, you look at Manchester United and its worrying, it feels as if he’s [Erik ten Hag] just bought every player he knows.”