Klopp loses rag with reporter over transfers question

Jürgen Klopp is getting a little fed up with constantly having to answer questions on one particular topic. The Liverpool manager was in the hotseat on Friday to preview Saturday’s league game against Brighton but the inevitable questions about whether the club would be getting involved in the winter transfer window arose.

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To be fair, Klopp had already answered the question earlier in his press briefing (”I don’t think so, it’s just the situation is like it is. My job is to use the boys we have”) but was rattled when pushed on the issue, prompting him to launch into a bizarre, two minute tirade. “Honestly Carl, I have at least 6,000 press conferences with Liverpool; and you were pretty much part of 5,999… In different seats, obviously, but you were always there. If you want to write or whatever, or today you don’t write, today you just record but come on. Now I have to tell you again the money story? Really? Really, do I have to tell it again? What could be the reason that we have money like crazy but we don’t buy the players even when they are available? That’s what you think of me? After all the years?

“Then why do you ask the question when the answer lies on the table? I really don’t understand that. I really don’t understand that,” he continued. “You stand here or you drove here, or I don’t know how you came here but now you stand here and this is the question now and you know the answer. If I was to sit here and answer, ‘No, no, we have money in the bank, massively, that we don’t know what to do with, but the players out there are, nah! Nah, we don’t do that’

“So but we have on top of that, the problem that, in the moment, four of our offensive players are injured, our strikers. So now we buy another one - then they come back, thankfully. Not tomorrow, but they will come back. Darwin soon, the others a little bit later. They come back and we have seven strikers then. We couldn’t even put them all on the Champions League list!

“So we have to make a decision. Who goes on? the new ones? or the other ones? Stuff like this. It’s just not that easy. That’s why I say you cannot solve the problems, especially with injuries. Injuries, that’s the main big shadow on all of us because you cannot solve it in the transfer window. Sometimes you have to but usually we just have to get through until the boys come back and then you can use them again. That’s how it is.

“That’s why in an ideal world, in our best season, we didn’t have a lot of injuries. And it was much more intense than it is now. And all these kinds of things but now we have them and we have to deal with that. But the transfer market is not for us in this moment. Obviously not the solution. But if something is out there and somebody tells me, ‘Yes’, we will do it. But for this specific situation I don’t think it will happen,” he ended, slightly calmer, before wrapping up his briefing with a trademark smile.

Players nearing the end of their contracts

Liverpool may not be looking to tweak the squad in the winter window, which is generally flat in any case, but it looks like they will have a busy summer ahead. Six players have just a few months left on their contracts: Roberto Firmino, James Milner, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Naby Keïta and Adrián while Arthur Melo’s loan deal expires in June. The club has the option to buy Arthur but it’s not clear whether they will - the player is recovering from surgery having played a total of 76 minutes for the first team spread over two games.