Puel set for £60m sell-off
Mourinho takes a dig at Liverpool U-turn as they join ranks of big spenders
PUEL: Nurtures players LEICESTER boss Claude Puel says he would rather be a talent scout than flash the cash for big-money players.
The Foxes travel to Liverpool today with the Kop’s £75million new-boy Virgil van Dijk looking on from the stands.
Puel, who managed the Dutchman during his brief spell at Southampton, insists he would rather nurture young blood than buy the finished article.
He is ready to sanction a clear-out of over £60m of talent from the King Power.
Three men who have all been record buys can go if the price is right – Islam Slimani (£29m), Ahmed Musa (£16m) and Leo Ulloa (£10m), along with Yohan Benalouane (£6m) and Bartosz Kapustka (£5m). Puel believes brandishing the chequebook is not the way to go.
“It becomes a competition between great teams dealing with great players,” he said. “We have seen this with PSG in France and different teams paying crazy, crazy, crazy prices for some players. It’s not my philosophy but perhaps in their place I would make the same decision. I prefer to try to develop my team.” REPORTS FOR ONCE, Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp found themselves singing from the same song sheet yesterday.
And the lyrics were along the lines of: Money talks.
After Mourinho had aimed a thinly-disguised accusation of hypocrisy towards his Liverpool rival, Klopp admitted his thoughts on transfer-market spending had changed – and some.
When Manchester United were negotiating a then world-record £89 million transfer fee with Juventus for Paul Pogba in the summer of 2016, a critical Klopp raised his eyebrows, puffed out his cheeks and inferred he would walk away from football if he ever had to spend that sort of money on a player.
He insisted football for him was all about coaching improvement into players and building a team ethic.
Now, having splashed out £75m – a world record for a defender – to sign Virgil van Dijk following a £60m deal to bring in Naby Keita next summer, he has changed his tune with the acceptance that hard graft and team spirit can take you only so far and you need top quality to win the big prizes.
But not before Mourinho – whose memory rarely deserts him when he needs it – had made his point.
He said: “You know I think the only person who can speak about it [the Van Dijk deal] in a specific way has to be Jurgen and if I was one of you I would ask him about his comments a year or so ago.”
With a gentle twist of the knife, he added: “This was the feeling, for example, that Jurgen had when he arrived at Liverpool, he trusted a lot in his quality as a good coach – which he is. He trusted a lot in his work, he spoke a few words.
“But now he has realised that is not enough to be the champion, to win the Champions League, to win trophies – he needs more.
“So you can see with Keita, a deal they have already done for next summer, and Van Dijk they have realised they have to go to the crazy levels of the market. Because if they don’t, if they offer £40m, then Southampton does not sell them the player. It’s as simple as that. That’s the reality.”
Klopp admits he has reluctantly embraced that reality in a bid to take Liverpool to the next level. He pointed out how Neymar’s £200m move from Barcelona to Paris St-Germain last summer changed the footballing landscape.
And he said Van Dijk’s fee was actually “cheaper” than other centre-backs on his transfer radar.
Klopp said: “The last half a year changed pretty much everything and we, as a club, cannot change that. We have to adapt to it. That’s how it is. It’s not nice, but that’s the market, that’s the world. We have to adapt.
“If you cannot do it, you have to look for other solutions but in the market at this moment there are a lot of interesting centre-halves who have [buy-out] clauses. There is not one with a lower clause [than Van Dijk].
“If you do not want to do it, do not do it. We had an opportunity to do it and that is why he will be a Liverpool player. Do I like it? No, because it puts more pressure on everything.”
Mourinho is also having to digest a harsh new reality at Old Trafford – that they simply can’t compete with the “limitless” spending of their Abu Dhabi-backed neighbours. Despite his Boxing Day remarks about needing more money, he insisted he is happy with United’s near £300m investment since he took charge and expects to sign two or three players this summer, adding that he is “pretty sure we are going to pay a lot of money for one player”.
That is likely to be Atletico Madrid’s Antoine Griezmann.
But Mourinho admits the problem is that Manchester City always have the resources to spend more.
“When Pep arrived, he had England’s No1 goalkeeper [Joe Hart] but he didn’t like him so he bought the Barcelona keeper [Claudio Bravo]. He didn’t like him so he buys another one [Ederson Moraes]. Now he likes him.
“He had Pablo Zabaleta and Alex Kolarov, two very good fullbacks but more than 30 years old, so he wanted to replace them. But he didn’t replace them with two players he replaced them with three – one from Tottenham [Kyle Walker], one from Monaco [Benjamin Mendy] and one from Real Madrid [Danilo]. “Can we buy six or seven players at the same time, can we invest £600m, £700m? No, I can’t expect the club to do that, so it’s difficult. “Unless you belong to one of these clubs where there is no limit – you buy what you want, no Financial Fair Play – it is hard. Money does make a difference.” If the spiralling transfer market has achieved anything, it has been to find some unlikely common ground between the managers of Liverpool and Manchester United.