Jurgen Klopp has confirmed that Liverpool were interested in Jadon Sancho before the Borussia Dortmund wunderkind left Manchester City.
The German side snapped up Sancho for just £8m at the start of last season and can already count the signing as an unqualified success, the teenage England international bursting through into the first team this season with seven goals and nine assists in the league alone.
Disgusting 😩
— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) February 18, 2019
Jadon Sancho making players look silly one game at a time... pic.twitter.com/4ndgQJd4i3
Quoted by The Guardian ahead of Liverpool's game against Bayern Munich on Tuesday, Klopp admitted that the Reds were fans of Sancho before he left the Premier League – but said they could never have signed him, due to Premier League clubs' reluctance to sell to rivals.
“Buying English players is a smart idea because we would never have a chance to get Sancho," he said. "We are not blind – we saw him, we liked him and then we think: ‘Can we get him?’ No. Because English clubs don’t sell to other English clubs. I don’t know exactly what the reason is for that but they don’t do it. Now they can go to Germany, which is a wonderful league.”
However, Klopp insisted that his homeland is not in the middle of a talent drought, adding: “There is no dip. Six or seven years ago you had all these boys coming up – Marco Reus, André Schürrle, Mario Götze, Thomas Müller, Mats Hummels – and it was clear when they became Under‑21 European champions it would be a generation of proper quality.
One of the nicest people in football I’ve interviewed for quite a while. As good off the pitch as he’s on it. https://t.co/AzKmVU30KK
— Raphael Honigstein (@honigstein) February 12, 2019
"It is clear that England now has that situation. It is like a wave with one country a little bit up and another country down.”
Source : 90min