Jurgen Klopp has made some huge moves in the transfer market in his time at Anfield, but as proven with the imminent arrival of Fabio Carvalho, the Liverpool boss is always keen to bring in a talented youngster if the price is right.
The Fulham starlet is expected to complete a transfer worth around £8million to link up with the Reds next season after watching his transfer collapse at the last minute in the January transfer window. The Premier League outfit did not get the paperwork sorted in time for the 11pm deadline.
As part of the deal, Liverpool will pay an initial £5m fee with add-ons expected to reach £2.7m, with the Merseyside outfit also agreeing to a 20 per cent sell-on percentage. There are not currently any plans for Carvalho to be loaned back to Fulham next season.
Carvalho would have stayed at Craven Cottage on loan until the end of the season even if he had moved in January. And the 19-year-old has taken full advantage of playing in the Championship to impress his prospective new club, scoring eight goals and creating seven assists for the Cottagers.
Liverpool have fought off competition from several of Europe’s elite clubs, including Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, to seal the highly-rated attacker’s signature as he prepares to join his former team-mate Harvey Elliott at Anfield. While there are similarities to be drawn between the pair, their moves show how determined Fulham have been in holding onto the player.
With Elliott, the youngster had decided to leave the club where he had come through the youth academy at the age of 16. Under FA rules on signing players under the age of 18, clubs can negotiate a pre-contract agreement if the player has not signed professional terms.
That is exactly what Liverpool did, snatching Elliott for their own Under-23 side and paying a nominal fee after a tribunal hearing. But Carvalho, at 19, has been tied down to a professional contract since his 18th birthday and that gave the west London outfit a more powerful bargaining chip.
It is certainly not the first time Klopp has been keen to land a young talent from another English club. The German and his youth coaches have been involved in several deals, poaching the best talent from lower league clubs and around Europe to strengthen their academies thanks to their substantial scouting system.
Elliott may be the most prominent member of the group of players Klopp has signed, with the 19-year-old featuring 19 times for the Reds and scoring his first goal against Cardiff City in the FA Cup. But he is just one of many to make their debut for the club.
The Liverpool boss recently gave an insight into his view on signing young footballers after securing the signings of Ibrahima Konate and Luis Diaz: “Some of the other guys, they are not old but in three or four years you might call them that,” he told Sky Sports. “But for me, the best time for them is yet to come. But we have to prepare the club for the time after these boys as well because there must be a time after us.”
The 54-year-old is always willing to hand out opportunities in the early rounds of the FA Cup and Carabao Cup. Marko Grujic, the first player signed by Klopp when he arrived as a 19-year-old from Red Star Belgrade in January 2016, played a handful of games for the club before heading out on loan to Hertha Berlin and Porto.
Players such as Sepp van den Berg, Ki-Jana Hoever, Yasser Larouci and Kaide Gordon have all excelled when given chances to impress. That doesn’t include the abundance of homegrown promising starlets in the Liverpool academy that have been developed at Kirkby, with Tyler Morton and Oakley Cannonier tipped as the next wonderkids in line to break into the first-team.
