Liverpool could potentially land a European Championship winner for a cut-price fee in the summer, according to fresh reports.
Football Insider have claimed that Renato Sanches has been made available for sale by Paris Saint-Germain, with the Reds believed to be ‘closely monitoring’ the Portuguese midfielder, of whom Jurgen Klopp is a ‘long-term admirer’.
The Ligue 1 champions have placed the 25-year-old among a list of players who could be offloaded as part of a major squad overhaul, with the Merseyside club planning their own midfield revamp.
The report added that ‘Sanches has now been added to that shopping list with Liverpool aware that they could strike a bargain deal if PSG want to offload him quickly’.
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The PSG midfielder shot to fame when he helped Portugal to win Euro 2016, also taking home the Young Player of the Tournament honour (UEFA) and claiming the Golden Boy award later that year (Tuttosport).
In addition to his involvement with the Parisian club, he’s also played for Bayern Munich, so he has a quite decent footballing pedigree.
However, English football fans will most likely recall his troubled time on these shores previously, when he failed to impress for an ultimately relegated Swansea team in 2017/18 and once erroneously passed straight to an advertising board, mistaking it for a teammate (Wales Online).
Liverpool will surely also be aware of his appalling injury record, with Sanches having no fewer than five separate spells on the sidelines this season alone and 14 since the start of the 2020/21 campaign (Transfermarkt).
Furthermore, they’d do well to heed the words of his former Swans boss Carlos Carvalhal, who said in 2018 (as per The Telegraph): “Renato knows he has had a very bad season…He stopped learning when he left Benfica and went to one of the biggest clubs in the world.”
With the Reds casting a wide net for midfielders in the summer, it seems they can certainly do better than taking a punt on an injury-prone player who’s flopped in England before and been criticised publicly by his previous coaches.
In other news Liverpool are chasing Thomas Lamar. Oh wait, it’s not 2018. This has to be some kind of April fools joke ?