Liverpool have offered Gabri Veiga an enormous pay rise in order to lure him to Anfield, according to reports from Italy.
The Celta Vigo midfielder has been strongly linked with the Reds in recent weeks, and it now seems as if the Merseysiders are prepared to give him a far greater salary than what he’s currently earning.
According to the print edition of Corriere del Mezzogiorno (via Paisley Gates), Jurgen Klopp’s side have offered a contract worth €5m (£4.3m) a year to the 21-year-old, which’d see him earn €96,000 (£82,113) per week if he were to sign.
That’d be an exponential increase on his current weekly wage of just under £3,000 at the LaLiga club (Capology).
The report suggested that Chelsea have made a similar offer, with the Premier League duo the likeliest candidates to sign him despite Napoli’s interest.
Corriere del Mezzogiorno – Liverpool offer 5m euros a season to sign Gabri Veigahttps://t.co/FnVEqwraAu
Napoli want him but will be difficult for them to complete with #LFC and #CFC pic.twitter.com/syXTpeVzqt
— Paisley Gates (@PaisleyGatesLFC) June 22, 2023
At surface level, you’d imagine that Veiga would jump at the chance to increase his earnings so vastly – based on the figures above, Liverpool are offering him a weekly wage which’d take him just over six months to accrue on his current Celta contract.
Of course, the Reds would also need to stump up the transfer fee to get the 21-year-old to Anfield, although his reported release clause of €40m (£34.2m) seems far from excessive and is a figure the club are seemingly prepared to pay (AS, via Paisley Gates).
Even if the Spaniard was limited to a 16-minute substitute appearance in his country’s opening fixture at the European Under-21 Championship on Wednesday (a 3-0 win over co-hosts Romania), he’s proven over the last 12 months that he can thrive at a high level.
He scored 11 goals in 36 LaLiga matches last season as Celta narrowly avoided relegation, ranking among the top 1% of midfielders in Europe’s five main leagues for non-penalty goals per 90 and the top 2% for shots per game (FBref).
Those figures suggest that he could offer Liverpool a potent presence in the middle of the park, something Jurgen Klopp’s side lacked during 2022/23 as they missed out on a place in the Champions League.
If indeed the Reds have offered a bumper pay rise to Veiga, hopefully he’ll be sufficiently tempted by the wages on the table to begin thinking seriously about making Anfield his home by the end of the summer transfer window.