Gary Neville has suggested that Liverpool were right to sign one member of their current squad but will regret not doing so sooner.
In the summer of 2018, Alisson Becker arrived at Anfield in a £66.9m move which briefly made him the most expensive goalkeeper of all time (The Guardian), and his performances ever since have more than justified that outlay.
However, speaking on the Stick to Football podcast, the Sky Sports pundit believes that Jurgen Klopp would now have even more silverware as Reds manager if he’d moved for the Brazilian stopper earlier in his reign.
Neville declared: “Liverpool would have won a [Premier] League and a Champions League if they had Alisson a couple of seasons earlier.”
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It’s fair to assume that Alisson almost certainly wouldn’t have committed the costly errors that we saw from Loris Karius in the 2018 Champions League final, and Klopp did tend to shuffle between the German and Simon Mignolet in his first two full seasons at Anfield.
However, Real Madrid might still have prevailed in extra time and possibly penalties in Kiev even had it not been for the goalkeeping mistakes, while the Reds were so far off the pace in the two Premier League campaigns prior to the Brazilian’s arrival that not even he’d have turned them into champions on his own.
Of course, it’s no coincidence that LFC’s defensive record improved massively once he and Virgil van Dijk were at the club, with a mere 22 top-flight goals conceded in 2018/19 compared to 80 across the preceding couple of seasons (Transfermarkt).
Incredibly, not even that formidable record five years ago was enough to dethrone Manchester City, so it might be too simplistic to state that we’d have an extra league title if Alisson had come to the club in 2016 rather than 2018.
What’s certainly not up for debate, though, is that his signing has been transformative for Liverpool.
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