Liverpool have reportedly finalised the appointment of Richard Hughes as the club’s new sporting director.
The Daily Mail‘s Lewis Steele reported shortly before 10am on Wednesday morning that the Reds ‘have completed their move’ to appoint the 44-year-old, whose departure from a similar role at Bournemouth was announced two weeks ago.
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The ex-Scotland international will now rekindle his previous professional relationship with newly-hired CEO of Football Michael Edwards, with the pair having also worked together at Portsmouth.
Although the pair won’t officially begin in their respective roles at Liverpool until the current season ends, both are ‘expected to be heavily influential’ at Anfield ‘from now onwards’, with the latter spotted at Old Trafford during the FA Cup quarter-final against Manchester United on Sunday.
While there hasn’t yet been any official announcement from Liverpool FC regarding Hughes’ appointment, we can take it as read that the deal is done, with Steele’s report following on from Fabrizio Romano’s overnight assertion that the 44-year-old’s arrival at Anfield was ‘imminent’.
His first major task will be to identify and hire a managerial successor to Jurgen Klopp, which’ll be a gargantuan task considering the impact that the German has had at the club over the past eight-and-a-half years.
He’ll also be tasked with opening contract renewal talks with Virgil van Dijk, Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold, whose current deals all expire in June 2025, as well as plotting the Reds’ transfer strategy for the summer.
Liverpool had been targeting the end of March as their deadline for appointing a new sporting director, and that now appears to have been completed, with Hughes coming to Anfield with a formidable reputation (Daily Mail).
While his term mightn’t have technically commenced as of yet, he’ll already be hard at work in striving to emulate the huge success that Edwards enjoyed when he was in that role at LFC from 2016 to 2022.