A World Cup semi-finalist has spoken about how close he came to signing for Liverpool when he was a teenager, only for the move to never happen.
Dele Alli was a guest panelist on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football as he watched his Everton teammates succumb 6-0 to Chelsea, and he revealed that he met with then-Reds manager Brendan Rodgers after an eye-catching performance for MK Dons against Coventry in 2014.
The now 28-year-old said (via Daily Mail): “After the game, Liverpool would play West Ham, I think, in London. Then I went to meet Brendan Rodgers after that [MK Dons] game, the night before the Liverpool game, and we had a conversation, but it never happened. I felt at that time I was ready to take the next step.”
Dele would only have to wait another year to get his move to the Premier League, although Tottenham was his destination and not Liverpool.
The playmaker was outstanding in his first couple of years in north London, scoring 22 goals in the 2016/17 season as Spurs finished second behind Chelsea, and he started in England’s 2018 World Cup semi-final defeat to Croatia.
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However, by the time that Jose Mourinho took charge of Tottenham in the 2019/20 campaign, he’d fallen out of favour amid accusations that he’d lost his hunger for football, although he gained widespread support following a revelatory interview last summer in which he opened up about a childhood ruined by sexual abuse and drug dealing.
Liverpool fans watching Dele rip it up at Spurs in the mid-2010s may have felt a pang of envy, although we had our own spectacular playmaker in Philippe Coutinho, who would come to be joined by a game-changing forward line of Mo Salah, Bobby Firmino and Sadio Mane.
It’s easy to see why Rodgers would’ve been interested in the then-teenage maverick in his MK Dons days, but considering how things turned out at Anfield during Jurgen Klopp’s reign, we don’t need to harbour too many regrets over not signing the now-Everton player.