Footballers, They’re Just Like Us: New Signing Szoboszlai Admits to Checking on LFC Transfer Rumor

The lives of footballers, even with the giant digital windows that act almost like an open wall that is social media, still feel a world away. When looking at players plying their trade at the top 5 leagues in the world, you’re talking about the most elite group of people to ever have played the sport. So the kind of day-to-day that they live, beyond even the intense physical tests and mental tests with tactics and playing philosophies, is really unlike what most of us will ever know.

So it’s a bit of a surprise when you get a bit of a peek behind the veil and learn that, sometimes, elite footballers do experience things that we can related to.

For example, in a feature piece on the official site that details the experience of his transfer to Liverpool FC from RB Leipzig, Dominik Szoboszlai let it slip that once he’d learned of the rumors that the Reds might be in for him, he began checking news on the potential transfer. In fact, to hear him tell it, he got a bit obsessed.

“I also heard a lot of rumours about where to go, it is time to go or not time to go? Then when Liverpool came, I think one of my friends sent me an Instagram [post] because they were looking for it. I wasn’t really [looking before]. They sent it to me and I was like, OK, but it was only two posts. And then I always checked like every 10 hours if there was something new, and it got always more and more.”

Szobo goes on to admit that he even bugged his agent asking about information on a nearly daily basis.

I know that the point of this story was more to note how excited our new No. 8 was to join Liverpool, but I find a little delight in knowing that something that is just so normal and a little tedious in the world of football fandom as transfer rumors can still light a fire under our favorite players. And it feels more interesting in that it doesn’t read as the typical canned comments on a player’s long-standing interest in joining a club; this isn’t a comment in the same vein as “I grew up playing Liverpool on FIFA” or whatever.

It reads, instead, that Szobo genuinely wants to be here. And for a club like Liverpool - and a sentimental sort like me - I feel that’s important. Gives me an extra reason to want to see him hit his stride and make his mark here.