Agger: “I Miss Liverpool”

In the end, he may not have made quite as big a mark at the club as fellow Nordic defender Sami Hyypia, but Liverpool fans will always have a soft spot for Daniel Agger, the classy centre half who joined from Brondby in 2005 and spent nine seasons at Anfield.

He remains a hugely popular figure amongst Reds fans, both for his cultured approach to defending and for his loyalty to the club. And that well known loyalty means that it perhaps isn’t all that surprising to learn that the player misses playing for Liverpool as much as Liverpool fans miss him.

"I miss Liverpool," Agger told Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet in an interview this week. "We had a really good life in the city, a solid base, and had built a good home. We felt really at home in the city. I hope I will always have some sort of connection to Liverpool, but I don’t regret that I left."

It may have been time to leave, with injuries starting to catch up with Agger and the player having fallen out of favour with then-manager Brendan Rodgers. Still, the method of his departure, as he was seemingly shoved out the door in favour of an expensive new signing who then failed to deliver, rankled.

It may even have been, in the end, that his departure and the method of it contributed to Brendan Rodgers’ eventual downfall, with fans less willing to be patient with a manager who had discarded one of their favourite players. Yet in the end, perhaps, it was time for Agger to move on.

Following his departure, he spoke about his body not being up to the rigours of the Premier League, suggesting that if that hadn’t been the case he might have stayed on, just as he had the summer before when Barcelona had come calling and he turned them down in a show of the kind of loyalty that made him so popular.

"When I make a decision, I never regret it," he added. "Barcelona was an option for me in 2013 but when I made my decision back then it was the right decision to stay at Liverpool at the time. It is not something I regret today, but when I think back, it could have been fun to try.

"Three or four years ago Spain might have suited me well but that is not how I decided and I will never regret the decision to stay."