:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46892752/GettyImages-484792275.0.jpg)
It was never a proposed deal that made a great deal of sense. Adama Traore is a promising 19-year-old winger, far from the finished product and not yet at the level of Liverpool’s current promising 19-year-old winger Jordon Ibe. He was never a player who would have walked straight from demoted Barcelona B into the starting eleven at Anfield.
Yet reports in Spain and, for reasons only the transfer gods will understand, Italy, were insistent that he was about to make the switch. Moreover, that Liverpool were going to pay €15M for him after a summer of heavy spending, and on top of it allow Barcelona a buy-back clause in the deal. There followed reports insisting Liverpool wanted Adama so much they had wanted him on loan.
A 19-year-old winger not as good as any player currently on Liverpool’s two-deep. On loan for a season or for €15M with a buyback. Or even, as one report in Catalan paper Sport claimed, with a promise to Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona for a discount price should they want him in a season or two. It simply never made a great deal of sense, the Adama to Liverpool story.
It never passed the smell test. And this morning, fresh off the latest round of insisting from Spain and, for reasons only the transfer gods will understand, Italy, James Pearce and the Liverpool Echo have worked their connections at Anfield and are reporting what every Liverpool fan already should have known. Namely that there is no deal. There is no interest. Adama is not undergoing a medical.
It may be the it was the player’s agent at work driving the story, as Adama is reportedly desperate both to leave Barcelona B and to play in England. But if the reports are true—and given how closely they align with common sense they probably are—Liverpool won’t be offering him a pricy escape route to spend the season either on their bench or loaned out.
