Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to Liverpool is “Nonsense”

Over the past 24 hours, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain emerged as a potential January signing for Liverpool. Or at least that’s what the rumour mongers would have you believe, led this time by the more normally reliable Telegraph. It didn’t take long for Jürgen Klopp to shoot the rumours down.

“Usually I wouldn’t say anything about transfer rumours, but this one I will make an exception,” Klopp told the journalists who had gathered at Melwood this morning for his pre-match press conference ahead of Saturday’s match against Manchester City. “This one is nonsense.”

In truth, it always seemed a stretch. Oxlade-Chamberlain is meant to want out of Arsenal because he hasn’t been getting as much playing time as he’d like, but a move to Liverpool likely wouldn’t improve that situation as he would at best be first off the bench as an attacking support player.

The price, £25M, also seemed high given the player will only have a year left on his contract this summer and in recent seasons at Arsenal he has, if anything, seemed to regress and found himself down the pecking order at a time he was meant to have established himself as starter and star.

As for rumours more generally, Klopp stuck to the expected boilerplate, saying that the club will do business if they think it can help the club and a player can be found at a price that isn’t overly inflated, but that business won’t be done simply to be able to say the club went and did something.

“I thought I had already said everything about the January transfer window,” Klopp noted. “My English isn’t good enough to use different words. So I say again, if we think a player can help us then yes, we will do something, but I’m not sure it will be important for us this year.”