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When Jürgen Klopp signed on to manage Liverpool in the autumn, it was really only a matter of time before the Reds began to be linked to every Bundesliga player who might conceivable come available—plus more than a few who almost certainly won’t be for sale.
Meanwhile, ever since Fenway Sports Group bought the club six years ago, there’s been a simmering suspicion that they’d rather like to go after an American player or two. The only problem there is a lack of Americans who would improve the side or end up being especially marketable.
Now, at least as some of the less reputable rumour mongers and transfer sites would have it, the club might be set to unite the "sign all the Germans" and "find an American worth signing" narratives as they land on the perfect transfer target: Borussia Dortmund’s Christian Pulisic.
He’s 17 years old, hard working and talented, and he was first signed by Dortmund while Klopp was in charge. He’s already good enough to get minutes with the Dortmund first team. And he’s the United States’ best hope at the moment of developing a superstar. He checks all the boxes.
Or at least he would seem to check all the boxes for rumour mongers set on concocting the perfect transfer rumour. Whether there’s the slightest bit of truth to it is another question entirely, especially when it’s the likes of Goal and Bleacher Report rumour columns pushing the idea.
Still, the problem when somebody tries to craft the perfect transfer rumour is that if they do it right, it can all make a little too much sense to dismiss entirely, no matter how poor the sources or how speculative it all is. So. Liverpool might want Dortmund’s rising star Christian Pulisic.
They probably don’t. Or if they do, he probably wouldn’t be attainable—despite the draw of the Premier League, Pulisic is playing for Germany’s second biggest club. But as far as rumours go, it certainly checks all the boxes. Including a few you didn’t realise needed checking until now.
Even better, according to the rumour mongers, he’s not necessarily a target for this summer. Given his age, he might instead just be monitored for now and targeted in 2017. Which means that true or not, this probably won’t be the last you hear of Pulisic to Liverpool.