Rumour Mongering: Liverpool to Lose Thiago to Paris Saint-Germain

Nobody in England, and especially nobody with any ties to the club, has ever thought that Liverpool were especially likely to sign the talented but injury-prone 29-year-old midfielder Thiago Alcantara away from Bayern Munich.

He’s a signing who would make the Reds average age older at a time when they should be getting younger. A player on £200k per week wages in a summer the club are nervous about spending big. In short, he’s not a signing that ever made sense.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of talk elsewhere, particularly in Germany, about Liverpool supposedly being interested. And that always meant that when some other club came for him—if some other club did come for him—there would be stories about the Reds missing out.

So is the case this week with multiple outlets in Germany, including local Bayern outlet Abendzeitung Muenchen, saying Paris Saint-Germain are interested and, unlike Liverpool, not put off by the £25M asking price. Or by Thiago’s age or wage or injury record.

In a summer where everyone knows Liverpool would ideally like to bring in a few new players but where we know that they won’t due to the uncertainty caused by coronavirus—or where at the least we know we’ll have to wait—the Reds make for a convenient name to feed to the press.

At another time, a selling club or agent trying to link the English and European champions with a player might scare other sides off. Now, it can be cast as a chance to steal a player the English and European champions want but are holding off on due to coronavirus.

So we get to spend a month or two being told by the German press that Liverpool want to sign Thiago. And to then, inevitably, lose a transfer race that the club were never actually in in the first place.