Liverpool are on the brink of signing Bradley Barcola for a package worth around £120million.
Read that sentence again.
A 23-year-old France international, a double Champions League winner, one of the most dangerous young wide forwards in European football, apparently wants Liverpool and Liverpool are finally giving him what he wants.
I should be bouncing off the walls.
Instead, my immediate reaction was rather more restrained.
Good. Who’s next?
That feels ridiculous when Liverpool are preparing to commit more than £100million guaranteed to one footballer. It probably sounds entitled. Maybe it is. Yet this is where Fenway Sports Group, Richard Hughes and Liverpool’s recruitment operation have left me after a summer that has drifted far too close to the edge.
Barcola is a wonderful signing. I have wanted Liverpool to get this deal done for weeks. Everyone I spoke to expected it to happen. There was confidence around the move long before we reached the final days of August.
Liverpool have eventually reached the point many of us expected them to reach.
That does not save the transfer window.
It simply completes one of the jobs that should already have been finished.
Bradley Barcola Gives Liverpool Genuine Elite Potential
Start with the player because he deserves that.
Barcola is exciting.
He has pace, acceleration, movement, technical quality and the ability to attack defenders from either side. He predominantly played from the left for Paris Saint-Germain, although his development tells us something important about his versatility.
At Lyon, his breakthrough came on the right.
