This piece is not for the faint-hearted. As a matter of fact, this one slightly got the better of us when we found out.
Former Liverpool Chief Executive Officer Ian Ayre has revealed that Liverpool tried to sign the now Tottenham star but the move failed due to difference in opinion regarding the transfer fee. Alli grew up as a Liverpool fan and met with then-manager Brendan Rodgers ahead of a potential transfer.
However, Liverpool and MK Dons could not agree on a deal and the 18-year-old eventually completed a £5million transfer to Tottenham Hotspur in February 2015.
Ayre revealed,
“There was interest in the player, but where it got to was that the demands at that time were not fitting to what he had achieved at that point. We didn’t feel the player matched that demand. It’s easy to sit and say: ‘Look what you could have bought,’ but how many players could you apply the reverse of that to? That’s the truth.”
Dele Alli since then, has won the PFA Young Player of the Year award twice in succession and has scored 30 goals and 22 assists for Tottenham in two seasons.
Last season, he scored 10 goals and set up 11 to win the PFA Young Player of the Year award. This season, he has already scored 20 goals and 11 assists, and was once again named the PFA Young Player of the Year award, thus joining a very short list of elite players to have won the prestigious award twice in succession.
Meanwhile, Ayre also discussed Liverpool’s summer of 2014, where Luis Suarez was drawing interest from Barcelona, with the Reds targeting their forward Alexis Sanchez. Suarez eventually moved to Barca and Sanchez joined Arsenal.
Ayre continued: “The hardest [transfer] has to be Suarez. Because A) nobody wanted him to leave. And B) halfway through the process he bit somebody at the World Cup! I remember the sporting director of Barcelona calling me during that game, immediately as Suarez bit the player, and he said to me: ‘My friend, he’s bitten somebody, how can this be the price?’ I said: ‘He’d already bitten somebody when you first bid!’
“The thing to understand is that you are never actually in complete control of who you buy and sell as a club. There was much publicised interest in Alexis Sanchez, as part of the deal which saw Luis go to Barcelona, and that deal was done — the only reason it wasn’t was that the player and his wife wanted to live in London.”
It is always good to be informed about behind the screen activities in transfer deals. But this one though doesn’t read well as Alli is a huge miss considering his achievement with Spurs in the past two seasons (not in terms of winning trophies).
Nevertheless, we have always managed to produce top class stars on our own and regretting on this one isn’t going to help us one a little bit.
We’ll have to move on!
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