Liverpool have made no secret of the fact Yan Diomande, RB Leipzig’s Ivorian rising star on the wing, is their top summer transfer target as the Reds look to do what seems frankly impossible and replace Mohamed Salah.
The 19-year-old Diomande might still be a little raw, with the player coming to organized football relatively late compared to many and failing land a place at a top European academy as a teenager despite his best efforts. He eventually chose to train at an academy in Florida before
joining Spanish second division side Leganés in 2024.
His route to emergent stardom is a little non-standard, then, and he lacks experience at a top academy, leading to questions as to whether he can continue to develop the technical and tactical sides of his game to become a truly elite player. His talent, though, is clear and inarguable.
What’s also clear is that RB Leipzig, who triggered a €20M release clause to sign him from Leganés last summer, aren’t eager to sell, at least not quickly. The German club are making noises as though they’d like to try and keep Diomande long-term and build a side around him. Yet that’s never really been their buy-low, sell-high business model, and it would take significant investment to build a side around Diomande capable of challenging Bayern Munich given where the two clubs currently stand.
Whether it’s now or in a year or two, then, the smart money is on Leipzig selling Diomande. Leipzig’s main goal, whether or not they’re willing publicly admit it, is to pick the right time to maximize his value. And with a World Cup ongoing, their hope will be that it spikes and perhaps even kicks off a bidding war.
There is, of course, a history of just that happening. Enzo Fernandez turned a star showing at the World Cup in Qatar into a mosnter €121M move to Chelsea. As good as Fernandez has been for London’s Blues, Benfica will have no regrets, at the time or in retrospect, over saying goodbye at that price.
Monaco will similarly have had no regrets over selling James Rodriguez to Real Madrid for €75M in 2014 after he won the Golden Boot with Colombia at the World Cup, a move the attacking midfielder was never able to live up to and that led to him bouncing around clubs over the next decade, failing to ever consistently hit those World Cup heights.
While they might be the biggest examples of inflated post-World Cup sales amongst active players, there are plenty more minor examples and the conventional wisdom remains that a good World Cup—or a good Euros—can be a massive benefit to a selling club, while the potential to overpay can lead to hesitant buyers.
And so as sellers Leipzig will wait, at the very least, for Yan Diomande and Côte d’Ivoire to fully play out their World Cup. It’s not entirely clear, though, that Liverpool should be especially concerned about fee inflation or a bidding war in this particular case.
That’s nothing to do with Diomande’s talent or his potential to perhaps one day turn into a worthy successor to a player like Salah at a club like Liverpool, and the rapid winger already put in a Man of the Match performance for Côte d’Ivoire in a 1-0 victory over Ecuador that makes that point. He also put in a solid if slightly less spectacular showing against Germany, battling gamely but not able to be quite the same difference maker when faced with higher ranked opposition.
He will face Curaçao next in Côte d’Ivoire’s final group stage game on Thursday. With second place in Group E and a spot in the knockout rounds on the line, many will expect him to be their difference maker there. Nobody would be surprised if he collects a few goals and assists in service of that. Put simply, Côte d’Ivoire will be expected to win easily, and Diomande will be expected to be a star.
It’s that which is Leipzig’s real problem if they’re hoping for this World Cup to boost his price. Because having been talked up as Liverpool’s top target to replace Salah and with the Reds having already sent in a €100M bid for his services that Leipzig rejected, the bar for him has already been set so very, very high.
After Diomande’s only very good performance against Germany, talk quickly turned to the fact that Diomande is still young, still raw, still developing. Against Ecuador, he looked perhaps a €100M man—but not more. Against Germany, he looked like a €100M gamble on promise and potential—and so the talk afterwards focused on just how big a risk his big money transfer might be. A few goal involvements against Curaçao won’t turn him into a player a half-dozen new clubs not already bidding for his services will suddenly be scrambling to spend even more than €100M on.
The conventional wisdom is that a World Cup can raise or rehabilitate the value of a player, especially if that player starts off without much hype, and there’s plenty of reason to think that’s not wrong. Diomande, though, started off his World Cup with a tonne of hype, sky-high value, and if anything probably more room to see his stock drop than skyrocket.
Before this World Cup, only Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain were seriously interested. Liverpool have an obvious need to replace Salah. For PSG he would be a luxury signing, likely force a sale of the talented Bradley Barcola, and the French club have signalled in recent days that they don’t see Diomande being worth even as much as Liverpool’s rejected €100M bid.
Unless he were to do something truly spectacular and unexpected, like single-handedly carrying Côte d’Ivoire on a historic run to the semi-finals or further while collecting a few individual honours, the reality for Leipzig is that Diomande kicked off his World Cup at peak value and with a very short list of suitors potentially willing to pay.
Currently, that list of suitors looks down to one, and when you’re at your peak, there’s usually only one way to go. The narrative around Diomande when he has delivered has simply been that it’s what you’d expect from a player valued at €100M-plus, the number of clubs willing or able to pay that kind of a fee to begin with are few, and Liverpool are the ones who have done more than anyone to lay the groundwork with Diomande personally.
Leipzig might prefer to wait, just in case. Realistically, though, Liverpool probably shouldn’t be too worried. They might even be thinking that if Diomande doesn’t now single-handedly carry Côte d’Ivoire to the semi-finals or further, well, that €100M bid Leipzig previously rejected might start looking mighty good to the German club.
