While much of the attention in Andoni Iraola’s first month at Liverpool has focused on potential signings, with last season’s unbalanced squad and the departures of multiple club legends leaving plenty of work to do on the player recruitment front, there’s also been plenty of work going on behind the scenes to fill out the new head coach’s backroom staff.
Today, it appears the work has been completed. With the calendar ticking over to July bringing us into a new season from a contracts and finances
point of view, reliable reports have the club having completed the signings of coaches Tommy Elphick and Shaun Cooper—both rumoured to be following Iraola from Bournemouth in recent weeks—as well as Pablo de la Torre and Tom Webber
Elphick and Cooper served as Iraola’s top assistants at Bournemouth while De la Torre was that club’s head of fitness and Webber their senior first team analyst. Earlier in the summer Elphick was linked with Bristol City in the Championship, with the 38-year-old even offered the chance to take over as their next manager but in the end deciding to reject them.
In the aftermath of that, talk of him following Iraola to Liverpool heated up, and in recent weeks it had been something of an open secret that he and Cooper would end up on Liverpool’s books when their Bournemouth contracts officially expired on June 30th.
