It’s been twenty-four hours since the curtain fell on a terrible horrible no good very bad season for Liverpool Football Club, and fans have spent most of that time alternately feeling sad about the departures of club legends Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson and uncertain about the future.
Head coach Arne Slot is widely seen by the fanbase as not the right man for the job, but the club have signalled strongly that they intend to persist with the Dutch trainer, a situation that has many fearing a repeat
of Brendan Rodgers’ aborted final season in charge. If that is in fact the plan and not just misdirection, the club need to send another strong signal quickly.
Namely, they need to send a strong signal about their plan for what comes next given the doubts surrounding not just Slot but sporting director Richard Hughes who oversaw a summer transfer window in 2025 that left a thin and unbalanced squad and made Slot’s job harder.
It’s been twenty-four hours now since the curtain fell on 2025-26 and it appears we have that signal. The club will target 19-year-old RB Leipzig winger Yan Diomande to be their Salah replacement, and with the briefing going out to every club-connected journalist today there’s already talk of them possibly being prepared to trigger his €100M (£86M) release clause.
It would be a headliner of a transfer, make no mistake. Yet given how big the club spent last summer only to end up with a worse squad than they started with, and as Diomande is a teenager with one season of senior football under his belt and he’s likely to cost somewhere in the region of £86M, there will be some skepticism.
Diomande has a grand total of 46 senior games under his belt, with 36 coming this past season at Leipzig in the Bundesliga and ten the year before with CD Leganés in Spain. His 13 goals and ten assists in 2724 minutes last season equate to a quite impressive goal involvement every 118 minutes.
But it’s still just 23 goal involvements and 2724 minutes. In his career he has 26 goal involvements in 3266 minutes. Diomande is one of the most talented young attackers in Europe, that’s inarguable. However, it’s an almighty £86M gamble on the teenager being able to walk in, replace a legend, and be a difference maker in the Premier League from day one.
For fans already worried that 2026-27 will end up being another wasted season after how the just concluded 2025-26 went, spending so much money on an exceptional talent but also a player who is very young and not yet the finished product will raise eyebrows.
It’s the kind of statement signing that could help Liverpool to win the transfer window in the eyes of fans and pundits. Hopefully, if it goes through, it will prove worth it from day one unlike some of the deals that helped Liverpool to win the transfer window in the eyes of fans and pundits last summer.
