Even without sales, Liverpool face a massive task in the summer transfer window needing to replace Mohamed Salah, Andy Robertson, and Ibrahima Konaté as well as having to fill additional holes at right back and forward due to long-term injury ahead of the 2026-27 season.
For a side that looked both unbalanced and lacking in quality depth this past season, something that made the job of departed head coach Arne Slot more difficult even if there was a widespread belief he underperformed with the talent
he did have to hand, there’s a lot of pressure on sporting director Richard Hughes to get things right after two summer transfer windows where he and his team have made significant mistakes.
That job won’t be made any easier if the latest rumblings around homegrown midfielder Curtis Jones are to be believed.
Jones has been seriously linked with Inter Milan going back to January when the framework for a transfer was agreed but Liverpool proved unwilling to sign off on a final deal due to depth concerns, and the signing of Andoni Iraola as the club’s new manager doesn’t seem to have tamped them down.
Now, The Athletic are claiming that while Liverpool would prefer not to lose Jones, they would reluctantly sanction his sale to the Serie A side if there was a suitable offer and if the player himself wanted to depart. And a suitable offer, it seems, would be one that met Liverpool’s £35M valuation of the midfielder, who has just one year to run on his contract.
Holding on to Jones might still be an option given on paper one would expect Iraola’s high-pace, high-pressure approach to suit him well and if he is content with his role under the new trainer it’s possible he would sign a new contract, but that is of course a risk.
Much of the talk around a potential Jones departure has focused on his role not being as large as he would like at the club, but the boyhood Red did play 2,850 minutes in 49 appearances last season, adding up to 58 minutes per appearance. Those aren’t perhaps the minutes of a player who’s first on the teamsheet, but it is very obviously a large and significant role that Jones has had over the past 12 months.
It may be worth considering, then, that if Jones does depart it’s not about minutes or managers—he got plenty of the former under Slot, after all, and Iraola might be the closest stylistic match to Jürgen Klopp the club could get without convincing Klopp to return.
Regardless, it his departure would make an already difficult summer transfer window with an already quite lengthy list of needs even more difficult for an upper management group that has failed to build on the high-quality foundations left to them by Klopp over the past two summers.
