With Liverpool legend Mohamed Salah set to depart the club at the end of the 2025-26 season and an almighty void needing to be filled, there’s going to be plenty of speculation over potential replacements in the coming weeks and months. In fact, if anything it’s a little surprising we haven’t had more already.
Never fear, though, just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too do the rumour mongers. And sooner or later, one of them might even be right. Which brings us to rumbings out of Germany this week that
Liverpool as well as Paris Saint-Germain have serious intent to sign 19-year-old Ivorian rising star winger Yan Diomande.
The rumours come by way of Sky’s Florian Plettenberg, who Liverpool fans will last remember for insisting that the club weren’t going to sign Florian Wirtz. Whether that was him toeing the line for Bayern Munich or because he’s a high-volume shit-flinger who gets things mostly wrong we’ll leave to the reader.
Still, here he’s pushing potentially good news for the Reds, which will likely mean getting more traction. Even if he’s correct and not just speculatively flinging shit hoping something sticks, though, it seems far from certain that Liverpool would or should be considered favourites for the talented RB Leipzig attacker.
With Liverpool in the midst of a very poor season and plenty of fan grumbling about the direction of the team under head coach Arne Slot, the Reds don’t look the favourites they would have last season. Meanwhile, United are currently ahead of them in the Premier League table. And PSG are quite obviously PSG.
Mostly, it seems a case of wherever Diomande ends up, sellers Leipzig are set to win a massive transfer fee. And it’s easy to imagine, given the persistent United chatter, a world where that is Plettenberg’s goal and that PSG and Liverpool both are being added to the mix late in order to drive up the price for United.
If the interest is genuine and Liverpool do win the race, it will be a massive task for the talented but still raw Diomande—he has 13 goals and eight assists in 32 games this season after playing ten games for Leganés in La Liga last year—to replace Salah without needing another season or three of developing.
