Jurgen Klopp, the manager of Liverpool, said on Friday that the Reds have reached a deal with Brighton to buy Moises Caicedo for what is said to be a British record fee of £110 million ($140 million, 127 million euros).
Sky Sports said that the 21-year-old Ecuador player still hasn’t decided what he wants to do with his life, and that Chelsea is also interested.
Chelsea had been interested in Caicedo for a long time, but Liverpool beat the Blues to him when Brighton set a deadline for bids on Thursday night.
The price would be more than the £107 million that Chelsea paid for Enzo Fernandez in January, which was the previous British record.
It would also be a big return for Brighton, which bought Caicedo from Independiente del Valle in Ecuador for only £4 million in 2021.
“I’ve been told that an agreement has been reached with Brighton,” Klopp said at a press conference before his team’s trip to Chelsea on the first weekend of the Premier League season.
Klopp has criticized the idea of spending £100 million on a single player in the past, but he has said that he has had to change his mind because transfer fees are going up and up.
He also said, “Everything was different. Like it or not? No. Did you know you were wrong? Yes.
“I’m not mad at anyone, but the market is just like that. In the end, as a club, we have to make sure we get the best player we can with the money we have.
Liverpool didn’t make a bid for Jude Bellingham earlier in the window because the English player was moving from Borussia Dortmund to Real Madrid for a starting fee of 100 million euros.
But Klopp said that the sudden losses of Jordan Henderson, the team captain, and Fabinho to Saudi Arabia for a total of £52 million had changed their plans.
Klopp said, “We are a club that doesn’t have a lot of money, so things happened this summer that we didn’t expect.”
“To be honest, we didn’t think about that before the summer. When it happened, we tried it, but, to be honest, the club was really stretched there.”
Caicedo could play with Alexis Mac Allister again. Mac Allister won the World Cup for Argentina and moved from Brighton to Anfield in June.
Dominik Szoboszlai, a Hungarian international, is the only other player Liverpool has brought in so far this window.