Liverpool will miss out on another Lyon attacker. Houssem Aouar will sign a new deal at the club and reject the Reds after the Nabil Fekir fiasco.
You might understand why Lyon don’t really want to the faces of Michael Edwards and his team now. The Liverpool negotiators drove a hard bargain in the prospective deal to bring Nabil Fekir to Anfield.
After bringing the initial fee down to only £44 million, Liverpool backed out at the last-minute. As you know by now, there was a photo shoot and a first interview video already to go until the Reds felt they could not trust the player’s knee after a 2015 injury and surgeries in 2016 and earlier this year.
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Despite a constant drip of reports that the deal may still happen that is not from Liverpool’s end; the club are maintaining they’ve moved on. But the Nabil Fekir move might not be the only deal that dies that day.
Liverpool have a long-standing interest in Lyon phenom Houssem Aouar. They tried to get him last summer and the reports from December were they would return again in this window.
However Lyon are not going to entertain any offers of selling the player they have pencilled in to replace Fekir. Instead they are giving him a new five-year deal that will end speculation of a move to Liverpool for the next year or two.
Making selling clubs annoyed is becoming a little habit for Liverpool in the transfer market in recent years. The Reds had a sixth month spat with Southampton during the pursuit of Virgil van Dijk. They also frustrated RB Leipzig during the Naby Keita negotiations so much that a move for Timo Werner now seems unlikely.
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Attention will continue to be on finding an alternative to Fekir and bolstering the squad. A move for Xherdan Shaqiri is expected to happen after the World Cup and a new center back to follow that.