Liverpool want 27-year-old Sampdoria defender

Liverpool, Omar Colley (Photo by Paolo Rattini/Getty Images)
Liverpool, Omar Colley (Photo by Paolo Rattini/Getty Images)

Liverpool want to sign Omar Colley.

The 27-year-old has only been with Sampdoria for two seasons, but he’s been making waves and Samp News has reported that he’s a man in demand.

There’s a queue of Premier League sides who want to sign Omar Colley, with Liverpool fighting off interest from West Brom, West Ham, Leicester, Burnley and Celtic keeping tabs on The Gambia star.

Colley has taken a maurarding route to one of the top five European leagues. He moved to Finland’s Kuopion Palloseura in 2013, before heading to Sweden with Djurgarden two years later.

That spell in Scandinavia was over pretty quickly as Gent came in with £1.5 million after just one season at Djurgarden as Colley moved to Belgium. This was the first time he’d been sold for a fee, and the defender repeated the trick two years later.

This time it was Sampdoria, who bought the 191cm centre-back for £7.2 million. That was the 12th highest fee Genk has ever recieved, which puts Colley in some fine company among greats like Kevin de Bruyne (£7.2 million), Thibaut Courtois (£8 million) and Leon Bailey (£12.1 million).

In just five years, Colley has gone from playing club football in The Gambia with Real de Banjul to featuring for Sampdoria. The journey has taken him from Finland to Sweden to Belgium to Italy and now it could include a stop in England.

Incidentally, his cousin is Ebrima Colley who turns out for Atalanta and has made five Serie A appearances, scoring 23 goals with five assists in 46 second string games.

Transfermarkt has Colley worth just £4.5 million, which seems on the low side given the fee the Italians paid for the defender and the amount of interest in him.

Since February 2019, he’s missed just 11 league games – none of which were through injury. Two of those were because of suspension, which shows how important the 27-year-old has been to the club.

With a quick rise to a top European league, this is clearly a player who has something about him and has the ability to improve. It could be an excellent move to make.