Jeremy Jacquet timing tells a story for Liverpool
The Reds moved decisively to hijack a deal for the highly-rated French defender
When a Paul Joyce tweet arrives it is usually decisive.
And so it proved to be the case, as Liverpool wrapped up a deal for the much-coveted Rennes defender Jeremy Jacquet for a £55m initial fee, with £5m in add-ons for the 20-year-old, taking the player from under the noses of Chelsea, who had been tracking him for some time. Joyce’s rather understanding way of tweeting rubber-stamping what will be one of the most interesting signings of the summer, which is when the deal will be completed.
Liverpool needed to address their centre-back positions, and on the back of a 4-1 routing of Newcastle United, where Ibou Konate, so far off the pace for much of this campaign, was utterly imperious, to add one of European football’s hottest defensive prospects for next season, not forgetting they already acquired another one last summer in the shape of Giovanni Leoni, cruelly injured on his debut, is the perfect pick-me-up for Reds fans, for whom this season has not lived up to initial expectations.
The fee for Jacquet, who has featured just 30 times for Rennes in Ligue 1, spending last season on loan at Clermont Foot in Ligue 2, on the face of it seems rather inflated. Analysts at the Swiss-based CIES Football Observatory, which uses a wide variety of metrics to obtain a fair market value for a player, pegged Jacquet at the high watermark of €29m (£25m), suggesting Liverpool have paid well over the odds for a player with such limited experience, who is yet to receive full international honours at senior level for France.
But that is the transfer world in which we live. The idea of what a player should be worth is all very well and good, but when there is competition in the market place for their services then the price point gets driven far higher than it really ought to be.
