Brendan Rodgers is ready to spend every penny of the £75million Liverpool bank for Luis Suarez – and then some, writes Alan Nixon in the Sunday People.
The Kop boss wants a further six players that could take his spending this summer to a whopping £135m – eclipsing the transfer frenzy Spurs went on last year after getting £86m from Real Madrid for Gareth Bale.
And Rodgers will go back to Southampton, from where he plucked Rickie Lambert and Adam Lallana earlier in the summer, for one of the incoming six – striker Jay Rodriguez.
Rodgers has also targeted Sevilla’s Alberto Moreno and Swansea’s Ben Davies – with a £20million move for Benfica’s Lazar Markovic almost completed.
And centre-back Dejan Lovren could be the fourth Saint to sign for the Reds with talks well under way.
Swansea keeper Michel Vorm’s £6m price tag has not put off Rodgers and the Dutchman is likely to be another heading to Merseyside this summer.
The spree will go some way to calming the fears of Liverpool fans, worried that Suarez’s move to Barcelona will rule out a title challenge.
But it mirrors the spend-spend-spend policy last year of Spurs, who wasted all the cash they got for Bale on a string of flops like £26m forward Roberto Soldado and midfielder Erik Lamela, who cost the same.
Tottenham were supposed to mount an assault on the title with their new-look, expensively-assembled team, but Denmark star Christian Eriksen was the only success as they finished way off the pace. Just as Spurs spent far more than the cash they got for Bale, the six Kop targets will cost more than the Reds banked for Suarez.
But Rodgers has already been given the green light to bring Lambert, Lallana and Emre Can to Anfield and he is confident that the club’s American owners will bankroll another splash.
Written by Steve Milne
