Moisés Caicedo and Mason Mount have set up $94m Mohamed Salah transfer repeat for Liverpool

Liverpool is not used to hearing ‘no’ in the transfer market. After Moisés Caicedo turned down a move, despite Brighton accepting a bid, the CEO of the Seagulls encapsulated exactly why:

“First of all Liverpool is a fantastic football club and for any footballer to have the chance to play at Anfield, you would imagine they’d be running up the M6,” Paul Barber told talkSPORT.

For whatever reason, however, Caicedo preferred Chelsea. Days later, so too did Roméo Lavia. And much earlier in the summer, Liverpool had shown an interest in Mason Mount, only for the former Chelsea man to make it clear he preferred Manchester United.

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A worrying trend? Potentially, although Liverpool will hope it’s primarily a mark of being outside the Champions League, a blip which should be corrected sooner rather than later. Obviously, Chelsea is not in European competition of any kind — but with Jürgen Klopp’s side not currently right at the pinnacle of the game, as they have been over the last half-decade or so, familiar old factors like the pull of living in London come back into play a little.

Even then, we’re talking about a handful of players, with most still very much ready to ‘run up the M6’, in Barber’s words. And looking at the deals on which Liverpool missed out, Premier League agents seem to think Klopp dodged a bullet or two.

In a study of agents undertaken by The Athletic, five respondents named Caicedo as the worst deal of the whole transfer window. Only Kai Havertz (six) received a more unanimous verdict. In the written responses published, the doubt was not so much about the Ecuadorian’s quality, but about the sheer size of the fee — and whether he will be able to produce his best form in what has been a pretty dysfunctional environment lately.