After Liverpool and sporting director Richard Hughes sold winger Luis Diaz to Bayern Munich last summer and didn’t see the need to replace him, the Reds struggled through 2025-26 with a lack of quality, application, and end product on the wings one of the side’s biggest issues.
To make matters worse, the club’s efforts to move on from Mohamed Salah and build a team around Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak—the first of whom never fully delivered and the second of whom spent much of the season injured—saw Hughes and the club again happy to part ways with Salah this summer, mutually agreeing the termination of his contract.
In theory, this freed up a large chunk of wages to put towards a new winger. The problem in practice has been that everyone knows the Reds are exceptionally desperate and are holding out for top dollar.
Liverpool have as a result spent much of the summer struggling to sign their top targets and will kick off the season against Newcastle on Sunday with a weaker squad than the one they ended last season with. Meanwhile, the latest blow on the winger recruitment front has Brighton rejecting an improved second bid for Yankuba Minteh.
Having seen a £50M offer rejected, Liverpool have upped their bid to £60M—and Brighton have rejected this second bid. Minteh is currently injured and expected to be sidelined until October. Last season, he made 36 appearances for Brighton with three goals and four assists and a goal involvement every 350 minutes.
If that number seems bad, that’s because it is. To put it into perspective, Salah had a goal involvement every 140 minutes last season while much-maligned Tottenham target Cody Gakpo had a goal involvement every 240 minutes last season. Both were down considerably from their career averages.
Minteh’s underlying numbers also don’t speak to a player on the verge of breaking out—which is to say, those top line numbers look about right based on advanced statistics. While Minteh doesn’t have end product or any real signs of the potential to develop it, the 22-year-old does have is endless graft and work rate. So there’s that.
Even in the current inflated market, though, a £60M bid for graft and work rate will rightly raise some eyebrows. To even put it in is a sign of just how desperate Liverpool are getting. That this is the club’s third summer under the guidance of Hughes as sporting director and this is the reality is quite frankly damning.
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