Your Transfer Rumour Is Bullshit: Divock Origi to Fenerbahçe

Given recent experiences with Turkish loan deals, the Reds are
unlikely to be interested in a repeat.

Sell! To! Buy! Sell! To! Buy! That is the refrain Reds fans have
familiarised themselves with over the past months, as it has become
clear the club are not willing to take even moderate financial
risks in the Covid-19 transfer market. If missing out on an
extremely thirsty Timo Werner didn’t make it clear, the fact that
Liverpool have spent exactly the amount of money
they’ve made this summer — essentially swapping Dejan Lovren for Kostas Tsimikas — should
hammer it home.

Luckily, the Merseysiders have a number of fringe players on the
first team squad available for those who can put up the dosh, with
Harry Wilson and Marko Grujic in particular prime candidates for
a move, and Georginio Wijnaldum, Xherdan Shaqiri, Rhian Brewster and Divock Origi in varying states of long-term job
insecurity.

It is the latter who is the subject of today’s nonsense courtesy of the Mirror,
however, where it is claimed that Liverpool are willing to let
Origi go to Turkey on a year-long loan with a compulsory transfer
at the end of it, at the exceptionally, suspiciously, reasonable
price of £14m. In case it wasn’t already obvious, here’s why that’s
not happening.

First of all, while Fenerbahçe is not Beşiktaş — with whom
Loris Karius just spent a turbulent two-year
loan at the end of which a supposed mandatory purchase was supposed
to take place — they are subject to some of the same issues that
plague Turkish football teams in general, with financial
instability at the top of that list. Given the recent Karius
experience — where the player went for months without wages at one
point — it is unlikely the Reds will want to dip into that
particular market anytime soon, nor that the player would be
particularly keen to experience unremunerated work.

Then there’s the issue of the transfer fee. Divock Origi was the
subject of an £18m bid from Crystal Palace two years ago, won a Champions League and a Premier League since then, and
is about to enter his prime years. Assuming continued inflation,
the idea that his price would drop in that time does not hold much
water. Not that Fenerbahçe would be likely to pay it, given that it
would constitute a club record fee for a club that has passed the
£10m threshold twice in its existence, neither of
those in the past five years.

The article does — bizarrely offhandedly — mention Newcastle, Aston Villa, Fulham and Brighton as other
potential buyers, but with the former two having spent a combined
£55m on strikers already, and the latter two looking particularly
tentative in the market this summer, we’ll wait until we hear
something a lot more concrete before we make any assumptions about
the immediate future of Liverpool’s fifth choice striker lying away
from the club.