Lille President Claims Liverpool Made Contact with Nicolas Pépé

Gerard Lopez is his name and living it up at the edge of Nicolas Pepe’s spotlight is his game.

We’re back with new, but not necessarily improved, rumors of Liverpool’s interest in Lille’s Nicolas Pépé. This time the report is coming straight from Lille’s president himself, the honorable Gerard Lopez. Lopez has claimed there was contact between Liverpool and Pépé’s agent and wants everybody to know about it.

He includes the bit about Liverpool potentially losing one of Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino, or Sadio Mané this summer and eyeing Pépé as an ideal replacement.

“I know there have been discussions with the player, not with us as a club,” said Lopez.

”Liverpool have players in those positions and I read that maybe there were players who could leave, or not.

“I am not particularly focused on Liverpool. But it is true that there have been discussions with agents.”

It’s the continuing strategy at Lille to escalate Pépé’s transfer fee by creating a bidding war, suggesting at the attention from some high-profile clubs in an effort to properly motivate other clubs to open their coffers a bit wider.

“We had two offers before the Africa Cup of Nations. We’ll see after that, my position was to see if we could not do something before it, we had two proposals before it, I had two clubs.”

The odds that Liverpool would spend £70million on a supporting player are still slim. Jürgen Klopp’s front three are solid in the starting XI and shelling out that amount of cash should still be reserved for must-haves like Virgil Van Dijk and Alisson last year. Lopez is just having his fun in the limelight this summer, bless him. Carry on.

Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com