LONDON: Thomas Lemar is ready to join Liverpool as a replacement for Philippe Coutinho, but the English Premier League club are refusing to meet AS Monaco’s asking price for the France international for the second transfer window running.
Arsenal — who agreed a summer deadline-day fee of €95 million ($115 million) for Lemar in August — remain interested in signing the 22-year-old as Alexis Sanchez prepares to leave the London club.
Conscious of the sharply rising value of creative players and goalscorers in an already inflated transfer market, Monaco are confident of securing at least €100 million for Lemar. The Ligue 1 club has grossed record income on players sales in recent windows and is ready to retain Lemar until the summer in the knowledge that all of England’s leading teams are looking to sign attacking midfielders ahead of next season.
According to sources close to the player, Liverpool have courted Lemar for months and their interest contributed to his decision to reject Arsenal in the summer window. While Arsenal offered around €20 million more than Liverpool as they scrambled to secure a successor to Sanchez, they were unable to convince Lemar to make a last-minute switch to a club outside the Champions League.
Despite securing a Premier League record fee of €120 million with €40 million of performance-related variable for Coutinho, Liverpool’s position is that they will not pay above what the club consider a reasonable valuation of Lemar.
Liverpool’s reluctance to pay €100 million to Monaco for Lemar may see the Anfield club switch to alternative targets. Jurgen Klopp drove a failed summer 2016 bid for Christian Pulisic; both the Liverpool manager and the club’s American ownership retain a strong interest in a player Klopp promoted to Borussia Dortmund’s first-team squad as a 16-year-old.
Pulisic’s popularity in the US adds to his attractiveness to Liverpool from a commercial perspective, with Fenway Sports Group holding a long-standing desire to sign an American player. Dortmund do not want to sell in January and are well-placed to benefit from a multi-club bidding war should they agree to let Pulisic go at the end of the season.
Manchester United have included both Pulisic and Lemar on a shortlist of a potential attacking recruits, along with Bordeaux’s Brazil youth international Malcom, whom Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur also want. If an agreement can be reached on transfer fee and personal terms, however, Jose Mourinho’s immediate objective is to exploit the “fantastic opportunity” to secure Sanchez.

Reaching a deal with Arsenal and Sanchez would keep the Chile international out of the hands of Manchester City while significantly improving Mourinho’s options at striker and across the second line of
United’s attack. “What we believe really is that there are some players in football world, if you have a chance to sign them — it doesn’t matter if it is in January, in March or in July — you have to try,” said Mourinho on Friday.
City agreed a transfer fee of £55 million plus £5m of bonuses for Sanchez in the summer coupled with a salary package to make him their highest paid footballer. Conscious of criticism of its unprecedented spending on player recruitment, the Abu Dhabi-owned club appears to have been preparing the public relations ground for missing out on an individual long expected to join Pep Guardiola’s first team.
City have indicated that they do not want to pay more than £20 million as a transfer fee this month and are not prepared to put all of the substantial savings on their deadline-day terms — near to £100,000 per week at Arsenal’s current asking price of £35 million — into the player’s remuneration package. With Sanchez’s representatives asking for a higher salary than agreed in August and Arsenal holding out for £35 million, the total cost of the deal would remain similar to the deal City previously struck.
Such has been the willingness to paint Sanchez’s current demands as unrealistic, City are understood to have complained about an agent’s fee of around £5m. In modern football, such a commission is relatively modest on a deal worth over £100 million when transfer fee and salary are factored in. While some observers have sought to portray the decision between United and City as one of money versus a desire to be reunited with Guardiola, that player-coach relationship has been overplayed. Signed by Barcelona from Udinese for an initial transfer fee of €26 million in 2011, Sanchez had just one campaign under Guardiola during which he struggled to come to terms with the complexities of the Catalan’s tactical system and instruction. He started just 20 Liga matches, being substituted 14 times.