Liverpool's Dilemma: PSG's Brutal Price for Bradley Barcola
Michael Owen has warned that Paris Saint-Germain hold all the cards as Liverpool scramble to replace Mohamed Salah – and could drive the price for Bradley Barcola into truly brutal territory.
Salah’s shock move to Trabzonspor on a free has ripped a hole in Liverpool’s attack just days before the window shuts. Nine years, 442 games, 257 goals, 123 assists. Two Premier League titles and a Champions League. You don’t quietly replace that kind of output, and the market knows it.
Liverpool’s recruitment team have turned their search to the flanks. Names like Yan Diomande and Ibrahim Mbaye have been floated, but 23-year-old French winger Barcola has pushed his way to the front of the queue. The problem? PSG’s asking price.
The French champions are said to want £145 million. Not a negotiating stance. A number. One that made even Owen, who has seen the market inflate year after year, stop in his tracks.
“That sounds extortionate, doesn't it? For someone that's not proven in the Premier League,” Owen said, noting that Barcola has operated at the highest level but still sits firmly in the ‘potential’ bracket rather than the ‘guarantee’ one. “If it gets to £145m, I mean, wow, that's eye-watering.”
This is the premium Liverpool now face. Desperation tax. Everyone in Europe knows the Reds have lost their talisman and are short of elite wide options. Once, it was Salah, Sadio Mane and Luis Diaz terrorising full-backs. Layers of threat. Now, as Owen put it, there is a “dearth” in those positions by comparison, and the squad suddenly looks thin where it once looked loaded.
Owen has long had his own idea for Salah’s heir. Months ago, he nailed his colours to Jared Bowen, arguing that the West Ham forward’s output, work-rate and Premier League pedigree made him an obvious fit. That ship, he accepts, has sailed.
“I went on record a couple of months ago saying if I was Liverpool, I'd go and try to get Jared Bowen from West Ham to replace Salah. I thought that made a lot of sense,” he said. That route now appears closed, leaving Liverpool staring at a far more complex equation.
So the focus has fallen harder on Barcola. Young, quick, technically sharp, already exposed to Champions League-level football. A profile Liverpool like. A situation PSG like even more.
“The problem is everybody knows you're desperate for a top-class player, so you're going to have to pay through the nose,” Owen admitted. And that is the crux. Do Liverpool hold their nerve and walk away from a number that offends their long-held sense of value, or do they accept that this is simply the going rate for a top winger in a seller’s market when you have left yourself no room to breathe?
Owen believes the club need more than just one answer out wide. With Salah gone and the depth chart suddenly stretched, he sees a rebuild rather than a simple one-for-one swap.
“You know, it used to be Salah, and Mane and Diaz,” he reflected. “There's so many great wide players [at Liverpool] over the years. And it feels like there's a dearth of them, of course, now at Liverpool. They probably need two. They certainly need one.”
That’s the tension now gripping Anfield’s corridors of power. The need is obvious. The target, Barcola, “seems to be one that's available, that's got the quality,” as Owen put it. There is clear interest, and the sense that “there's no smoke without fire.”
But the deal lives and dies on one thing: price.
Liverpool have built an era on smart, disciplined recruitment. PSG are daring them to abandon that principle in one swing. With the clock ticking and Salah gone, how far are they willing to bend it?
