Liverpool’s faint hopes of signing Michael Olise would appear to be dead in the water after one prominent Bayern Munich figure ruled out a transfer at any price.
There were reports from Bild last month that the Merseyside club were prepared to offer as much as €200m (£173.2m) to bring the ex-Crystal Palace winger back to England, but German football insider Christian Falk claimed that the Bavarian outfit wouldn’t ‘even discuss’ such a proposal.
With Mo Salah leaving at the end of this season (and potentially having played his last match for the Reds already), LFC will have a massive void to fill on the right flank, and the France international – who has 19 goals and 29 assists this season – would be an elite replacement.
Rummenigge – who sits on Bayern’s supervisory board – pointed to the club’s refusal to sell Franck Ribery to Chelsea in 2009 in underlining the club’s rigid not-for-sale stance on Olise, irrespective of how much Liverpool might offer.
The 70-year-old told t-online.de: “He’s a wonderful player. I also appreciate how reserved and almost media-shy he is. That’s rare these days. He’s a great guy, and on the pitch, he’s outstanding. The way he plays football is almost magical, so it doesn’t surprise me that he’s incredibly popular and hyped among our fans.
“Let me tell you a story from the past. In 2009, we had an incredible offer from Chelsea for Franck Ribéry. At the time, it would have been a new world transfer record. I then went to our then CFO, Karl Hopfner, and Uli Hoeneß with this offer. We discussed it for two hours, trying to figure out what to do with it.
“That day, we made a fundamental decision that, in the future, we would never sell a player we would miss on the pitch, and this unwritten rule still applies today. For a player like Olise, there’s no price tag that would make us flinch.”
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If any (somewhat attainable) player on the market were to justify a club-record transfer outlay from Liverpool this summer, it’d be the Bayern Munich winger.
Salah will be an exceptionally hard man to replace in the Reds’ line-up, and FSG would be justified in pushing the boat out to secure an elite replacement, a category into which Olise would certainly fall.
His G/A returns for the German champions this season have been superb, and at 24 he hits that sweet spot of already being quite experienced and proven at a high level in Europe, whilst only just coming into what should be his prime footballing years.
Unfortunately, while he’d be the top-shelf Salah successor that Liverpool require, it’s not the least bit surprising that Bayern have absolutely zero intention of selling him in the summer, regardless of how big an offer might be tabled from elsewhere.
After refusing to sell Ribery to Chelsea in 2009, the Frenchman went on to spend another decade in Munich, winning the Champions League and a further eight Bundesliga titles, scoring 124 goals in 425 appearances along the way.
Their not-for-sale stance on him was more than vindicated, and we must expect them to be every bit as uncompromising when it comes to Olise.
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