Date: 29th June 2011 at 5:11pm
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Sunderland have completed a deal worth up to £12million for Ipswich striker Connor Wickham.

Wickham had been heavily linked with a move to Liverpool with suggestions that the striker himself wanted to join Liverpool this summer ahead of any other club. But unfortunately Wickham’s dream has not been realised and he has had to settle on joining Sunderland.

Now the questions will start to ring among the Liverpool fans, “Why did we not sign Wickham?”

Firstly, Sunderland have bought Wickham for a reported £8million cash and that fee will increase to £12million dependent on the players goals, appearances, European qualification and future England appearances. Liverpool probably looked at this and saw that Wickham is not worth the amount that Ipswich want to sell him for. Yes we may have money to spend but we are not going to go around and splash it out on a player who does not meet our valuation.

Sunderland have cash in the bank, ironically from Liverpool after we bought Jordan Henderson from them and they more than likely still have some left over from selling Darren Bent. So to Sunderland £8million may not be a lot of money for them to part with.

Still staying on the money point although it touches on another reason Liverpool may not have bought Wickham, £8million is a lot to spend on a player who does not have any Premier League experience under his belt, especially since he is only 18 years old.

Dalglish probably looked at the fact that we already have a young hot striking prospect in the form of Adam Morgan and thus we do not need another young striker who we would have to rely on if Suarez and Carroll are injured. What Liverpool need is another fairly experienced and talented striker to come in as back up.
If Suarez or Carroll were to have a long term injury where they sit out for three months, I do not think Wickham is ready to fill in that role and be our go-to-striker. We have seen this with David Ngog, he never really delivered when called upon and thus we need someone of a higher caliber to come in.

Liverpool are setting out to buy the best young talent in Britain and Wickham is in that bracket but we have let him go. There is surely a reason we did not pursue Wickham with more aggression.

Why do you think Liverpool did not sign Connor Wickham?

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35 responses to “Why Liverpool did not sign Connor Wickham”

  1. aliGB says:

    Agree 100% . Morgan is better

  2. 80 says:

    No point in signing him and then having to loan him out to get experience because he isn’t good enough to challenge for a starting spot.

  3. kkkersh says:

    hes a player who wanted to play for us, we should have signed him for the future

  4. SS says:

    we didnt sign him because dalglish thinks there are other players that are a higher priority based on the resource available. simple.

  5. njanja says:

    KK and Comolli seem to have realised their terrible mistake of signing an inexperiencd Heinderson, and they don’t want such a gamble

  6. wd red says:

    does this mean they are not buying Ngog

  7. redhed17 says:

    At £10m+ I would have said no to Wickham, but if it was £8m rising to £12m, it was worth a punt.

    Replacing Ngog with Wickham would have been OK with me. Although I don’t think Ngog is as bad as people make out, Wickham has the most potential and is almost as good already imho.

  8. gee says:

    I think the mistake of paying £35m for Carroll has also been realised World class players go for that type of money

  9. Sanjay says:

    WILL SEE HIM HOW IS HE GOOD AT SUNDEDRLAND WILL REMEMBER ME AS HE WILL SCORE AGAINST MATCH AT LIVERPOOL.THE YANKS DON’T WANT TO SPEND.ARE THEY THE RICH AS MUFC,M CITY,CHELSEA,ARSENAL,TOTTENHAM,EVERTON,NEWCASTLE ETC.CONNOR IS BETTER THAN CAROLL .A PLAYER LIKE CAROLL MUST HAVE SOMEONE TO FEED HIM FOOD(BALL) IN ORDER HE CAN HAVE THE BALL LAZY CHAP.VERY VERY LAZY FOR LIVERPOOL.WHY KK SIGNED HIM DON’T KNOW.NO IDEA.A LONG CHAP WITH LAZY FOOT.BETTER PLAYERS LIKE CAROLL ARE AT LIVERPOOL(MORGAN,COADY,STERLING,JOVANOVIC,PACHECO,NGOG,(THE GONE AWAY NEMETH ,PONGOLLE,LE TALLEC.

  10. lee daniel says:

    sanjay you talk total rubbish.
    wickham was TOO EXPENSIVE considering he has never played in the premier league. hundreds of championship strikers have never made the grade in the premiership !!!

  11. L. Dun says:

    simple. Too expensive. Resources are required for more experience. We will see when the international transfer window opens. I hope we spend the money wisely on a good backup to our strikers.

  12. Steven says:

    I think this is a mistake! Not worth 8m plus add ons? What you kidding me? We paid 35 m for Carrol so I don’t think the price should have been an issue!
    Not to mention 16 m plus add ons for Henderson!

  13. David says:

    I don’t understand why Wickham get’s such a look in. You have young player’s that have actually played in the Premier League and have been relegated so are on the cheap. What about DJ Campbell for Blackpool? He had some amazing goals. Perhaps Jerome for Birmingham? Just saying you could probably get Campbell for £3million to replace N’Gog or Jerome for a rough £7-9 million. They must be better than a 4th sub?

  14. Budi says:

    We have kuyt! So we don’t need any striker! We need wingers and a leftback!!

  15. m kop says:

    Liverpool don’t need Wickham, overrated in my view, half of the transfer fee is due to him being English, the other half is for his ability.

    Liverpool needs Lucas from Sao Paolo, I like him, he could be as good signing as Neymar, only much cheaper.
    He would be great substitute for Suarez and he could be in wings if Liverpool ever chose to play 4-3-3 formation, like Walcott for Arsenal.

  16. albert says:

    We have lost the plot

  17. nufc says:

    u guys are idiots haha … kk is destroying your team

  18. Rob says:

    Good maybe it’s time for a class act or 2

  19. Andrew says:

    Any chance it was Wickham that declined the move? If he thinks he’s going to be the business it’s not out of the realm of possibility to think that he preferred a move which ensures he’s going to get more games, no?

  20. Desy says:

    Please read and then calm down.

  21. crazyhorse says:

    15 goals in 72 games in the Championship doesn’t suggest to me that it’s worth paying that kind of money.

  22. David says:

    @m kop: We can’t sign that new “young” Lucas because they put a 79million Price tag on him. We enquired about a 9m bid

  23. Greg says:

    It’s a very good we did not sign him.. English strikers are usually garbage.. look at the league stats the last 10 years.. show me the last time an English striker led the league in goals.. hell.. show me the lasat time an English striker showed up in the top 10 for consecutive years!! We should be going after young foreign talent that we can call home grown.. they are cheaper and WAAAAY more talented than the English crap we are buying.. If Kenny wants to stockpile English crap.. we should not be surprised when we miss out on Europe again …

  24. Fernandez says:

    If LFC was really his first choice and we are really interested in him. We will sign him in 3 years time when he does have Prem experience (providing he does continue to flourish).
    He signed a 4 year contract, which is odd. Big transfers usually sign for 5. When negotiating a contract they must have made concessions to sign him and one of them was to sign him on a 4 year not 5 year deal.

  25. philip says:

    Wickham choose SUnderland because he got more Chances to play in first team Football. If he sign for Liverpool, he is always played as a reserve & back up player. If i am Wickham, yes i go for Sunderland. Anyway, Liverpool still got lot of talent young players. I am glad Liverpool fail to sign Wickham. Perhaps they can go for the Korean Monaco’s player previously link to Liverpool. Where He will much more reliable & cheaper.

  26. kunal says:

    If you had started the article by saying that by buying Wickham we will be slowing down the progress of Adam Morgan, then i would have totally agreed with you. But by saying 8 mill is too much for a striker with immense potential and resale value is way off the point really.
    We paid 35 million for a striker with just 6 months premier league experience,whereas we could have got him for 2.5 million when Newcastle got relegated.We always end up paying over the odds in the transfer market because we are too soft in our transfer dealing(Overvaluing players while buying, undervaluing while selling).Lets hope the same doesn’t happen with Wickham.If we have to end up paying 35 million in two years time for Wickham then this will look like a huge mistake.

  27. TG says:

    Wickham had no choice as Liverpool refused to pay £12m and rightly so, Connor is a Liverpool fan but so am i and im not good enough at £12m. We did the right thing with Marveaux too, failed his medical and was bombed. Connor would have been 4th choice behind Kuyt at Liverpool so £12m was a joke, Ryad Boudebouz is a better more talented option at £7m!!!!!!

  28. pzee says:

    i dont think we should have signed him just because he wanted to play for liverpool….there are plenty of them who dream of playing for the reds,but we dont sign evryone of them jus like that right 🙂

  29. Jimbo says:

    We can’t buy every expensive Pikey who claims to ” have supported Liverpool since conception”, otherwise we would spend £ 20 M on Roy Keane’s uglier brother . . . whoops we did do that didn’t we . . .

  30. Chambers says:

    We would have had to let him go on loan to Blackpool! It seems that greed still has its hooks into Holloway and to me it appears he wants a dozen or so loanees from us in place of letting a certain average player ( I am so sick of him I can’t say the name! ) leave. It will probably come to pass that ALL of LFC will turn out in the Championship for Blackpool next season!!! Laughable….

  31. jj says:

    guys we need to start thinking like the owners, they look at return on investment, they will put the money in but its about putting it wheres its needed, do we really need another striker when we need wingers, and a left back.

    theres need to do and nice to do, we need to spend our funds on need to do at the moment,

    KK and DC have a plan, under 25 with real talent players that will improve the first team squad first.

    as to carrol, the owners downt see it as spending 35 mil but rather getting suarez and carrol for about 5 mil after selling torres and babel, good business.

    finally we are getting a bit frustrated by not signing the best players like Mata, they need to want to come to us and not chelsea, arsenal, man c, man u real , barca as thhose teams are ahead of us due to champions league, so from the list of targets this will be a hard window to get the players we want.

    we also have alot of players sucking the life out of us due to bad signings and management that need to be dealt with, this may take a few transfer windows, so although we want to buy our new team in total this window, in truth it may take a few years as champions league footy is needed to attract the right players and get rid of some of the expensive wage players.

    im happy that they are doing the right thing and are showing good managment of the club 🙂

  32. Andy says:

    Lets get real here for a second, the Carroll fee was set by the Torres fee, yes we paid more than we would have done now but teams would have been aware that we had a spare £50 million and stuck it to us so Carroll would have cost us over £25 million now. Some will ask why not wait till now? Because we needed him then and the time he has spent at the club already will further develop his relationship with the players he will be playing with come August, he is now settled in as a Liverpool player. Now as for Wickham, yes we are looking for top young talent but was our need that of Sunderland? Hardly we have 3 top strikers whereas they have one (Gyan) they were in our situation when Torrres left they needed a player and had to pay over the odds for his current ability. We did not value Wickham at that price and refused to pay it. I agree with that, we should only pay hat we value a player at. Some will mention Henderson but no one here knows how much we paid for Henderson read Comolli’s comments on the price, and we needed to get someone in soon as Stevie G is starting to hit the downslope, he’s still a fantastic player but we need to get someone in who can learn of him and eventually replace him. We should continue to look for top talent but we should not be held to ransom, this is a long term project unlike the citeh project which is quite simply vulgar, they pour good money after bad on players and then appoint a salesman to sell them. Finally to those who are slating us and getting on our backs, grow up or get lost, Kenny is our manager and he’s forgetten far more about football than what you or I have ever known. It’s a rare day I agree with Lawrie Sanchez but I do here, fans play computer games and think they’re amazing well here’s a clue I don’t care if you’ve won 20 titles, 15 European Cups and 12 FA Cups and lead your country to 3 World Cup victories on Football Manager it’s nowhere near real, it has no relation to real life football. So if that’s you try getting out and enjoying life

  33. Vickeshy says:

    we dont need dat lad

  34. ScouseUK says:

    15 goals in 75 games for a eventual 13 mill,we dont need him we have better younger players coming through