Karl Coppack

What's the competition like?

It looks right now like it's us and PSG going in for him.

looks from what the reports are saying that we're in the driving seat but we know that these things can change well you know next summer is who else is looking at him or Bayern Munich looking to get somebody in to replace Alise or something like that you know so a city looking at him or city looking at him exactly so I actually think I understand that there's not loads of games and I always talk about the 150 don't they well it's

It's obviously nothing like that.

Well, this is the thing about the last sort of five to 10 years where we are fairly routinely up and challenging for leagues and champions leagues.

And we go into most seasons thinking we can win one, if not both of these.

And 10 years ago, you could take a risk on sort of the next big thing coming through.

Like even Amani was a little bit risky at the time because he was patchy for Southampton.

Obviously he came in, he was world class straight away.

But I think Liverpool at that time, which was a team finishing around fourth and fifth every year,

You could say, well, we're happy for you to be a little bit of development on our watch, which feels like, well, we can't do that now.

We need the oven-ready player.

But to get the oven-ready world-class winger, you're paying well over £100 million.

So I'm happy to take a bit of a risk.

I'm going to think double figures, goals and assists in Germany at 19.

is so impressive and if you think back to the sort of analogy I was making earlier where we play that Sevilla Europa League final with so little pace up front and well the obvious thing to do is find out who the next Mane and who the next Salah are and sign them now which is obviously a lot easier said than done but for all the world it looks like off his first season that he could be the next big thing and if he is we need to get him now.

Yeah, sorry, just on that point about the output, it's not as if we're losing 20 goals in Mo Salah, we lost them this season, so we are starting from this point.

Of course we need to score more goals, but it's like anything we get in now is adding to our goals for next year, so if we were losing Salah and we still scored 30 goals, I would say this is a lot more of a risk than...

because what are the chances he comes in and does that?

Well, probably almost zero in his first season.