Mauricio Pochettino could be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja vu after seeing Alexis Mac Allister sign for Liverpool.
The new Chelsea manager had made a late swoop for his compatriot, report The Times, only to be left disappointed, with the Argentina international’s preference being to work with Jurgen Klopp at Anfield.
While the fee for the 24-year-old is undisclosed, it has been reported to be as low as £35m courtesy of a release clause inserted in the new contract Mac Allister penned last October. Meanwhile, the World Cup winner will wear the No.10 shirt at Anfield.
This isn’t the first time a South American No.10 has snubbed Pochettino’s advances in favour of a cut-price switch to Liverpool. The same thing happened back in January 2013 when the Reds landed Philippe Coutinho from Inter Milan.
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The Brazilian had spent half a season playing for Pochettino on loan at Espanyol in the second half of the 2011/12 season. With the Argentine taking over as Southampton manager in January 2013, he quickly decided he wanted to reunite with Coutinho.
Southampton even had a £10.2m bid accepted for Coutinho by Inter, only to be pipped to the post by Liverpool. And Pochettino would later brush off missing out on the player.
“I am not frustrated about not being able to sign him,” he said. “I knew there was a small chance he would come here, but overall I have not had much time to consider new signings,” he said.
“I am very happy with the squad which is available to me. We all know who Coutinho is, and that he is a quality player. However, there are other factors when we want to sign a player.”
Coutinho would then actually reject Pochettino's advances for a second time in the summer of 2019, opting to join Bayern Munich on loan from Barcelona rather than his Tottenham Hotspur side.
While his fortunes since will hardly have made Pochettino regret missing out on his signature four years ago, it will have been a different story the first time around when Liverpool landed the Brazil international in 2013. The playmaker would end up returning 54 goals and 43 assists from 201 appearances during five years with the Reds, before completing a club-record £142m move to Barcelona in January 2018.
Now, 10 years on from first being snubbed by the Brazilian, history has repeated itself with a South American No.10 declining Pochettino’s advances in favour of Liverpool.
And in a further coincidence between the two transfers, one of Mac Allister’s representatives is Juan Manuel Gemelli, who represents a number of high-profile South American players and was actually involved in the deal which brought Coutinho to Anfield from Inter in the first place. Club bosses have a longstanding relationship with the agent as a result of that switch a decade ago, which is believed to have aided with their signing of Mac Allister.
Liverpool bosses can now only hope that Mac Allister is able to follow in Coutinho’s footsteps and be equally successful at Anfield, as Pochettino is left watching on enviously from Stamford Bridge. Considering he is already a proven Premier League player, and World Cup winner too, in contrast to a then unproven 20-year-old, the odds are stacked firmly in Mac Allister favour.
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