Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp admits his previous comments on heavy spending were wrong in the wake of the Reds' £111m agreement to sign Moises Caicedo from Brighton.
Caicedo is set to become the most expensive signing in the history of English football after Liverpool agreed to pay Brighton £111m to sign the midfielder, but critics were quick to recall Klopp's previous criticisms of such heavy spending.
Indeed, in 2016, Klopp was left stunned by Manchester United's £89m acquisition of Paul Pogba - a world record at the time - and vowed he would never pull the trigger on such a deal.
"The day that this is football, I'm not in a job anymore, because the game is about playing together," Klopp said at the time. "Other clubs can go out and spend more money and collect top players. I want to do it differently. I would even do it differently if I could spend that money."
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Having now agreed to sign Caicedo for £111m in the same summer as Dominik Szoboszlai and Alexis Mac Allister moved to Liverpool for a combined £95m, Klopp confessed the market has been thrown into turmoil since his comments on Pogba.
"Everything changed," he told a press conference on Friday. "Do I like it? No, but did I realise I was wrong? Definitely. Definitely. That's the way it goes. It's not great, it's not top. Saudi Arabia will not help with that. I'm not blaming it, but another market with a lot of money.
"In the end, we as a club, we have to try make sure that we, with our resources, get the best possible team together. We try everything to bring together the best squad for us, and we are not in dreamland, so it's not like we can just point at players and bring them in.
"If people want to throw my quotes from five or six years ago at me, no problem. That's what I thought that day, and I realise now I was wrong, easy to admit that."
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This article was originally published on 90min as Jurgen Klopp: I was wrong about huge transfer fees.