2 years ago
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Photo by John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images
The 20-year-old Dutch defender is heading to Germany on loan for the 2022-23 season after signing a new Liverpool deal.
After putting pen to paper on a new Liverpool deal, 20-year-old Dutch centre half Sepp van den Berg is heading to Germany where he will spend the 2022-23 season with Schalke who are back in the Bundesliga after a year in the second flight.
Mid-table this time around is the target for the North Rhine club who were a fixture near the top of the Bundesliga for much of the current millennium but fell off over the last five years, taking on debt and slipping increasingly down the Bundesliga table.
That led to relegation in 2021, an event that caused fan riots and risked seeing the club crumble. However, having steadied themselves and earned promotion after just one season there are hopes now for a mid-table finish and comfortable survival.
For Van den Berg, it will be a step up from the year-and-a-half spent on loan with Preston in the Championship from January of 2021 through the end of last season. In 2019-20 he made four senior Liverpool appearances in the domestic cups.
He first signed for the Reds from PEC Zwole in the summer of 2019 as a highly-rated 17-year-old in a deal that saw Liverpool pay the Eredivise side £1.3M up front in a deal that could rise to around £4.5M if all of the add-ons are triggered.
