Rumour Mongering: Liverpool Ready to Trigger £85M Kudus Release Clause

West Ham’s 23-year-old Ghanaian winger Mohammed Kudus is being linked with Liverpool but the proposed fee will raise eyebrows.

With manager Jürgen Klopp departing the club while former sporting director Michael Edwards returns to oversee the club with Dutch manager Arne Slot lined up to take over, Liverpool are heading into their most uncertain offseason in recent years.

Nobody on the outside quite knows what to expect from the club, and into this void of uncertainty there’s plenty of room for speculation. The latest—and perhaps the biggest by proposed transfer fee—arrives this week via Ghanaian claims that Mohammed Kudus is a top target for the Reds.

The 23-year-old West Ham winger was linked lightly with the Reds before ending up at West Ham last summer, and Slot is also speculated to be amongst his admirers from Kudus time at Ajax previously. At least that’s the claim from Ghanaian journalist Ibrahim Daara.

A quite hefty £85M release clause is also said to be involved—a fee that would match the one paid for Darwin Nuñez—and Liverpool are said to be ready to trigger it and get the deal done as soon as the 2023-24 season comes to a close.

Release clauses and early deals do perhaps sound like Liverpool’s happy place, and Kudus is a quality player with room to grow. Such a deal, though, would mark the very top end of the market for a player of his quality, one inflated by dealing with a Premier League side, and most certainly wouldn’t represent good value.

There have also been claims from West Ham watchers that the London club’s standard practice isn’t to include release clauses that are active in the two summers following a player’s signing—though these claims are based around how the club tend to operate rather than insight into Kudus’s case in particular.

All of which is to say that there really isn’t much on either side of this developing rumour that screams highly reliable and trustworthy. Still, given the player’s quality, past links, and the size of the proposed fee there feels a need to at least acknowledge its existence.