Decoding Richard Hughes’ transfers and what they mean for Liverpool

A sporting director’s job is complicated, but whether they are deemed to be a success usually comes down to one thing: transfers. 

Maintaining Liverpool’s impressive record in the market will be one of the top priorities for Richard Hughes, whose arrival as sporting director was confirmed on Wednesday. 

He will need help. At any club, the recruitment and scouting department plays a key role in player identification — Liverpool’s is led by head of recruitment Dave Fallows and chief scout Barry Hunter. Meanwhile, the manager will have their own say and opportunities may arrive via contacts and agents. The sporting director leads the operation, but not every transfer is their idea. 

Hughes will be operating with a bigger budget and in a wider marketplace at Liverpool than he did at Bournemouth, where most of his deals after being appointed sporting director in 2016 came from the domestic market. Of first-team signings, including loans, 48 out of 62 were from England (27 from the Premier League, 19 from the Championship, and two from League One). Recruiting the next up-and-coming young stars in the second tier became a strong theme.

The takeover of Bill Foley in 2022 and the subsequent shift in money available allowed the club to expand their horizons and attack the European market. Italian football is one of Hughes’ areas of expertise: he played for Atalanta’s youth teams and is fluent in the language. Recent deals for Justin Kluivert (AS Roma), Hamed Traore (Sassuolo) and Matias Vina (AS Roma) have had varying degrees of success.

The Athletic looked at Bournemouth’s transfer business in the Hughes era to assess how successful the transfer department was under his regime.

The Liverpool connection

Hughes’ relationship with sporting director Michael Edwards dates back to their time at Portsmouth when the former was a player and the latter a junior analyst. They were far from strangers in their respective roles at Liverpool and Bournemouth either. 

During his tenure, Bournemouth signed six players from Liverpool — three permanently and three on loan — which represents the most business Hughes did with a single club. 

Deals for youngsters Jordon Ibe (£15million) and Brad Smith (£6m) were led by Hughes during his first summer window (2016), but neither lived up to their transfer fee. 

Smith, who now plays for MLS side Houston Dynamos, only made 11 appearances in his four-year spell on the south coast. The left-back was loaned to Seattle Sounders and Cardiff City before signing permanently for the former in 2020. 

Ibe was much more involved but struggled to fulfil the potential he showed in flashes at Anfield. He managed five goals and nine assists in 92 appearances and was released in 2020, having fallen out of favour. He was also receiving treatment to improve his mental health. Ibe subsequently had an equally unhappy spell at Derby and Turkish club Adanaspor; he signed for non-league Ebbsfleet last October but has hardly featured since. 

When Bournemouth spent an initial £19m on Dominic Solanke, another Hughes-led signing, in January 2019, the initial signs suggested it was another move which had backfired. He scored just four goals in his first 46 appearances for the club, but 15 goals in the Championship in 2020-21 proved a turning point. 

Solanke, now 26, has developed into an elite striker. His 29 goals fired Bournemouth to promotion in 2022 and he has upped his return of six in the league last season to 15 from 28 top-flight appearances in 2023-24.

Nathaniel Clyne signed on loan from Liverpool in the same window, while Nathaniel Phillips and Harry Wilson have also made the temporary switch. Wilson was a regular — scoring seven league goals in 31 appearances — when Bournemouth were relegated from the top flight in 2019-20. Phillips, meanwhile, was part of the second half of the 2021-22 promotion campaign.

Finding value in the market

Bournemouth have never quite been the plucky, cash-strapped club that some portrayed them as, but they still have to make every pound count in the transfer market.

In that sense, Bournemouth’s biggest successes during Hughes’ time were the likes of Aaron Ramsdale (signed for around £800,000 from League One Sheffield United in January 2017) and Nathan Ake (who arrived for a far bigger fee at £20m from Chelsea, also in 2017, but was sold for over twice that sum to Manchester City three years later). Hughes was not the main driving force behind those deals but clearly had a role to play in securing them. 

Bournemouth hope young centre-back Illia Zabarnyi is their next Ake. The 21-year-old centre-back arrived in January 2023 for £24m and has impressed, with the club hoping he will develop into a top-six Premier League player. 

Alex Scott, signed from Bristol City last summer for around £20m, is another they will have high hopes for. A knee injury meant the 20-year-old’s season did not begin until October, but he has already offered exciting glimpses that he has an elite future. The same applies to Milos Kerkez, a 19-year-old left-back who joined from AZ Alkmaar for a fee reported to be around £15m last summer.

Alex Scott is tipped for big things (Michael Steele/Getty Images)

This trio fit a pattern of Bournemouth plundering either the English second-tier or less glamorous European markets to find the best value. Antoine Semenyo (Bristol City) and Marcus Tavernier (Middlesbrough) have also proven to be astute buys since joining in 2022 for £10.5m and £12.5m respectively, while previously, midfielders Lewis Cook (£7m from Leeds in 2016) and Philip Billing (£15m from Huddersfield in 2019) have also played significant roles.

David Brooks (£11.5m from Sheffield United in 2018) was another who seemed fast-tracked for the top — Liverpool had also watched his progress at Sheffield United — only for his cancer diagnosis to put his career on hiatus. He has since returned to first-team football and is currently on loan at Southampton.

Learning from mistakes

Hughes outlined his theory about the success rate of sporting directors in 2020.

“By pure statistics and numbers, there are going to be ones that are not necessarily successful because no one is going to get 100 per cent right,” he said. “Some people say if you get two out of three right, you’re doing well.”

By and large, Hughes succeeded according to those parameters at Bournemouth. The difference at Liverpool — whose owner, Fenway Sports Group, is also keen to maximise every pound spent in the transfer market — is that errors will inevitably bring more public scrutiny.

Bournemouth’s forays into the market after they first won promotion in 2015 were far from unanimously successful and a pattern emerged in those early seasons in the top tier of manager Eddie Howe preferring to rely on the players who had secured Premier League football. Ibe was the most high-profile mistake given the £15m fee.

Foley has changed the club’s ambitions in the market, expanding their reach into new territories and for bigger sums. They have spent £200m in that period, largely on young, international talent, but not all have reaped instant dividends.

The two biggest question marks relate to the £20m deals for Tyler Adams and Traore. Adams, a U.S. international signed from Leeds, only made his debut as a substitute against Luton earlier this month due to a long-term injury. Traore, who arrived on an initial loan which was made permanent, made only three Premier League appearances this season totalling 44 minutes before being loaned to Napoli on loan, with an option to make the deal permanent. 

Selling for the best money

A sporting director’s role is not only about purchases but also sales. To generate funds, abide by profit and sustainability rules (PSR) and evolve the squad, players have to be moved on. 

Edwards was widely praised in this area by Liverpool fans, ironically largely because of the deals he struck with Bournemouth for Ibe, Smith and Solanke, together with Rhian Brewster’s £23.5m move to Sheffield United in 2020.

For Hughes, the most notable success is Ake, but he is not the only one. Ramsdale (£18.5m to Sheffield United) and Callum Wilson (£20m to Newcastle) also represented significant profits given they cost only £4m combined (albeit Wilson was signed before Hughes’ appointment as sporting director). 

Callum Wilson was sold to Newcastle for a big profit (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)

The 2019 summer sales of centre-back Tyrone Mings to Aston Villa and French forward Lys Mousset to Sheffield United both also represented exceptional value. 

Mings signed for £8m from Ipswich in 2015 but only managed 23 appearances — 17 in the Premier League — in four injury-hit seasons. The defender, who had been another Hughes-led deal, joined Villa on loan for the second part of the 2018-19 campaign, helping them to secure promotion to the Premier League. As a result, they paid big money — an initial £20m rising to £26.5m — to sign him permanently.

They virtually doubled their money on Mousset, too, despite the striker failing to nail down a place in Bournemouth’s starting XI. Sheffield United agreed to pay £10m for a striker who had scored only three league goals in 58 Premier League appearances.

Arnaut Danjuma was another success. He caught fire in the Championship in 2020-21, a season after arriving for £13.5m, and his record convinced Villarreal to spend £20m on him in 2021. It was an excellent return on a player who had been inconsistent in his only season of Premier League football. 

(Top photos: Dominic Solanke, Richard Hughes and Illia Zabarnyi; by Getty Images)