‘He always spoke about Liverpool’: The inside story of Bradley Barcola’s rise to the top

“As a kid, he always spoke to me about Liverpool,” says one of Bradley Barcola’s youth coaches, Amaury Barlet. No wonder that when the Merseyside club came knocking, the forward “didn’t ask any questions”, as he said in his first interview after a £123m (€143m) move to Anfield.

Barcola joined after three seasons with Paris Saint-Germain but came through the ranks at Lyon, where interviews are conducted with returning youth players at the start of each campaign. It was during one such discussion that Barcola made his revelation to Barlet. “When he was 15, 16, it was his dream ,” Barlet says. “Maybe that changed when he was 19 or 20 …” Or perhaps not.