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Steven Gerrard chose his words carefully. He’d done this dance before.
As Liverpool’s captain, talisman and most high-profile figure, he had grown used to his role as the club’s unofficial transfer fixer.
“It was the same ritual every summer,” Gerrard wrote in his 2016 autobiography. “The club would let me know which long-shot target they had in mind and then ask me to contact him.
“They thought that a request to consider moving to Liverpool would have more impact coming from me.”
In the summer of 2014, that "long-shot target" was Alexis Sanchez.
The Chile star, then of Barcelona, had been identified as the ideal replacement for Luis Suarez, who was heading to the Camp Nou after three-and-a-half incident-filled years on Merseyside.
Suarez had shone in his final season at Anfield, his 31 goals firing Brendan Rodgers’ side to the brink of an unlikely Premier League title win. Replacing him, Liverpool knew, would be close to impossible.
“We felt we needed to get a world-class operator, to go like-for-like,” Rodgers would tell talkSPORT, some years later.
“It was always going to be very difficult to replace Luis. Alexis was that player. We thought we had him."
Getty/GOALSanchez had done well enough at Barcelona, scoring 19 goals in the previous La Liga campaign, but Suarez’s arrival – and the creation of that incredible ‘MSN’ forward line with Lionel Messi and Neymar – meant his time was up.
He and Cesc Fabregas were the ones to be sacrificed, as Luis Enrique looked to construct a Champions League-winning side.
With Sanchez’s representatives indicating that the Premier League was where he wanted to be, Liverpool felt they had a good chance.
Initial discussions with Barcelona suggested a fee of around £30 million ($41m), and although the player’s wage demands were big, they were doable, given the exit of Suarez and the £65m ($88m) they were due to bank for it.
Gerrard, despite being away captaining England at the World Cup in Brazil, did what he could.
“I tried hard with Sanchez,” he wrote. “I was hoping I could ride the wave of our fantastic 2013-14 season.
“He was great in the way he responded; his English was good and we had some detailed text exchanges.”
Quickly, though, Liverpool’s captain realised there was a problem.
“We knew Arsene Wenger was also in the hunt,” Gerrard said. “Wenger had gone to Brazil to try and convince him.”
Arsenal had finished fourth that season, with Liverpool second, but Wenger’s pitch to Sanchez and his representatives was a convincing one.
The Gunners, he argued, were a more stable club, a better long-term bet for honours.
Liverpool’s 2013-14 season was thrilling, but ultimately they’d fallen short. And now their best player was leaving, while their captain had just turned 34 and was starting to wind down his career.
Getty/GOALDick Law, Arsenal’s former transfer and contract negotiator, felt there was another issue at play too.
“Liverpool were throwing a ton of money at him,” Law told GOAL in 2019, “but my understanding was that there was no real personal contact.
“My conclusion was that Sanchez felt like a makeweight in the Liverpool-Barcelona transfer negotiations for Suarez.”
While Rodgers and Ian Ayre, then Liverpool’s chief executive, based themselves in Rio de Janeiro for the World Cup, Wenger went mobile.
He followed Sanchez and his representatives to Cuiaba, to Sao Paolo and to Belo Horizonte, each time emphasising Arsenal’s desire to bring him to England.
For Gerrard, that meant disappointment, and accepting a couple of painful truths.
“Just when I thought we were getting somewhere, Sanchez pointed out, politely but honestly, that he appreciated my career was coming to an end and he felt he needed to be careful before signing a contract with Liverpool,” he wrote.
“Essentially, he wasn’t really certain of Liverpool’s future and had a lot more confidence in Arsenal.
“I appreciated the fact he was open and candid about his reasons. Being in London was another attraction for him and his girlfriend.”
That last reason was seized upon by Liverpool at the time, and has been used by Rodgers on multiple occasions since.
Getty/GOAL“Geography dictated where he wanted to go, simple as that,” he said in 2014. “It wasn’t due to a lack of ambition by the club, it was about where the player and his family wanted to live.”
Rodgers repeated that assertion to The Beautiful Game podcast in 2020, stating that: “I was led to believe that his partner at the time was keen to move to London.”
The harsher truth, however, is that Sanchez’s misgivings about Liverpool were correct.
He was right to wonder if they would be able to continue riding that wave under Rodgers, and smart to identify that Gerrard’s time at the club would soon come to an end.
And so he joined Arsenal.
“He would become one of the signings of the season,” said Gerrard. “And, well over a year later, I still wondered how Liverpool’s 2014-15 campaign might have turned out had Sanchez chosen us.”
In the end, Liverpool’s search for a Suarez replacement turned into a nightmare.
After Sanchez, they agreed a deal for Loic Remy, only for the Queens Park Rangers striker to fail a medical.
Swansea’s Wilfried Bony and Aston Villa’s Christian Benteke were deemed too expensive, while Rodgers, somewhat bizarrely, suggested privately that Karim Benzema was an option. Needless to say, the Real Madrid star didn’t come close to moving to Anfield.
And so Liverpool, having wanted a high-energy, high-pressing striker, ended up with the exact opposite.
Weeks after Sanchez settled in at Arsenal, Mario Balotelli rocked up at Anfield, with Rodgers promising to unlock a new, mature version.
Getty/GOALNo surprise how that turned out. Balotelli scored only one Premier League goal for Liverpool and was loaned back to AC Milan after a year.
Rickie Lambert, the Reds’ other forward signing that summer, was similarly ineffective.
And Sanchez? He scored 25 goals in his first season at Arsenal, including a screamer in the FA Cup final against Aston Villa.
“He’d have been perfect for us,” lamented Rodgers, who now reflects on the summer of 2014 as the moment things started to unravel for him at Liverpool.
His successor at Anfield, Jurgen Klopp, will run into Sanchez on Wednesday night, when the Reds take on Inter in their Champions League last-16 first leg at San Siro.
Inter will start with Lautaro Martinez and Edin Dzeko against Liverpool, but Sanchez could still have a big role to play off the bench – not that he’d be too happy with that.
“When I don't play, I'm like a caged lion,” he said recently. "If they let me play instead, I'm a monster.”
Consider yourselves warned, Liverpool.
Having left them disappointed in 2014, could Sanchez do the same in 2022?