Liverpool’s deadline is being spent at the expensive end.
Bradley Barcola is arriving from PSG for an initial £100m that could rise to £120m, bids for Yankuba Minteh have been rejected twice, and an approach for Ismaïla Sarr was rebuffed by Crystal Palace, who insist he isn’t for sale.
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Before 11pm on Tuesday, Andoni Iraola still needs a right winger to fill Mohamed Salah’s place.
The other half of any deadline is quieter and rarely makes the front of the transfer trackers.
Liverpool have a group of academy forwards who scored heavily in Premier League 2 last season and now need to find out whether that means anything at senior level.
Youth football rewards technique.
The EFL rewards whoever can still stand up in the 78th minute.
Keyrol Figueroa is the one heading out.
As per The Athletic, the 20-year-old striker is joining Port Vale on loan for the season, with Liverpool wanting regular first-team minutes in League Two rather than another year of dominating age-group fixtures.
His numbers explain the interest.
Figueroa scored 11 goals in 732 Premier League 2 minutes last season, a goal roughly every 66 minutes, with an average rating of 7.22.
Across all U21 competitions the tally was 12 in 781 minutes.
By late January he was the joint leading scorer in PL2 alongside Chelsea’s Shumaira Mheuka, having managed nine in a six-game run off just 599 league minutes.
Very few strikers in League Two will arrive this week with a scoring rate like that attached to their name, even allowing for the level.
That form drew interest from abroad.
Porto were reported in January to be pursuing a loan with a €4m option to buy, but Liverpool preferred a move within England and tied him to fresh terms over the summer before sanctioning anything.
He was left out of the senior squad’s USA tour in July, trained instead with the U21s in Slovenia, and scored twice in a 4-2 friendly win over NK Celje.
Figueroa joined Liverpool’s academy at under-14 level and signed his first professional contract in 2024.
He’s yet to make a senior appearance, though he was on the bench for last season’s Carabao Cup exit against Crystal Palace.
His father, Maynor, spent five years at Wigan Athletic and won an FA Cup there, which is a useful reference point for a son now being sent to learn the parts of English football that don’t show up in academy fixtures.
There’s an international layer too.
Figueroa played youth football for the United States before switching to Honduras, his country of birth, earlier this year.
Regular senior minutes at Vale Park strengthen that case as much as anything at Kirkby would.
For Port Vale, it’s a free striker with a proven scoring habit.
For Liverpool, it’s the first real test of whether the habit travels.
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