Liverpool's transfer window: How sporting director Richard Hughes plotted post-Jurgen Klopp life and record-breaking summer spend

Richard Hughes took on the seemingly impossible job when agreeing to become Liverpool sporting director in March last year.

This summer the Scot has broken the British transfer record by signing Alexander Isak, while overseeing the biggest transfer spend in the club's history.

This is how he did it.

After Michael Edwards agreed to return to Liverpool under a new, expanded brief of chief executive of football for Fenway Sports Group [FSG] in March 2024, the very first thing he did was pick up the phone to Hughes, on gardening leave at the time having just decided to quit as Bournemouth's technical director.

The duo's close relationship dates back some 20 years to when Hughes was a hard-working midfielder and captain of Harry Redknapp's exciting Portsmouth side and Edwards a performance analyst on the south coast, with the two, both deep thinkers, striking up an immediate bond over analysing the game.

Not officially due to start his role until June 2024, and with a to-do list that not only included negotiating new contracts for three of Liverpool's biggest stars - Trent Alexander-Arnold, Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah - but also somehow finding a successor to Jurgen Klopp, the new man appeared to have been handed a hospital pass.

The latter was the more urgent priority given Klopp's near decade-long stay at Anfield was coming to an end, although Liverpool had already been dealt a blow with the news Xabi Alonso - their former midfielder who had been heavily tipped to replace the German - would be staying as Bayer Leverkusen manager.

Ruben Amorim, one of Europe's most sought-after young coaches having guided Sporting Lisbon to the brink of a second Portuguese title, was now reportedly the front runner for the role, but Hughes had other ideas.

Having pored over the data supplied to him by the club's director of research, Will Spearman, Hughes knew there was only one candidate he wanted to speak to and in April flew to the Netherlands to meet Feyenoord head coach Arne Slot at his home in Zwolle.

The Dutchman had scored highly when it came to both improving players and keeping them fit, while importantly unlike with Amorim, he played the same formation and style of football as Klopp.

Slot has recounted how Hughes came to that first meeting armed with huge folders of detailed information on him and his team, joking the Scot knew stuff about him even he did not.

"Liverpool were so clear they wanted to have me, and they knew everything about me," he said. "Immediately it was: 'OK.' Richard knew many, many, many games and many of the assessments I've made during games - the changes I made in tactics. Julian [Ward, FSG's technical director] visited the [Feyenoord] training ground and spoke with a lot of people trying to get some knowledge for the club and how I worked. There was not a stone unturned."

To the outside world, Slot's appointment was viewed as a risk given he had relatively little Champions League experience and only won two major trophies in Holland. Hughes, though, backed his judgement, just as he did when taking the unpopular decision not to stick with his friend Gary O'Neil as Bournemouth manager in the summer of 2023, but to go with the relatively unknown Basque Andoni Iraola.

Both would turn out to be shrewd appointments. However, with Liverpool's underwhelming summer 2024 transfer window seeing the arrival of only two players, one of whom in Giorgi Mamardashvili immediately loaned out and the other in Federico Chiesa arriving under an injury cloud, the pressure from outside was already mounting.

Hughes' early standing with the club's supporters was not helped either by his failure to get the £51m Martin Zubimendi deal over the line after flying to Spain in August having been assured by the holding midfielder he wanted to move to Anfield, only for a late change of heart from the Spain international.

However, while many Reds supporters fumed over the club's lack of transfer activity, Hughes stayed cool in the knowledge Slot's training-ground coaching - including the pivotal decision to drop Ryan Gravenberch back as a No 6 - would improve a squad which had led the Premier League table at the start of that April.

And so the duo agreed to play the 2024-25 season with Klopp's squad, allowing Slot to make judgement calls on players at the end of that campaign.

"Jurgen left the team in a good place and we are trying to build from there," said Slot on the eve of the season. "We're not changing everything. Actually, we [didn't] change that much because many things were already good."

Either way, all eyes were on Hughes in the opening weeks of the campaign to see how the team would perform without Klopp on the touchline, but despite Slot making a record-breaking start to life as Liverpool head coach, the Scot now needed to secure the futures of the club's 'big three'.

Van Dijk, Salah and Alexander-Arnold's contracts all expired the following summer, meaning all three could start negotiating with foreign clubs as early as January 2025.

Hughes confided he was hopeful of keeping one of the trio, but as the season progressed, even that prospect looked bleak with Alexander-Arnold and Van Dijk's camps both silent, unlike Salah, who revealed "no one" from Liverpool had talked to him and it would "probably" be his last season at the club in an on-pitch interview with Sky after a 3-0 win at Old Trafford in September.

The Egypt forward, in the midst of his best-ever season at Anfield, kept the heat on Hughes by revealing he had still to be offered a new deal and was "probably more out than in" after his double helped keep the Reds top of the Premier League with a comeback win at Southampton last November.

The Glaswegian has a reputation as a "fierce negotiator" who is ice-cool even in the most pressurised situations, described by one agent as a "robot", while his detailed knowledge of the game is a huge asset when it comes to getting a deal over the line.