Report: £80m Liverpool target ‘is expected to leave’ current club; he could be ‘perfect’ for Reds

Manchester United are also believed to be firmly in the mix for Wharton’s signature, and while Palace are understandably determined to hold onto him, it’s reported that the England international is eyeing an exit from south London ‘in the hope of testing himself at a higher level’.

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Could Liverpool persuade Palace to sell Wharton this summer?

Liverpool have a reasonably healthy stock of midfielders as things stand, but if either or both of Jones or Mac Allister were to depart, that could force sporting director Richard Hughes to treat the position with greater priority.

Homegrown, 22 years old and proven in the Premier League, Wharton immediately ticks several important boxes for the Reds, and Crook’s report for talkSPORT says that he ‘provides the perfect foil’ for what Arne Slot needs in the middle of the park.

Whilst playing primarily as a defensive midfielder, the Palace dynamo is more of a creative than a destructive presence, as his underlying statistics from this season (compared to top-flight positional peers) would suggest (see table below, with data from Fotmob).

He certainly wouldn’t come cheap, but he could give Liverpool a hugely influential midfield presence for a number of years if they were to win the race for his signature.

As Hughes knows all too well from the doomed pursuit of Marc Guehi last summer, the Selhurst Park hierarchy can be tricky negotiators, and you can be sure that it’d take all of his powers of persuasion to convince the Eagles to sell Wharton.

His performance at Anfield next week will command particularly close attention from the Reds’ powerbrokers.