Jorg Schmadtke, Liverpool’s new sporting director, said he regretted selling Victor Osimhen when he was still a young player at Wolfsburg.
The Nigerian striker was not quite the ruthless player he is now while playing for Wolfsburg in the German Bundesliga under the watchful eye of Jorg Schmadtke, Wolfsburg’s director of sports at the time.
He was allowed to join the Belgian club Charleroi on a season-long loan after going 16 games without scoring with the German team where he had just started his professional career, where he thrived and scored 20 goals in all competitions during the 2018-19 season.
His performance for Charleroi earned him a $3 million transfer fee to the German club.
The 24-year-old Nigeria international left Charleroi for Lille after the French club made a £19 million bid for him. In September 2020, he will join Napoli for a fee of more than £70 million.
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Victor Osimhen is now one of Europe’s most highly rated strikers, and Schmadtke, who will return to Liverpool as the man in charge of transfers this summer, can’t stop regretting not being patient with the Nigerian star while at Wolfsburg.
Interestingly, one of Schmadtke’s first tasks as Liverpool’s sporting director is to persuade Osimhen to join the Premier League club this summer.
It was previously reported that Liverpool and other elite clubs attempted to sign Osimhen in 2020, but the Nigerian charismatic striker chose to join Napoli even though they were not competing in the Champions League at the time.
With his assistance, Napoli won the Scudetto for the first time in 33 years, and he also assisted the Italian team in reaching the quarter-finals of the Champions League for the first time in the club’s history.
Schmadtke admitted that authorising the sale of Osimhen while at Wolfsburg was a mistake ahead of his return to Liverpool as the club’s sporting director.
“In retrospect, it wasn’t a wise decision.” “When I arrived, he [Osimhen] was limping and running in circles,” he explained to Kicker.
“I was told that the strikers we had were insufficient. The most important lesson is that some transfers require patience.”
