Why Liverpool trust Richard Hughes, the man who signed Slot and Iraola
Sporting director who built team at Bournemouth and played a key role in bringing new manager to Anfield prefers clever deals and letting players develop to flashy signings
Robertson and Elliott, left, were targets for Hughes, right, when he was at Bournemouth. Gravenberch, centre, has been a revelation for Liverpool this season
Jonathan Northcroft
, Football Correspondent
Friday January 31 2025, 11.30pm GMT, The Sunday Times
Last spring, in his old, characterful mansion house in the centre of Zwolle, Arne Slot sat down with Richard Hughes. Daniel Levy had attempted the same mission the previous year but was unable to persuade Slot to leave Feyenoord.
A colleague believes Hughes “should be getting f***ing knighted” for what happened next. It was the Scotsman’s first major task as Liverpool’s sporting director and he nailed it, that afternoon, in Slot’s family home. Two retired midfielders, multilingual, analytical and from middle-class backgrounds, bonded over common ground, not least their addiction to the game.
“I had a very good relationship from the start with Richard, which is one of the reasons I loved to join the club,” Slot said on why he chose Liverpool.
In that meeting, his big question was “why me?” Glad you asked, Hughes replied, laying down a 60-page dossier Liverpool compiled on him. When Slot opined that one of his strengths was improving players, Hughes said “we agree” and directed him to the section packed with stats and personal testimonies which supported that view. Slot was blown away.
The previous summer, Hughes led another head coach hire. Then, as Bournemouth’s technical director, he made a bold proposal to the owner Bill Foley that he should replace Gary O’Neil with Andoni Iraola. O’Neil is Hughes’s friend but business is business. Iraola was simply further along in his career trajectory and Hughes had the contacts and relationships in Spain to believe he could get him.
Any sane observer would conclude that someone able to sign the Premier League’s two hottest coaches, one after another, was quite good at their job. A glance at Liverpool’s league position and the riches in the Bournemouth squad Hughes assembled might strengthen that belief.
But there is madness in the football debate caused by a modern need for gratification through transfers. Hughes is called “useless” and “missing” by a section of Liverpool fans on social media for (in their minds) not doing enough of them. Forget results, forget Slot’s caviar football: where are our deals?
Slot said the chance to work alongside Hughes was one of the reasons why he left Feyenoord for Liverpool
ANDREW POWELL/LIVERPOOL FC VIA GETTY IMAGES
It is not a view shared by Michael Edwards, chief executive of football at Liverpool’s owners, FSG. He was arguably the best sporting director the Premier League has had when he did Hughes’s job from 2016 to 2022, having joined the club in 2011. Famed for deals ahead of the curve his belief is that appointing Hughes last March was another example. After all, if Hughes was at still Bournemouth big clubs would be fighting to hire him given how the project he put together is performing.
Edwards and Hughes go back two decades to when Edwards was Portsmouth’s performance analyst and Hughes their captain. After training, Pompey’s senior pros would file into Edwards’ room: O’Neil, Hughes, Matt Taylor, David James and — carrying a copy of the Times or Guardian, for which he was teased — Eddie Howe. These were the guys who most loved football and getting into the detail of the game.
Howe brought Hughes into Bournemouth’s recruitment set-up after his retirement from playing and Hughes became Bournemouth technical director in 2014. Edwards, building Liverpool at the time, was struck by how often he ran into his old friend during the final yards of deals.
Bournemouth were Liverpool’s main competition when he signed Joe Gomez, Andrew Robertson and Harvey Elliott. When he went for Lloyd Kelly at Bristol City, Hughes got there first: that one still rankles. David Brooks and Ryan Christie were others Edwards was considering when Bournemouth beat them to the punch. Before he joined Liverpool, exploiting doubts at Southampton about the player, Hughes almost pulled off a remarkable deal for Sadio Mané.
Edwards noticed that he and Hughes were often pursuing the same players, such as Elliott
IAN STEPHEN/SPORTIMAGE
Back when Virgil van Dijk was at Celtic, Hughes told Edwards to sign him. He was a sounding board when Edwards was plotting the recruitment of Mohamed Salah and Alisson from Roma. Raised in Italy (where his father Kevin worked in publishing) Hughes was a youth player at Atalanta, and later a Serie A pundit for BT Sport, and he was raving to Edwards about Roberto De Zerbi long before De Zerbi’s breakthrough job at Sassuolo.
De Zerbi had committed to joining Bournemouth, only for a delay with Foley’s takeover to allow Brighton the opportunity to hire him first.
Knowing all this, and remembering how Hughes stood out among their peers at Premier League sporting director meetings, Edwards could not understand why he was not prime target when Liverpool began headhunting a new sporting director last season. Candidates being interviewed, such as Paul Mitchell and Markus Krösche, would not fit the club and its culture nearly so well, Edwards believed. And so when FSG brought Edwards back last March, recruiting Hughes was his key decision.
A sparky and forthright character, Edwards acknowledges Hughes has soft skills superior to his own and when the pair — plus Will Spearman’s data department — agreed Slot was the outstanding candidate to replace Jürgen Klopp, Edwards saw Hughes as best equipped to sell Slot Liverpool’s project face-to-face.
Liverpool have a checklist of about 20 different elements they seek in a head coach. Interestingly in one category, player availability, another candidate — Ruben Amorim — rated best in Europe. But Slot still scored very highly there and topped nearly all the others, especially impressing in Liverpool’s model measuring over-performance and improvement of players.
Hughes needed no convincing about the latter. At Bournemouth, he got to know Slot’s work only too well, signing two talents Slot developed at Feyenoord — Marcos Senesi and (via Leeds) Luis Sinisterra — and pursuing others such as Marcus Pedersen and Quilindschy Hartman. He ended up telling Bournemouth’s scouts to stop recommending Feyenoord players “because it’s the coach there who makes them look good”.
Slot’s ability to improve players has resulted in Gravenberch becoming one of Europe’s best holding midfielders
MARC ATKINS/GETTY IMAGES
Criticism of Hughes began after he was part of a two-man delegation who flew to San Sebastian in late July to try to sign Martín Zubimendi but returned empty handed, after Zubimendi decided he could not bring himself to put in the transfer request necessary to trigger a €60million buyout clause at his boyhood club, Real Sociedad.
It intensified when Liverpool signalled they would not be pursuing secondary targets. Hughes assessed the market and decided options such as Manuel Ugarte were not appropriate for Slot’s dynamic, ball-progressing, possession-based style and Liverpool already had a player with the very profile of the type of No6 Slot needed.
That was Ryan Gravenberch. He was late returning for pre-season so Slot needed a little time to work with him to be convinced — but very soon was. That ability to improve footballers has allowed Slot to nurture Gravenberch into arguably Europe’s best holding player, in the injury absence of Manchester City’s Rodri. “It was clear [improving players] was one of Arne’s superpowers so why would you stop him using it by just buying?” a source said, regarding Hughes’s measured approach to transfers at Liverpool.
They point to the deals Hughes has done. To meet Slot’s demand for six top attackers he signed the best Italian talent of his generation, Federico Chiesa, for a knockdown £10million. It was factored in that, after a couple of injury-hit seasons, Chiesa would arrive lacking fitness. The target was always for him to be properly ready by January, and
against PSV Eindhoven on Wednesday he played his first 90 minutes for Liverpool.
Kerkez is one Bournemouth player signed by Hughes who is now coveted by some of Europe’s biggest clubs
ROBIN JONES/AFC BOURNEMOUTH VIA GETTY IMAGES
Hughes also signed Giorgi Mamardashvili, assessed by Liverpool’s scouting and data to have been best young goalkeeper in the world over the previous 12 months. It was for the “mad” price of £25million — exploiting financial problems at Valencia, where Mamardashvili remained on loan for 2024-25. The Georgian represents good forward planning given Alisson, now 32, will soon enter the final two years of his contract.
At Liverpool’s AXA Training Centre, where his office on the first floor is next door to Slot’s, Hughes has reorganised departments and revamped staff, installing David Woodfine as assistant sporting director and recruiting Mark Burchill and Craig McKee as senior scouts. Both helped him assemble a Bournemouth squad stocked with talents, such as Antoine Semenyo and Milos Kerkez, coveted by big clubs.
And then there is sales, the underestimated part of a sporting director’s job. Bringing in €47million for Sepp van den Berg and Fabio Carvalho seems business almost Edwards-esque. Again, you look back to Hughes’s work at Bournemouth: “flipping” Tyrone Mings (signed for £8million, sold for £25million), Aaron Ramsdale (signed for £800,000, sold for £18.5million) and others.
Asked to describe himself Edwards might say, albeit with a smile, “ruthless”. If you know him, you know friendship would be bottom of his reasons for making business decisions. It was not why Hughes was hired. But their close relationship might help Liverpool’s ownership and football department navigate, with a united front, the treacherous waters around Salah, Van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold. That all three ended last season with only 12 months on their contracts was not a problem of Hughes and Edwards’s making. Like being “thrown a shit sandwich” is one well-placed view.
Liverpool want the trio to stay and Hughes is leading negotiations to try to make that happen but players have got to want to stay. Alexander-Arnold is considering interest from Real Madrid and the first time Salah clarified his desire to remain at Liverpool was on the pitch at Old Trafford, in a TV interview after Liverpool won there in September.
At Liverpool, where there is no state or oligarch funding, they know “you can’t spend the money twice” and as much as, for example, Salah, is valued, no player can be handed a contract that risks the club’s financial health and long-term stability. An example borne in mind is the mess Arsenal got into after handing mega-deals to Mesut Özil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
Liverpool don’t envisage being active before the end of this window — only something completely out of the blue would change things. They believe in their squad, its quality, its depth, and see no sense in major changes until the futures of the big three are resolved.
However, their long-term work involves succession-planning for every position and if any of the trio leave, the list of options to replace them will be at the ready. But the view is that the surest way to retain stars is by creating football conditions that make them want to be there, and appointing the right head coach is the start.
The man who landed Slot has much to do but “useless?” His doings so far don’t suggest that.
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