At one point last season, it looked as though Liverpool would mount a serious challenge for the Premier League title, though securing a top-four finish still represented a decent campaign for the Merseyside outfit.
Qualifying for the Champions League, albeit that they still have a two-legged tie to negotiate, now enables the Reds to compete in a different market when it comes to transfers, so it will be interesting to see how they approach things this summer.
According to reports in the Daily Star, Jürgen Klopp is prepared to go big, targeting his former Borussia Dortmund attacker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in a massive £61.3m deal.
PIERRE-EMERICK AUBAMEYANG
It would be fair to say that the Gabonese international is a genuinely world-class striker, regularly being linked with moves to the likes of Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain.
This is hardly surprising given his form over the course of the last couple of Bundesliga campaigns, with the 28-year-old scoring at a rate of not-far-shy of one goal per game:
In fact, even Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski was unable to keep pace with the lightning-fast forward in the top-flight scoring charts in 2016/17, netting 30 times to Aubameyang’s 31.
Harry Kane’s goals have been crucial in establishing Tottenham as title contenders in recent times and Klopp probably feels that bringing in a similarly-prolific striker could help to do the same for the Anfield club: