The teenage Genk goalkeeper now central to Liverpool succession planning

Liverpool have quietly moved to secure the future of their goalkeeping department, and the name at the centre of it belongs to someone most of the fanbase will never have heard say a word in English. Lucca Brughmans, an 18 year old shot stopper at Belgian side Genk, has a verbal agreement in place for a switch to Anfield worth a package of €35m, according to Fabrizio Romano, whose report built on earlier work from Belgian journalists Bob Faesen and Sacha Tavolieri.

A deal built on patience

What stands out here is not the fee, though €35m for a teenager who has never played outside Belgium will raise eyebrows. It is the timeline. Brughmans is expected to stay at Genk for another season before any move to Merseyside happens next summer, with the club having already been given the go ahead to carry out a medical. The formal paperwork is still to be completed, and until it is, this remains a verbal agreement rather than a done deal in the strictest sense.

Romano relayed the detail directly from inside the negotiations, and it is worth reading in full given how specific it is.

A note on the spelling before we go further. The player is referred to in places as Luca Brughmans, but Lucca, with the double c, is how both his club and his official records list him.

How a two metre teenager got here

Brughmans was born on 27 June 2008 and started out in the youth ranks at Kalmthout and FC Beigem before a spell with Royal Antwerp. In 2019 he moved to PSV Eindhoven, spending three years across the border in the Netherlands, then returned home to join the Genk academy in 2022. That last move looks shrewd in hindsight. Genk have built a genuine reputation for developing goalkeepers who can handle first team football early, and Brughmans is the clearest example yet.

He began training with the Genk senior squad from the age of 15, made his professional debut at 16, and by the time this reported agreement emerged had already racked up 43 appearances for the first team. That is a serious number of competitive minutes for a goalkeeper barely out of school, and it is a big part of why Liverpool are prepared to commit this early. Standing at close to two metres tall, he has the physical profile clubs look for between the posts, but recruiters at Anfield will have been just as interested in his reflexes, his reach and, increasingly important for how Liverpool want to play, his composure with the ball at his feet.

Why the number makes sense to us

Spending this kind of money on potential rather than a finished article always invites scrutiny, and rightly so. Goalkeepers rarely develop in a straight line, and there is no guarantee that a player excelling in the Belgian Pro League walks straight into a Premier League side without any bumps along the way. But Liverpool appear to have built that uncertainty into the structure of the deal itself. Leaving Brughmans at Genk for another year gives him more senior football, rather than a season on the bench in England waiting for a cup tie. It also buys him a year away from the kind of scrutiny that comes with being a Liverpool goalkeeper, where every dropped cross becomes a talking point.

There is also a leadership dimension worth flagging. Genk have described him as a natural leader, and he has already captained Belgium at under 17 level at both a European Championship and a World Cup. That matters more for goalkeepers than almost any other position, given how much organising of a back line the role demands. Genk moved in August to tie him to a contract through to 2030, a decision that only strengthened their hand in these negotiations and goes some way to explaining why the fee has landed where it has. This was never going to be a cut price academy deal.

Our take

Nothing here is finished. The medical and the formal contractual steps still need to be completed before anyone should treat this as confirmed business, and the reporting from Romano is careful to make that distinction. Brughmans himself still has plenty to work on, decision making under pressure and distribution chief among them, which is normal for any 18 year old goalkeeper anywhere in Europe.

But the pattern is the interesting part. This is not a club panic buying a goalkeeper to fix an immediate problem. It is a long term move, identifying a prospect early, protecting his development path and getting the deal done before the rest of the continent works out what Genk have been sitting on. Whether it pays off will not be clear for years rather than weeks, but as a piece of planning it fits a club thinking well beyond next season.