Marco Palestra And Nuno Mendes: The Full Back Pursuits That Reveal Liverpool’s Real Transfer Priorities

Not every transfer story is about a deal that happened. Some of the most revealing ones are about the deals that did not. According to The Athletic, Liverpool’s departing sporting director Richard Hughes explored moves for two full backs who never arrived at Anfield, Atalanta’s Marco Palestra and Paris Saint Germain’s Nuno Mendes, and looking at why tells us more about Liverpool’s rebuild than most of the signings that actually went through.

Palestra And The Right Back Question Nobody Wanted To Ask Out Loud

Liverpool’s interest in Palestra surfaced this summer, with Hughes reportedly weighing up whether the club could beat Chelsea to the Atalanta defender. Liverpool’s ability to actually push the deal through was limited by their need to strengthen elsewhere and by ongoing difficulty raising funds through fringe player sales, but the interest itself is the story.

Liverpool had already committed £30m to Jeremie Frimpong twelve months earlier, a signing intended to provide both competition at right back and an attacking option further forward. That has not gone to plan so far. Frimpong has reportedly struggled to convince in either role, and Liverpool are said to be hoping Conor Bradley can recover from injury and finally nail down the position long term.

Clubs assess players constantly without ever making a move, so interest in Palestra does not automatically mean dissatisfaction with Frimpong. But exploring another right sided option so soon after paying £30m for one suggests Hughes never fully considered the position settled.

Mendes Was The Original Left Back Target, Not Kerkez

The Mendes revelation is arguably the more interesting of the two. Milos Kerkez became one of the headline names of Liverpool’s huge 2025 rebuild, and the connection to Hughes felt obvious given he had already signed Kerkez for Bournemouth from AZ back in 2023. It would have been easy to assume Kerkez was always the priority target.

He was not. Liverpool’s first choice was reportedly Mendes, considered a realistic target before he signed a new PSG contract in February 2025 and took himself off the market. Only once that door closed did Liverpool turn to Kerkez, who arrived carrying plenty of promise but has come under real pressure after a difficult first season on Merseyside.

Knowing an elite, established Mendes was the original plan puts Kerkez’s difficult start in a slightly different light. Liverpool were not simply backing a promising young player as their first idea, they were backing him as the fallback option once the more established name became unavailable.

It also raises a fair question about squad building priorities more broadly. Liverpool spent heavily on Florian Wirtz, Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitike as part of the same 2025 rebuild that brought in Frimpong and Kerkez, before adding Bradley Barcola, Jeremie Jacquet, Victor Munoz and Ronald Araujo this summer. Whether that reconstruction ultimately works is still an open question, but the full back pursuits suggest Hughes always had a clear hierarchy of targets rather than simply reacting to whoever became available.

Why The Ones That Got Away Still Matter

There is always a risk of reading too much into transfers that never happened. Every recruitment department keeps long lists, and every sporting director has conversations that lead nowhere. Football would look completely different if every exploratory approach turned into a deal.

Even so, Palestra and Mendes feel relevant because Liverpool’s full back situation has been a live issue ever since Trent Alexander Arnold and Andy Robertson moved on, leaving genuinely difficult shoes to fill on both sides of defence. Frimpong and Kerkez were Liverpool’s actual answers, but Hughes evidently explored bigger, more established alternatives at both ends before settling for developmental bets instead.

It is a pattern that echoes elsewhere in Hughes’ Liverpool tenure. Antoine Semenyo is another player he recommended and could not land, with Manchester City signing him instead. Identifying the right targets was rarely Liverpool’s problem under Hughes. Turning identification into a completed deal, working through budgets, timing and boardroom sign off, proved considerably harder.

Hughes leaves behind an unfinished squad and a set of expensive signings still waiting on a final verdict. Somewhere alongside all of that sits an imaginary Liverpool defence built around Mendes and Palestra. It never existed and never will, but understanding why Hughes wanted them in the first place says plenty about the team he was actually trying to build.