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Shakhtar Donestk star Alex Teixeira sends plea to Liverpool

By on January 28, 2016

The timing is right for both parties in Alex Teixeira’s potential move to Liverpool. The fit is ideal. If the highly rumored transfer falls through, having stalled in recent hours, it won’t be because of lack of effort on either Teixeira’s or Liverpool’s part. All that’s left to choreograph is the right price, with the difference in Liverpool and Shakthar Donetsk’s valuation of the attacking midfielder the remaining sticking point.

In a revealing interview with a Florida television station that went viral after Liverpool fanzine Anfield HQ published it on YouTube, Teixeira made a plea to Liverpool and revealed that Shakhtar had turned down and initial €32 million offer. Shakhtar, however, are holding out for a considerably higher sum for their star man.

Shakthar manager Mircea Lucescu, echoed this sentiment, telling FourFourTwo that Teixeira would be worth €50 million, as much as Angel di Maria, if he didn’t play in the niche Ukrainian market.

There’s undoubtedly an element of truth to this statement. Teixeira himself said, per FourFourTwo: “I read a lot comments [on social media] and I feel there’s some discrimination against the Ukrainian league – it’s not a competition seen that often around Brazil and Europe. The Champions League games are the only ones broadcast. When someone mentions that you’ve already scored 16 goals, they immediately say: ‘Even a blind person would do the same in Ukraine.”

Yet his stats are truly phenomenal. He has scored twenty-two goals in fifteen Ukrainian Premier League appearances this season, and bagged three in the Champions League group stages. Last season, he cemented himself as a replacement for Douglas Costa, who moved to Bayern Munich, with seventeen goals in the league and took the starring role for Shakhtar. He’s been at the club since 2009, when he moved to Ukraine from his hometown club in Brazil, Vasco da Gama, which he joined at the age of nine.

Lucescu persuaded him to stay for another year last summer, but Teixeira is now pushing hard for a move to the Premier League to put himself out in front of the Brazilian national team coach Dunga in hopes of his first senior international call-up. “I’ve reached an age 26 years old in which I’m really looking to break into the Brazil team,” said Teixeira. “2018 may be the the last World Cup I have a chance to play in, so I want to go to a big club and show what I can do at the highest level and hopefully be selected for Brazil.”

“I feel that [going to Liverpool] would be the best move for my career.”

If the move were to fall through, it would hurt Teixeira the most.

At Liverpool, he could mold nicely into a midfield partnership with Philipe Coutinho, whom he played with in his childhood years in Vasco da Gama’s youth system.

When asked if he thinks he will be playing for Liverpool in January in that Florida interview, he sheepishly smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s tough to answer that. I want to be there.” He might as well have added a cheeky wink too, before finishing the interview. But with a more serious tone, he stressed that the decision is out of his hands.

Homepage photo credit: Aleksandr Osipov from Ukraine [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.