Parma’s chief executive has confirmed the club rejected a higher offer from Newcastle United for teenage centre back Giovanni Leoni before the defender completed a high-profile move to Liverpool.<\/p>\n
Leoni has so far been involved with Liverpool only as an unused substitute, his sole matchday selection coming in the 3\u20132 win over Newcastle. Parma say the sequence of events reflected both the financial appeal of Liverpool’s bid and the player’s willingness to accept the opportunity.<\/p>\n
Federico Cherubini told local newspaper Gazzetta di Parma: \u201cI\u2019ve always said we wanted to keep him, and he\u2019s always said he\u2019d be happy to stay here. We even turned down an offer from Newcastle, which was more advantageous than the one Liverpool eventually made,\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWhen the Reds came forward, our plans changed: both because the offer was very attractive and because the player made it clear he was very happy to take advantage of this opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parma say their decision followed a period in which they had backed Leoni despite limited first-team experience. The club had promoted him after he had made just 12 appearances in Italy\u2019s second tier.<\/p>\n
Cherubini acknowledged mixed emotions at losing a youngster the club had backed early. \u201cOn the one hand, it\u2019s disappointing to lose such a promising young player, but on the other, we\u2019re proud to have believed in him in unsuspecting times, when he\u2019d only played a few games in Serie B,\u201d Cherubini explained.<\/p>\n
The club framed the move as the result of a commercially attractive offer from Liverpool combined with the player\u2019s preference to move. Parma say their earlier refusal of Newcastle\u2019s higher proposal underlined their initial wish to retain Leoni before circumstances changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Parma turned down a bigger offer from Newcastle before Giovanni Leoni’s switch to Liverpool……..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2510,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,194,172],"tags":[754,923],"class_list":["post-2511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-newcastle-united","category-epl","tag-giovanni-leoni","tag-transfer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}