Inside Richard Hughes’ first year at Liverpool

There was a knock at the door and Arne Slot opened it.

The man standing behind it was a suited-and-booted Glasweigan chap and he walked in, chunky ring-binder under arm ready for his host to stick the kettle on or pour a bottle of red, looking like a teacher about to give a lesson.

In many respects, he did. The opening scene in Zwolle, Netherlands in spring 2024 is slightly reimagined but it is based on a true story.

Richard Hughes is our aforementioned lead character, still officially working at the Vitality Stadium at this point but for all intents and purposes the man with the keys to the day-to-day running of football operations at Liverpool.

A brief recap of the state of play at Anfield back then: Jurgen Klopp had informed the club in November 2023 that he was to leave at the end of that season, interim sporting director Jorg Schmadtke was also departing.

Bayer Leverkusen boss Xabi Alonso was the hot favourite to take over from Klopp and, after him, Sporting Lisbon manager Ruben Amorim was another leading candidate. Other media reports linked Roberto De Zerbi, Ange Postecoglou and even then-Wolves boss Gary O’Neil.

None mentioned Slot. So with no fanfare and zero noise from the flight-tracking nerds on social media, Hughes travelled to Slot’s home of Zwolle on a mission to find the man to step into Klopp’s sizable shoes.

He sat down and plonked his dossier on the table. This was not so much of a job interview for Slot, more of a head-hunting assignment from Hughes. Of course, Slot had to sell himself – but equally it was about the incoming Liverpool transfer chief selling the Anfield project.

And Hughes had done his homework. The pair talked in detail about Slot’s footballing ethos and Hughes would go into such depth as pointing out how the Feyenoord boss had changed his off-the-ball pressing structure at half-time in a match two years prior.

While it was correct that Amorim and others, like Ernesto Valverde (Athletic Bilbao) and Luciano Spalletti (then at Italy) had been considered, no one fit Liverpool’s squad better than Slot. His style was a perfect match, his coaching methods and overall way of working the same.

Of around 20 data metrics, Slot topped most of them.

A year earlier, Daniel Levy had tried and failed to get Slot to move from Feyenoord, the club he had fallen in love with after winning the league and cup, to England. Tottenham told the Dutchman he was one of the leading candidates. One of.

Liverpool and Hughes, however, told him he was their No 1 candidate and first choice. That approach from the Scotsman managed to convince the Slot family and his agent Rafaela Pimenta to move and then he led negotiations with Feyenoord CEO Dennis te Kloese.

Slot had a sneaky suspicion beforehand anyway, when another staffer at Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Julian Ward, went to Rotterdam to spend a few days at Feyenoord.

Officially he was there to learn whether it would be a good club to send young players on loan, but really he was sniffing around Slot. Ward spoke to staff for first-hand references on the man who had scored so highly on Liverpool’s data tests led by head of research Will Spearman.

This whole episode is pertinent now because next week marks a year since Hughes officially started work at Liverpool. He had confidentially told friends in early 2024 that he was leaving and had Bournemouth’s blessing to lead the recruitment of Klopp’s successor.

And what a year it has been, especially given the turbulent club he inherited. Three of his best players – Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold – were out of contract, he had no head coach or backroom team and little was in place for summer business.

As one agent put it bluntly at the time: ‘It is a s***show.’ Another, on the night Liverpool lost out on signing midfielder Martin Zubimendi, a top target, messaged: ‘I have no idea what is going on right now.’

Maybe that was a slight exaggeration but the point stands. Hughes, whose profile picture is still of his kids and dog wearing Bournemouth shirts, walked into a job with a daunting to-do list and a club where instant success needs to occur.

When just one player arrived last summer, the rarely-seen Federico Chiesa, fans were calling for his head. Zubimendi had fallen through the cracks despite giving Slot and Hughes his word – not their fault, to be fair, the midfielder just decided he wanted to stay in Spain.

Things got even more nasty when Salah, Van Dijk and Alexander-Arnold all had uncertain futures going into spring. But none of them were easy deals, especially the latter who had his heart set on Real Madrid for some time.

But now, Hughes is viewed by fans as a mastermind. He extended two of those three deals – and managed to get £10million for Alexander-Arnold when Real originally proposed to pay £850,000 – before setting his sights on one of the best transfer windows in recent memory.

Florian Wirtz represents the biggest import to the Premier League since Erling Haaland at £100m which could rise to £116m, while full backs Jeremie Frimpong (£29.5m) and Milos Kerkez (£40m) make the whole XI feel a lot more youthful and fresh.

When you ask those who have been in the room with him for anecdotes, the responses tend to follow a similar theme. ‘He’s stubborn,’ one representative told us last summer. ‘He’s cold as ice and tends to get what he wants.’

Rob Jansen, the agent of Arne Slot’s coach John Heitinga who has just left to be first-team boss at Ajax, said: ‘One thing Richard Hughes doesn’t have is any sense of empathy. Zero. He’s a robot. There’s zero feelings in him.’

All of the above probably sound like digs but not all of them were. Being Mr Nice Guy gets you nowhere in the dog-eats-dog world of football negotiating, so we will present them with a positive slant.

Michael Edwards, the CEO of Football at FSG, has nothing but good things to say about Hughes. This time last year, he talked with surprise that he had a clear pass at hiring him at Liverpool, a genuine shock that no other European heavyweight had hired him.

The pair have a long-standing friendship that was forged in a portakabin in Portsmouth. Hughes was a seasoned midfielder playing under Harry Redknapp for Pompey at the time. He used to be a bit of a wind-up merchant to Edwards the ‘laptop guru’, to use Redknapp’s words.

They would go into Edwards’ so-called analysts’ room, with O’Neil, Eddie Howe and Matt Taylor also among the friendship group – they are all now managers. Howe later took Hughes to Bournemouth and Edwards noted the amount of times he would bump into his old pal.

They crossed paths many times in a recruitment sense. Bournemouth and Hughes had to be swatted away to sign the likes of Harvey Elliott and Andy Robertson, while the Cherries beat Liverpool to the punch for David Brooks and Lloyd Kelly, who the Reds liked.

Sadio Mane was another that Bournemouth nearly signed before Liverpool flexed their muscles. It all showed Edwards that this man knew what he was doing and, when the time came around, it felt like he was the perfect man to lead the Anfield transfer operations.

Speaking to Mail Sport last year, Redknapp described Hughes as a ‘walking, talking contacts book’ and added: ‘Richard is so knowledgeable, knows every player around Europe. You mention a player to him and he can tell you what they had for dinner last night.

‘His recruitment is smart and he is an encyclopedia of football.’

Another former colleague describes him: ‘If he wants to sign your player he won’t go as far as sending them a bouquet of flowers but he will do just about everything else to wow them… and it normally works.’

Edwards and Ward leave Hughes to run the operation and neither of them were in the north west when Wirtz flew from Germany to Manchester on Thursday night to complete his medical. It was on Hughes to greet him and pose for a picture with Liverpool’s new gem.

That signing cannot be underestimated and is a mammoth coup for Hughes, who led the search and first spoke to the Wirtz family in March.

But while Slot, Salah and Co rightly receive mass plaudits, the men in the background, including Hughes, deserve a shout-out too.

As Mail Sport wrote on the day he was hired last year: ‘If anyone feared – or hoped – Liverpool’s triumphs would dry out once Klopp puts his feet up and enjoys his life as a grandfather, they were wrong. The appointments of Hughes and Edwards point only in the direction of success.’

And after spending north of £200million in Hughes’s second summer at the club, it feels like they are only just getting started.