Liverpool don’t want to sign unvaccinated players, confirms Klopp

With so many Premier League games having been postponed due to COVID-19 over the past week, the question of whether players’ vaccine status should play a part in recruitment decisions has resurfaced. At Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp has confirmed that he and the club’s sporting department would consider this when deciding which players to bring to Anfield.

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Klopp has discussed a number of coronavirus issues during the pandemic and gave a detailed answer about the issue of unvaccinated players during his pre-Tottenham press conference this weekend.

“So, I got this question asked in the last press conference and I didn’t think about it, to be honest,” Klopp said. “That was probably my fault. It’s because we’re not close to signing any players! But, since then I thought about it and yes, it will be influential. Definitely.”

He continued: “If a player is not vaccinated at all, he’s a constant threat to all of us. He doesn’t want to be a threat, of course. It’s not like he thinks ‘I don’t care about the others’, but he is. So, we have to find different scenarios. He has to change in a different dressing room, he has to eat in a different dining room, he has to sit on a different bus, he has to drive wherever in a different car. If we travel to a country where we play international football, we come back and he has to self-isolate. From an organisational point of view, it’s a real mess. If you really want to follow the protocols, it’s incredibly difficult to do. If we have to do all these kinds of things, like building an extra building for unvaccinated players, it will not happen.”

What is the vaccination rate in the Premier League?

Over the past week, it has been widely reported that the Premier League is behind the other top European leagues when it comes to the number of players with two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Premier League reportedly has 68 percent, while Serie A has 98 percent, Ligue 1 95 percent, Bundesliga 94 percent and LaLiga 93 percent.