When initial speculation appeared online about Liverpool making a move to sign the Hungary captain from RB Leipzig earlier this summer, he tried to take it with something of a measured pinch of salt.

His agent would only contact him with concrete news.

Friends, though, were alerting him to the increasing strength of the link with the Reds, and soon the midfielder was refreshing the rumour pages with ever more regularity – and no small impatience.

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“We have my agent, my father and me – I never decide alone or my agent never decides alone or my dad never decides alone, it doesn’t matter what’s going on.

We always decide as three,” Szoboszlai tells Liverpoolfc.com at the team’s hotel on their tour of Singapore.

“My agent wrote in our WhatsApp group [about Liverpool’s interest]; I was on holiday, my father was doing something else and my agent was also somewhere else.

We had a group call.

“My agent doesn’t want to say before anything is fixed, so he doesn’t come to me and say, ‘It may be possible.’ He only comes to me when he says it’s close and he needs me now to decide?

And then I always checked like every 10 hours if there was something new, and it got always more and more.

“You know, if it’s like a little rumour – two pictures and that’s it, it’s over.

I called my agent and from this day every day I called him and said, ‘What is going on?’”

He had a level of previous with Liverpool, having experienced Anfield as an opposition player when Jürgen Klopp’s side defeated Salzburg in the Champions League in 2019.

His team lost 4-3 that night but nevertheless, the atmosphere, the emotion and the passion of the manager left a tremendous impression on Szoboszlai.

“It’s one of the best stadiums I ever played in and I have played in a lot of stadiums,” he says.

And the manager, this desire he has is crazy and I like it.”

The 22-year-old adds: “Of course he is a nice guy and a good personality, but how it feels, the energy that he has next to the pitch… it’s like he would play with us.

“I think sometimes he would just run on the pitch and tackle!”