Jurgen Klopp gives firm stance on signing unvaccinated players in January

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has admitted that the club will not sign any players in the January transfer window who are unvaccinated against COVID-19.

Klopp has often spoken about the importance of being vaccinated, but football has been criticised in recent month because vaccine uptake has lagged behind society in general.

A survey of EFL players has found that 25% have no intention to have a COVID-19 vaccine.

“We are not close to signing a player but, yes, it would be influential, definitely,” Klopp said, via the Mirror, when asked whether vaccination status will have an impact on January recruitment.

“If a player is not vaccinated at all, he is a constant threat for all of us. He doesn’t want to be a threat, of course, it is not that he thinks, ‘Oh my God, I don’t care about the others,’ but he is and we have to find different scenarios.”

Klopp went on to explain that isolation protocols dictate that any unvaccinated player could cause additional problems from an ‘organisational’ view.

“He has to change in a different dressing room, he has to eat in a different dining room, he has to sit in a different bus, he has to drive in a different car,” the boss said.

“From an organisational point of view, it gets really messy. If you really want to follow the protocols, it is incredibly difficult to do. If one gets Covid and he was in the last four days around him, he will be in isolation. If we have to travel to a country to play international football and we come back, he has to self-isolate – all these kinds of things.

"We have to do all these kinds of things, like building extra buildings for unvaccinated players, and it will not happen. Hopefully, it will not be necessary in the future.”

For more from Jamie Spencer, follow him on Twitter and Facebook!