Gary Neville names Liverpool star he would sign first for Man Utd this summer

Gary Neville has picked out Ryan Gravenberch as the one Liverpool player he would sign to strengthen Manchester United’s squad this summer.

Liverpool endured an immensely disappointing year on the back of their extraordinary title success under Arne Slot, with a decline in team performance ultimately costing the Dutchman his job in late May.

The Merseyside giants had splashed out in the region of £446million on new recruits the previous summer, a record-breaking sum surpassing the £400m that Chelsea spent back in 2023.

However, Florian Wirtz, Alexander Isak, Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong all fell short of expectations as results spiraled, with Hugo Ekitike arguably the club’s standout signing before his devastating Achilles injury.

Liverpool’s bitter rivals United also spent big ahead of the 2025/26 campaign, focusing their efforts on bolstering their misfiring attack with the addition of Benjamin Sesko, Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo for a combined fee of around £200m.

Old Trafford bosses failed to fix United’s apparent frailties in central midfield, though, and the position has been identified as a priority for this summer following Michael Carrick’s appointment as head coach.

During a Q&A session for The Overlap, Neville highlighted United’s ‘desperation’ for midfield reinforcements when asked to name which of Liverpool’s players he would most like to see at the Theatre of Dreams.

The former Manchester United and England right-back said: ‘There’s a few but it’s harder because Wirtz isn’t exactly jumping out at me, Isak isn’t jumping out at me, Ekitike yeah, Dominik Szoboszlai maybe…

‘I’d go with Gravenberch. If you said to me, “United, now, who would I take?”, I’d take Gravenberch probably.

‘He’s the best of the three midfielders that United would need and we need a midfielder desperately.’

While Neville said Liverpool’s frontline have ‘potential’, he wouldn’t take any of the club’s current crop of attackers over the likes of Mbeumo and Cunha.

He added: ‘The [Liverpool] forwards are good but I wouldn’t probably swap them over Mbeumo, Cunha, Bruno, Amad… I don’t think I’d be jumping at taking any of them.

‘I think they’ve got potential to go and do brilliant things but they’ve not proved it yet so I’d go with Gravenberch.’

In a separate question, Neville was asked which manager in world football he would most like to have played under, to which he immediately replied: ‘[Jurgen] Klopp. I’ve said this before, I think Klopp with his football, his personality, I just love it. Mad.

‘For five or six years you couldn’t help but admire the team that I dislike the most, the team that I don’t want to win.

‘Every time you went and watched Liverpool it was a proper game of football, you knew they weren’t holding back and you knew they were going to go for it.

‘You knew they were electric in attack, speed, particularly in that two or three-year period when they had [Sadio] Mane, [Mohamed] Salah and [Roberto] Firmino at their peak. That was a proper front three, that.

‘The runs of Salah and Mane and the goals, then you’ve got Firmino just dropping in and pulling centre-backs out and then they go in behind. It was devastating, honestly, it really was.

‘It was an aggressive backline. If you think of the three, the two full-backs and [Virgil] van Dijk, [Andy] Robertson at his peak, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Van Dijk and then you had [Joel] Matip or someone… but they were three brilliant defenders and Alisson was the best goalkeeper in the world.

‘So for me, the style of football, the personality of Klopp, yeah, I’d say Klopp.’

Klopp is reportedly being lined up by the German national team to replace Julian Nagelsmann in the wake of the side’s shock World Cup exit at the hands of Paraguay.

Asked if Klopp as what it takes to make Germany successful once again, Neville replied: ‘The thing is about international football is you’ve got a fixed pool of players that you can pick from whereas with clubs you can sign players from different nationalities.

‘I wouldn’t say [club management] is easy but you’ve obviously got the pick of the world, you can go and sign players from everywhere, whereas with Germany, if they haven’t got a good crop coming through and they haven’t got a good talent base for the next four or fives years then there’s nothing he can do really.

‘They’ve got some decent players. You look at Wirtz, Musiala, Havertz, they had four or five, but are they really [top level].

‘You look at the French and look at that four they have and then look at the German four, they’re a level below.

‘I look at England’s front players like Saka and Foden and Palmer and Kane and Rogers and Bellingham, and I think our players are better than Germany’s.

‘You can never write Germany off just because we’ve got their history of seeing them win but I wouldn’t be thinking he’s going to go in there and be able to get [them firing].

‘Look at Carlo Ancelotti and Brazil and they weren’t quite right. It’s difficult to make them right and he’s a great manager.’

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