Liverpool’s 2027 rebuild is already taking shape, and the fault line runs straight through the heart of their defence.
The club are weighing up a €50m move for Finn Jeltsch, the Stuttgart centre-back whose rise in the Bundesliga has not gone unnoticed across Europe. At 19, he has already pushed himself into a rare bracket of young defenders trusted at the highest level.
A defence built on uncertainty
Liverpool’s centre-back department looks crowded on paper, but the foundations are anything but secure.
Virgil van Dijk is out of contract next summer. So is Joe Gomez. Ronald Araujo is only at Anfield on loan and would cost €50m to keep permanently. Strip those situations back and the long-term picture becomes stark.
Beyond this season, only Jeremy Jacquet and Giovanni Leoni are guaranteed to be Liverpool players in that position. Both are talented, both are young, and both are largely unproven.
Jacquet, 21, is coming off shoulder surgery. Leoni, just 19, has spent around a year out with a serious knee injury. Between them, they represent promise rather than certainty. For a club that has built eras on defensive authority, that’s a gamble.
So Liverpool will have to go back into the market for a centre-back in 2027. The work has already started.
The Jeltsch equation
According to TuttoJuve, Liverpool are among the clubs monitoring Finn Jeltsch ahead of a possible move next year. Stuttgart know what they have and are not inclined to let him go cheaply. The reported asking price: €50m.
The numbers back up the hype. Jeltsch was one of only 14 teenage centre-backs to log at least 1,000 minutes across Europe’s top five leagues last season. Push that threshold to 1,500 minutes and the pool shrinks to just 10 players. On top of that, Liverpool’s own Value Adder model reportedly rates him around the fifth-best in that elite group.
That kind of profile explains the queue. Arsenal, Manchester United and Bayern Munich are all said to be tracking him. Half of Europe, effectively, is looking at the same emerging talent.
A fight is brewing for his signature.
Logic vs. opportunity
Here’s where Liverpool’s dilemma sharpens.
Investing heavily in Jeltsch would mean committing to a third young centre-back in a squad where the only guaranteed long-term options already have an average age of 20. On the surface, that looks reckless. A back line built almost entirely on potential, with no guarantee of an experienced anchor, would test even the most patient rebuild.
So does it really make sense to drop another €50m on a 20-year-old in 2027?
From one angle, it feels close to madness. From another, it’s exactly where smart clubs now hunt for value: early, aggressive, and before the price climbs even higher.
Liverpool may decide that if the market is pushing elite young defenders into that price range, you either compete for them or watch rivals do it instead.
For now, Jeltsch sits on a growing list rather than at the end of a runway to Anfield. But as contracts tick down and loan deals expire, Liverpool’s defensive jigsaw will need more than hope and hypotheticals.
This is one to watch—because if they do pull the trigger, it will say everything about how bold they’re willing to be in reshaping the next great Liverpool back line.
