Liverpool confirm Matip out for the season following Kabak & Davies captures

Liverpool have confirmed that Joel Matip will miss the rest of the season with an ankle ligament injury.

The Cameroon international suffered the injury in Thursday’s 3-1 win over Tottenham, and Jurgen Klopp revealed on Monday that the 29-year-old would not be available for the remainder of the campaign.

Klopp said: “Unfortunately, we found out now after everybody looked at it that Joel will be out for the rest of the season.

“But he will be ready for the start of the next pre-season and finally everything will be sorted.”

The news explains why Liverpool have dipped into the transfer market, signing two new centre-backs on deadline day.

Ben Davies joined from Preston in a £1.6 million ($2.1m) deal, and that deal was followed by the loan signing of Turkish international Ozan Kabak from Schalke. The Reds will have the option to make that deal permanent in the summer for a fee of £18m ($24.5m). 

Matip’s absence, though, is a sizeable blow. He joins Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez as a long-term casualty, with Klopp suggesting the former Schalke man, who has a long history of injury issues on Merseyside, had played through the pain barrier for the sake of the team.

Klopp said: “In the end, we have to admit that he probably did that.

“The situation is just, the season started and Joel was injured when the season started, unfortunately. We should not forget that at Schalke when he was there he played pretty much all the time completely through, he never had something.

“Then he was unlucky with a [Kalidou] Koulibaly challenge against Napoli in the last second [in December 2018], in the Everton game [June 2020] kind of things, a little bit with the foot here and there.

"If something started and then the situation is like our situation – that nobody can really wait because of our situation with Virgil out and Joe out – we always had to try to find the first moment when he is able to play again.

“It was really unlucky because it was a brilliant challenge he made actually, he saved our life in that moment in the Tottenham game when he won the challenge against Son.

“But he injured his ankle and played the game on and now is out for the season, so you can imagine how much he tried to stay on the pitch and tried to help us.

“We will wait for him. He has now the rest of this season, then the summer, then the pre-season to get ready again and he will be ready again.”