Despite Liverpool winning the league so comfortably last season, the consensus was that new signings were needed.
Safe to say, new signings have been made. The likes of Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike were most notably signed for big fees.
Whilst Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong were also high profile signings.
One other player that was signed more under the radar was Giovanni Leoni from Parma.
Well it turns out after securing a move as big as this, his month has gone one better.
The 18-year old has been given his first call up to the Italian national team by manager Gennaro Gattuso.
If you want to feel old – Leoni was not even born when Gattuso won the World Cup with Italy in 2006.
He will be part of the squad for World Cup qualifiers against Estonia and Israel.
It was the nightmare start to qualifying for the Italians, who lost 3-0 to Norway in their opening game.
They remain nine points off their counterparts, albeit they do have two games in hand left to play.
Though there is a goal difference swing of 12 also needed to overtake them.
After the defeat to Norway, they won 2-0 at home to Moldova. An important win, but an unconvincing performance.
In fact, they allowed 18 shots – to the side ranked 154th in the world. This proved to be Luciano Spalletti’s final game in charge.
Weirdly, it was announced that he would be leaving beforehand, but he still took the game regardless.
Now it is up to Gattuso, who has a fairly average managerial career to date, to turn things around.
Given the state of the national team at the moment, a debut during this break does not feel too far fetched for Leoni.
It would be some way to cap off an amazing few months for him.
We can expect game time will be hard to come by at club level, so the chance to impress Gattuso here would be huge in terms of the World Cup.
That is, if they get there. Italy will know more than anyone that that is no given. They still haven’t qualified since 2014.
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