Brendan Rodgers reveals the ‘sad side’ of £14m Leicester City transfer

Brendan Rodgers praised the professionalism of Ademola Lookman after the former on-loan Leicester City striker plundered a hat-trick in Atalanta’s Europa League triumph over Bayer Leverkusen.

The 26-year-old scored all three of his side’s goals to hand Xabi Alonso’s Bundesliga champions a first defeat of the season and regain the titles that have eluded them since leaving the Premier League in 2022.

Celtic manager Rodgers had Lookman in his City squad in 2021/22 when, as an Everton player, he made 26 Premier League appearances and was part of the squad that reached the Europa Conference semi-finals League. Rodgers has fond memories of the striker’s time at the King Power Stadium and regrets not being able to make it permanent.

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Speaking to talkSPORT, he said: “When I was at Leicester and he was at Red Bull we had the chance to get him on loan so we got him and he was absolutely brilliant.

“How professional he is, how he takes care of himself, the extra work he puts in in training. Those goals he scored, he practices them after training. They would always do extra finishing touches. His professionalism was unbelievable and the only sad part for us was at the end of that season we had a clause where we could have bought him for £14m.

“But if you think back to that summer, we couldn’t sign any players and one of my guys that I worked closely with here at Celtic and at Leicester was a guy called Lee Congerton and Lee was by then the managing director of Atalanta. When he knew we couldn’t get him, he then took him to Atalanta and he did absolutely brilliantly there. So I am so happy. The goals he scored, especially the second and third.

“He scored some massive goals for me at Leicester, he scored the winning goal in a game against Liverpool at home. It was a brilliant individual goal but I was so, so excited for him because he traveled the world to be the best player he can be and I’m so happy that his talents were able to blossom into a such a great opportunity.”

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