Liverpool have confirmed the signing of the 18-year-old centre-back Giovanni Leoni from Parma for an initial \u00a326m. He has a six-year contract and is regarded by the club as a potential long-term successor to Virgil van Dijk.<\/p>\n
Leoni was a target for other clubs, including Newcastle, and is expected to go straight into the first-team squad. The 6ft 4in defender has played for Italy\u2019s under-18s and under-19s.<\/p>\n
The signing was announced shortly before Liverpool start their Premier League title defence at home to Bournemouth, a game Leoni will be at Anfield to watch.<\/p>\n
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Leoni, who played in Serie A for the first time last season, making 17 appearances, told Liverpool\u2019s website of his excitement at joining. \u201cI\u2019m so honoured,\u201d he said. \u201cI was very happy [about Liverpool being interested]. When I saw this I said: \u2018Wow, this is crazy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
He will wear the No 15 shirt and said: \u201cI want to improve a lot with my new teammates in training and after on the pitch, in the Premier League and the Champions League.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Liverpool have confirmed the signing of the 18-year-old centre-back Giovanni Leoni from Parma for an initial \u00a326m. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-69457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}