Liverpool will have every penny of £142m to spend on Philippe Coutinho replacement, says Jurgen Klopp

Jürgen Klopp is confident he will be allowed to spend every penny of the £142m raised by Philippe Coutinho’s move to Barcelona as the Liverpool manager begins to search for the influential playmaker’s replacement.

Having previously stood firm and rejected all offers, Liverpool finally relented to Barcelona last week and sanctioned Coutinho’s long-awaited move to the Camp Nou.

World football’s second-most expensive transfer of all time leaves Klopp with a sizeable windfall but also just 19 days to replace one of his key players before the close of the current transfer window.

Thomas Lemar, the Monaco winger, is understood to be Liverpool’s priority target but the Ligue 1 club are reluctant to sell mid-season and will demand at least £90m for the highly-rated 22-year-old.

Speaking ahead of Manchester City’s visit to Anfield on Sunday, Klopp insisted that the £142m recouped from the sale of Coutinho would be reinvested into the squad and denied that it may be used to pay for the recent record signings of Virgil van Dijk and Naby Keita.

“You know I’m not a manager who counts all the money and goes to the owners and say we need this. The owners are completely on my side,” he said.

“It is not that they say: ‘You’ve got this but we’ve done this and this and so you cannot spend.’ Everything is fine. We have no money issues at this club. We will get all the money.

“Always since I’m in here we can have all the monies from transfers and more if needed. Nobody told me: ‘No way.’”

Klopp added: “In the end, if you lose five or six players then obviously it can be a little different if you cannot replace them, but we will bring in other players, that’s for sure. If we do it in this window, I don’t know.”