Official: Liverpool's Pitaluga Returns to Fluminense on Free Transfer
Yesterday at 08:26 AM
Young goalkeeper Marcelo Pitaluga has struggled to make the switch to European football and the Reds have agreed his return to the club he signed from in 2020.
Recruiting top young players into the club's academy is a strategy that has paid off for Liverpool under Fenway Sports Group's ownership, but it's far from a sure thing even at the best of times and comes with a unique set of downsides.
Namely that to ask teenagers to uproot their lives and join a club academy hundreds or thousands of miles from their homes can be a burden on the players—especially a player whose home was nearly six thousand miles from Merseyside.
Today, Liverpool and goalkeeper Marcelo Pitaluga agreed to call it quits on their best laid plans to develop the 22-year-old into a natural successor to fellow Brazilian Alisson Becker, returning the struggling stopper to Fluminense on a free.
The Reds will retain 40% of the player's rights, which will allow them to potentially profit from a future sale should Pitaluga find his feet back home in Rio de Janeiro at the club he played for before joining Liverpool for £2M back in 2020.
It's an obvious loss on a player who had been an exceptionally highly rated prospect, but after a strong start in the academy Pitaluga hadn't taken the next steps in recent seasons and struggled in Scotland with Livingston this campaign.
With only a pair of appearances in the first half of the 2024-25 season—following a loan to League of Ireland's St. Patrik's Athletic last January where he made just four appearances—Pitaluga seems an increasingly homesick, struggling player.
A career back home in Brazil, then, seems at this point more plausible than further development in Europe, and hopefully Pitaluga will be able to find himself back with Fluminense and still make something of this whole football lark.
