I feel the same about Declan Rice. Comes across as absolutely obsessed with football, hugely knowledgeable about the game and an absolute sponge in terms of wanting to learn about the GOATs of the game and how they trained, what they did to succeed. There was a YouTube video he did with Rio, where he was just clearly in awe of some of the stories Rio was telling.
It's a hugely underrated quality to sign intelligent players - both game and general. We've seen that with Bruno. Our best teams were full of characters like that. Gary Neville basically made a career out of hard work and high game intelligence.
I think it's a big, underlooked reason for Liverpool's success under Klopp. Packed with high IQ players who live and breathe the game. Robertson, Van Dijk, Trent, Henderson, Milner, Wijnaldum...Jota has an encyclopedic football knowledge. And those are just the ones I've heard speaking for a significant amount of time.
It's a massive quality, and one that can set you apart from a big chunk of the league. It's an attribute that should be talked about as much as pace or technical ability. How many footballers have you heard that just reel off base level cliches? And in almost all those cases, their lack of game intelligence shows on the pitch.
