Klopp explains AFCON 'little tournament' comment with Liverpool to lose key trio

AFCON 2022, which begins on January 9, will upset Premier League teams who have African players from participating nations among their ranks.

Liverpool are arguably the worst affected team as they're set to lose Egypt talisman Mohamed Salah, Senegal star Sadio Mane and Guinea midfielder Naby Keita.

Before the Reds' win over Porto in the Champions League, Klopp spoke about the upcoming absences of the key trio, later referring to AFCON as a 'little tournament' in passing.

The German was confronted by journalist Ojora Babatunde in a press conference after the 2-0 win with Babatunde insisting Klopp's comments were an insult to the players, fans, people and continent of Africa.

Klopp responded: "It's all good, I didn't mean it like that. I don't know why you don't understand it like that to be honest."

Babatunde fired back at the Liverpool boss, saying he owed the continent an apology.

Klopp said: "It's not even close, it was not the idea in my mind to talk about AFCON as a little tournament or talk about the continent of Africa as a little continent, not at all.

"What I meant is people said, and if you watch the full press conference, if you wanted to understand it in the right way you could've understood it in the right way because I said there's no more international break until March - then I said 'oh, there's a little tournament in January'.

"I didn't mean a little tournament, I just mean you say it when there's still a tournament, it's ironic. There's still a tournament, a big one where we lose our best players."

Babatunde still didn't seem satisfied with Klopp's defence, so the Liverpool boss added: "I'm not a native speaker but if you want to understand me wrong you can do that all the time.

"I know that I would never think like this. I don't understand why you thought like this but that's really not okay. I would not do that but that's it now.

"It was not my intention but you made something of it and that's not 100 per cent cool to be honest."