Loris Karius has, er, caused a bit of a stir since signing for Besiktas from Liverpool. Not long after moving to Turkey, Karius was caught sending an Instagram message to Turkish model Melis Ayça Değirmencioğlu, whom he had yet to meet. She screenshotted the message and disseminate it on Twitter. It read, eh, 'Hello, how are you?'
Karius has since given an interview in which he says that he is mobbed for pictures when he takes to the streets of Istanbul: "Everyone who knows me while walking in the streets or sitting in a corner outside of matches wants to come and take pictures. I can say that most of them are women".
According to a report by Dominic King of the Daily Mail, it was another of Karius' Instagram activities that cost him a future at Liverpool.
It had been expected that Karius would stay at Liverpool as second choice to Alisson Becker, with Simon Mignolet moving on. That hasn't happened, and instead, a sullen Mignolet has been left on the Liverpool bench.
At the start of pre-season, after everyone spent a summer ruminating on the horrors of the Champions League final, Karius posted a bewildering promotional trailer to his Instagram, which showed him swimming, playing table-tennis, running and eating ice-cream.
Per the Mail, this proved the last straw for some of his teammates, who believed he should keep his head down. Writing of how Alisson Becker retains the faith of his teammates in spite of the clanger against Leicester City, King contrasts it to the reception to Karius' video.
The dressing room is the best place to gauge what is happening and the universal approval of the qualities that Alisson has brought means the men around him have total faith.
This also shows why Loris Karius had to move on.
Slowly but surely, his actions led to trust being eroded and, for some, the video he posted to Instagram in July of him exercising and eating ice cream in California was the final straw.
That was a time for self-awareness, to keep his head down and work but he continued to make himself a story.
Alisson, it has already been noted, is an entirely different character. It is why his mistake has already been forgotten.
While Karius had been publicly supported by some teammates - Mo Salah and Dejan Lovren among them - it seems that his Baywatch-esque trailer didn't get full support from all of the dressing room.
[Daily Mail]
