Jürgen Klopp has credited Liverpool’s scouting department with securing a cut-price deal for Roberto Firmino when they signed the Brazil striker for £29m from Hoffenheim last year.

Firmino was the second most expensive signing in Liverpool’s history at the time of his move from the Bundesliga but Klopp believes the 25-year-old was undervalued. Firmino has emerged as a key player for Klopp’s pressing style and has scored six goals for Liverpool this season.

The former Borussia Dortmund coach was on sabbatical when Firmino joined Liverpool in the summer of 2015 and has said no club consulted him over the Brazilian. But he admits he expected the forward to command a much higher transfer fee.

Klopp explained: “The first thing I did when I left Dortmund, I took my phone and deleted all the numbers so I was not reachable. So I didn’t speak to anyone to offer advice, about Firmino or anyone else. Nobody asked me about him but he was a player I thought was one of the best in the Bundesliga. So when I saw that Liverpool had signed him I thought, ‘How could Liverpool do this?’ They were not in their 100% best moment and other clubs would have spent more on him, so I thought, immediately, ‘What a good transfer for them.’ When I heard about it I thought they had made a good signing, because I felt pretty sure clubs would have paid a lot more for him.”

The Liverpool manager did utilise his Bundesliga background this summer to sign Joël Matip on a free transfer from Schalke, Ragnar Klavan from Augsburg and the goalkeeper Loris Karius for £4.7m from Mainz. But credit for Firmino, he says, rests entirely with Liverpool’s scouts. He added: “I can see in the Premier League you cannot have the perfect overview of the Bundesliga, and in the Bundesliga you cannot have the perfect overview of the Premier League. So you can know the Champions League and the players who are top-class but around there are so many good players you cannot know, only if you watch each game at the weekend.

“That is normal, and a lot of people thought, ‘Hoffenheim, where is this? That is a lot of money’. In Germany some people don’t know where it is but, if you play your football there, then you feel it is a tough place and so you know what a decent job the scout did, whoever brought him in for that price.”

Matip, meanwhile, has told Liverpool that he will not play for Cameroon in the Africa Cup of Nations in January. Klopp had hoped the influential defender would remain available for the club but Cameroon had hoped to tempt him.