Trevor Sinclair has pointed to three factors that he believes led to Sadio Mane's Liverpool exit as some ex-Reds remain mystified by his decision to leave the club.
After weeks of speculation, Mane was finally granted his move to Bayern Munich this week after the clubs agreed a £35million deal for the Senegalese forward.
Mane was entering the final year of his contract at Anfield and made it clear that he didn't see his long-term future at the club.
Former Liverpool stars Dean Saunders and Michael Owen have spoken of their surprise that Mane would want to leave the club right now.
Sinclair, though, believes there are some off-field factors that have weighed heavily on Mane's mind and ultimately influenced his decision to leave.
The former Man City star told the talkSPORT Breakfast: "This Sadio Mane transfer is obviously universally accepted now he's left Liverpool Football Club as a club legend. But I keep on hearing some fans and ex-players saying 'I don't know why he's left?' Let me tell you why he's left.
"One, I don't think he's ever been lauded and appreciated at the football club like Virgil van Dijk or Mo Salah.
"Two, the fact that Liverpool let his contract go down to the last year kind of suggests that that's how they felt about him.
"Three, I think the main thing is that Jurgen Klopp lost him when he came out and belittled the AFCON tournament which his manager (for Senegal) Aliou Cisse had to come out and defend the AFCON and said 'you were coming second until our African players started playing for you'.
"Mane is a man of principles, you've seen him buy hospitals, buy schools and all the rest of it in his home town of Senegal and it's for these reasons I feel Sadio Mane's thought, you know what, I'm going, I'm leaving the club.
"He's had a good time, he's been a club legend but I don't think he could play on after that."
Klopp did clarify his comments about the Africa Cup of Nations, insisting his words had been misconstrued.
"I didn't mean it like that. I don't know why you understand it like that," he said when confronted by a journalist.
"It's not even close to the idea in my mind that I want to talk about AFCON as a little tournament, or the continent of Africa like a little continent, not at all.
"What I meant is, because people said, and if you watch the full press conference, if you wanted to understand it in the right way you could have understood it in the right way. I said 'there's no international break anymore until March' and I said: 'Oh and there's a little tournament in January,' and I didn't mean a little tournament, just like you say it when there's still a tournament. It's ironic. There's still a tournament. A big one. We lose our best players to the Africa Cup of Nations.
"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 never understand why you thought like this to be honest, but that's really not OK, because I would never do that, but that's it now.
"It was not my intention, but you made something of it. That's not so cool as well to be 100 per cent honest."
Mane boasted superb statistics during his six-year spell at Anfield, scoring 120 goals and providing 48 assists in 269 games for the Reds.
He helped Liverpool reach three Champions League finals in a five year period between 2018 and 2022 and was a scorer in the 2018 final defeat to Real Madrid in Kyiv.
On signing for Bayern, Mane added: "I'm really happy to finally be at FC Bayern in Munich. We spoke a lot and I felt big interest from this great club right from the beginning, so for me there were no doubts. It's the right time for this challenge. I want to achieve a lot with this club, in Europe too. During my time in Salzburg I watched a lot of Bayern games - I really like this club!"
Comments