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TRENT Alexander-Arnold continues to be linked with a move to Real Madrid – but plenty of big players have seen their fortunes dip after leaving Liverpool.
For every Luis Suarez or Steve McManaman who went on to enjoy immense success elsewhere, there are notable players who flopped after leaving Anfield in search of new pastures.
We’ve identified six players who were world-class operators at Liverpool, but dramatically declined after leaving.
Ian Rush
This is a contentious one. Rush never really settled in Turin, although that famous “it was like living in a foreign country” line is by all accounts apocryphal.
Liverpool’s all-time top goalscorer believes that his short stint in Italy actually improved him as a footballer for his second wildly prolific spell on Merseyside.
“At Juventus I learned to be a better all-round player,” Rush told FourFourTwo.
“I went to Italy as a goalscorer and came back a better footballer. At Liverpool, because we had such a great team, my job was just to be in and around the box. In Italy I was around the pitch more, getting back to the halfway line and everything.”
That’s fair enough. But he only scored seven Serie A goals, never won anything with Italy’s most dominant force and surely wouldn’t have returned to Liverpool so soon were he a great success out there.
If you’re not counting Juve, you can definitely count Leeds after his second Anfield farewell. He only scored three Premier League goals for the Yorkshire club during an infamously dour season under George Graham.
Michael Owen
Real Madrid aren’t shy of bringing Ballon d’Or-winning football royalty to the Bernabeu, but you’d probably class Owen more alongside Kaka than you would Ronaldo Nazario, Zinedine Zidane or Cristiano Ronaldo.
The former England international defends both his decision to leave Liverpool for Madrid and his record during his short-lived time in Spain. Sixteen goals from a season in which he saw limited game time isn’t as bad as you might think, to be fair.
Still, you can divide Owen’s career into two distinct categories: his time at Liverpool and his time after.
The first in which he was dazzlingly dynamic at his boyhood club, fearlessly scoring goals for fun as if he were on the schoolyard, and the latter in which he was serviceable, often decent, but ultimately several shades of ordinary at Madrid, Newcastle, Manchester United and Stoke City. To be fair, recurring hamstring injuries probably have more to do with that than the team he happened to be representing, but the trajectory nevertheless coincides.
Fernando Torres
On the one hand, Torres left Liverpool and went on to win the Champions League, scoring one of the most iconic goals in Chelsea’s recent history at the Camp Nou and sealing their spot in the 2012 final in the process.
While that’s undeniably true, El Nino was never the same player in Chelsea blue as he was in Liverpool red. Struggling for confidence and consistency, he looked unrecognisable to the fearless forward who used to ragdoll Nemanja Vidic for fun.
You only need to look at the numbers. Torres scored 81 goals in 145 appearances for Liverpool, but only 45 goals in 172 outings for the Blues.
Philippe Coutinho
Neymar’s insane €222million move from Barcelona to PSG back in 2017 had huge repercussions across the entire transfer market.
Little did they know it at the time, but the formation of Jurgen Klopp’s great all-conquering Liverpool team can probably be traced back to that moment.
Barcelona panicked and splurged a huge proportion of that world-record fee on signing Coutinho, while Liverpool reinvested the cash they received far more wisely by using the cash they received for the Brazilian playmaker to bring in game-changers Virgil van Dijk and Alisson.
Ultimately, Neymar, Coutinho, PSG and Barcelona all ended up varying degrees of unsatisfied while Liverpool have never looked back after assembling a super-team.
Coutinho was a wonderful player, capable of producing extra-ordinary moments, during his time at Anfield. But he was never able to recapture that at the Camp Nou.
The fact that he’s currently on loan, back in Brazil, from Aston Villa speaks volumes about how things have gone for him.
Georginio Wijnaldum
Alright, “world-class” might be stretching it a tad for Wijnaldum.
But he didn’t look far off as a key cog in a Liverpool midfield that won the Champions League and Premier League in successive seasons, notching 97 and 99 points respectively.
Part of a wider theme here with players Jurgen Klopp got the best out of, Wijnaldum sought a new challenge when his contract expired in 2021 and reportedly rejected Ronald Koeman’s Barcelona for better wages at PSG.
He failed to impress in Paris and was loaned out to Jose Mourinho’s Roma after just one season. But he suffered a broken leg and failed to kick on at the Stadio Olimpico.
Nowadays he’s turning out as the captain of Steven Gerrard’s Al Ettifaq in the Saudi Pro League.
Sadio Mane
Your reminder that Mane is three months older than Salah.
While the Egyptian King continues to tear it up for Liverpool, arguably the very best player in world football right now, Mane has dropped off the footballing map completely.
The Senegalese forward sought a new challenge only a couple of years back. But his move to Bayern Munich was nothing short of a disaster and after coming to blows with Leroy Sane, he was unceremoniously shipped out to the Saudi Pro League. – msn.com
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