Liverpool's Next Gamble: Matias Soule's Potential

Liverpool once bet against the market and won the jackpot with Mohamed Salah. Now, with the Egyptian gone and the right flank suddenly bare, a strangely familiar opportunity is staring back at them.

Remembering the first Salah gamble

Salah did not arrive at Anfield as a guaranteed superstar. He was a Chelsea cast-off, a winger many in England had already written off. When Liverpool moved for him from Roma, his numbers in Serie A were excellent, but his reputation in the Premier League was anything but intimidating.

Liverpool ignored the noise. They trusted the data, trusted the eye test, trusted their conviction that he could be far more than the player others thought they knew.

From his first fixtures in red, the doubts evaporated. Salah exploded. Goals, assists, records. He departs as one of Liverpool’s greatest players, one of the most prolific forwards English football has seen. That outcome was not preordained. It was the product of a club willing to back its own judgement when the market hesitated.

That context matters now.

A brutal market and a glaring hole

Salah’s exit has left Liverpool hunting for a right-sided attacker at a time when the market is thin and wildly inflated. The pool of high-level right wingers is shallow. The few obvious names are either unavailable, prohibitively expensive, or already moving elsewhere.

Yan Diomande choosing Paris Saint-Germain underlined the problem. One serious target gone, and Liverpool left scanning a landscape that looks, in truth, “incredibly poor”.

This is where creative thinking has to replace star-chasing. Where value, not just profile, becomes the key.

The Soule question

Enter Matias Soule.

The Argentine, currently at Roma, fits a profile that should sound familiar to anyone who remembers the Salah deal. His output tells one story; the broader perception of him hasn’t quite caught up.

Last season, very few right wingers in Europe delivered the kind of value Soule produced. Among players under 24, only Lamine Yamal, Maghnes Akliouche and Dango Ouattara could match that level with any real consistency.

That is elite company for a 23-year-old who, crucially, is actually on the market.

Roma are prepared to sell. Reports in Gazzetta dello Sport indicate that an offer in the region of €40m could be enough to secure him. In a market where raw, unproven wide players are fetching far more, that price bracket stands out.

Soule is not just a touchline winger, either. He can operate across the line behind the striker, offering the kind of positional flexibility modern coaches prize. He is young enough to grow, old enough to contribute immediately.

And yet, there is no scramble. No bidding war. No sense that Europe’s biggest clubs are jostling for position.

Echoes of 2017

Strip away the names and the badge, and the pattern is striking.

A right-sided attacker. Numbers that outshine his reputation. A club willing to sell at a reasonable fee. A player whose ceiling might be higher than the wider game currently believes.

No one is suggesting Soule will replicate Salah’s historic output. That would be unfair, and unrealistic. But the same was said, in quieter tones, when Liverpool first moved for Salah. The consensus then did not forecast a record-breaking phenomenon.

What Liverpool saw in 2017 was mispriced talent. A player whose data, attributes and mentality hinted at a level the market had not fully appreciated.

Soule looks like another case study in that category.

Another leap of faith?

Liverpool’s recruitment team now faces a familiar choice. Chase the obvious, overhyped names in a weak market, or lean again into the kind of conviction that once turned a doubted winger into a legend.

At €40m, with age, versatility and output on his side, Matias Soule offers something rare in this window: genuine value.

The question is not whether he is the next Mohamed Salah.

The question is whether Liverpool are still the club willing to act before everyone else realises what a player truly is.