Liverpool's Next Gamble: Matias Soule as Salah's Successor
Liverpool once gambled on a wide forward whose reputation lagged miles behind his numbers. That bet changed the club’s modern history. Now, with Mohamed Salah gone and the right flank suddenly stripped of its defining presence, the question hangs in the air again: do they have the nerve to repeat the trick?
Remembering the first Salah gamble
When Salah walked through the doors at Anfield from Roma, he did not arrive as a superstar. He arrived as a curiosity. A Chelsea cast-off. A winger whose previous Premier League stint had been quietly filed under “didn’t work out”.
The numbers from his time in Serie A told a different story. Goals, assists, chance creation – Salah produced at a level that demanded attention. The wider perception did not. Liverpool chose to trust the data, the scouting, and their conviction that they could unlock something others had missed.
From his first fixtures in red, that decision looked inspired. Salah exploded, then sustained it, then kept going until he left as one of Liverpool’s greatest ever players and one of the most prolific forwards English football has seen. None of that felt inevitable when he signed. It was a calculated leap.
Now Liverpool are back at a similar crossroads.
A brutal market and a glaring vacancy
Salah’s exit has left a jagged hole on the right-hand side of Liverpool’s attack. Replacing his goals, his gravity, his reliability is close to impossible. Replacing the profile – a left-footed right winger who can cut inside, create and finish – is hard enough on its own.
And this is a bad summer to need that kind of player. The market for right-sided forwards is thin, inflated and, in some cases, already picked over. Targets have slipped away. Yan Diomande choosing Paris Saint-Germain underlined how quickly options can vanish and how unforgiving this window is for clubs looking in that area.
Liverpool need quality, value and upside. Those three rarely live in the same player.
Matias Soule might be one of the few who come close.
Soule: the numbers, the noise and the opportunity
Soule, an Argentine playmaker who can operate across the line behind the striker but is comfortable from the right, is available this summer. Roma are open to a sale. Reports in Italy, including Gazzetta dello Sport, indicate that an offer in the region of €40m could be enough to get him.
In this market, for a 23-year-old with his output, that figure jumps off the page.
Soule’s production last season put him in rare company among right wingers. In terms of the value he brought – not just in raw goals and assists, but in the broader attacking contribution – very few under the age of 24 could match him. Only Lamine Yamal, Maghnes Akliouche and Dango Ouattara sat in a similar bracket statistically.
The difference? Those names are either untouchable or prohibitively expensive. Soule is neither. He is there, available, and – for now – strangely under the radar.
His reputation has not caught up with his numbers. That should sound familiar at Anfield.
Echoes of 2017
No one is saying Soule is the next Salah. That would be unfair on both players. Salah’s peak at Liverpool sits in a stratosphere of its own, a blend of output and longevity that very few in the modern game have matched.
The parallel lies elsewhere: in the gap between perception and production, and in the possibility that a club with a clear plan could close it.
Like Salah at Roma, Soule already has the statistical profile of a high-level attacker. He can operate on the right, drift inside, link play and threaten goal. He is young enough to grow, old enough to contribute immediately. He fits the age bracket Liverpool traditionally like to work in. He comes at a price that, in a hyper-inflated market, looks like genuine value.
Most importantly, he looks like a player whose ceiling might be higher than the current conversation around him suggests.
That was the bet Liverpool placed on Salah. They trusted what they saw, not what the wider game believed. It was bold, it was brave, and it was decisive.
Now, with the right flank wide open and the market offering precious little, the club face a familiar dilemma: play it safe and overpay for a name everyone already rates, or lean into what made them so sharp in the first place and move for a player like Matias Soule before everyone else catches on.
They found one era-defining forward in the blind spot between numbers and narrative. Are they willing to dive into that space again?
