Liverpool's Opportunity with Matias Soule: A Potential New Star
Liverpool once again find themselves standing at a familiar crossroads: a hole on the right flank, a market short on obvious answers, and a potentially undervalued gem hiding in plain sight.
The last time they walked this path, they came back with Mohamed Salah.
Remembering the Salah gamble
It’s easy to rewrite history and pretend Salah was a guaranteed superstar when he arrived at Anfield. He wasn’t. He was the winger who hadn’t quite cracked it at Chelsea, the forward whose reputation lagged behind his numbers in Serie A. A good player, yes. A sure-fire icon? Hardly.
Liverpool chose to believe the data over the doubts. They trusted that the player they saw at AS Roma was closer to the truth than the narrative that followed him from England. From his very first fixtures in red, that faith was repaid. He scored, he ran, he terrified defenders. Then he just kept going.
Salah leaves as one of Liverpool’s greatest ever players and one of the most prolific forwards English football has seen. But that outcome was never inevitable. It was the result of a club willing to back their conviction when the wider market hesitated.
Now, they may have another chance to do it.
A brutal market, a familiar problem
Salah’s departure has left a glaring vacancy on the right side of Liverpool’s attack. The timing could hardly be worse. The current market for right wingers is thin, overpriced, or simply unavailable. Targets have slipped away, and the options that remain either don’t convince or don’t make financial sense.
Yan Diomande choosing Paris Saint-Germain underlined the difficulty. Liverpool, by all accounts, have been left scrambling, scanning a landscape that looks increasingly barren at the top end.
That’s where Matias Soule enters the conversation.
Soule: numbers that shout, a reputation that whispers
Soule’s name does not yet carry the weight of Europe’s elite attackers. His reputation doesn’t match the output he produced last season, and that discrepancy is exactly what should interest a club like Liverpool.
By the numbers, there were not many right wingers who delivered the same level of value as Soule over the last campaign. Among players under 24, only Lamine Yamal, Maghnes Akliouche and Dango Ouattara could say they matched that kind of certainty in their contribution.
The twist? Those players are either untouchable or extremely difficult to prise away. Soule is not.
Roma are open to a sale. Reports in Gazzetta dello Sport suggest that a bid of around €40m would be enough to take him. In a market where average wide forwards are going for elite prices, that figure stands out. It’s not just reasonable; it’s arguably one of the best value propositions available this summer.
Soule is 23, comfortable across the line behind the striker, and has already shown he can influence games consistently. Yet the scramble for his signature has not started. There is no queue at Roma’s door. No bidding war. Just an opportunity waiting for someone bold enough to move first.
Echoes of a past master
The parallels with Salah are not perfect, but they are striking. A right-sided attacker whose output outstrips his reputation. A player available from Roma at a price that feels almost out of step with the current market. A talent whose ceiling might be far higher than the conversation around him suggests.
No one is seriously claiming Soule will become the next Salah. Those heights belong to a tiny handful of players in any era. But that was the point with Salah too: nobody foresaw the scale of what he would become. Liverpool simply saw a misjudged asset and backed themselves to unlock his full potential.
Soule looks like that kind of bet. A player who could explode at the top level if given the right platform, the right structure, the right trust.
The question is no longer whether he represents value. At €40m, in this market, there is a strong case that he does. The question is whether Liverpool are prepared to lean into the same kind of conviction that once turned a doubted winger from Roma into a legend of the Kop.
Do they take that leap again? Or let someone else find out what Matias Soule really is?
