Liverpool's No-Risk Solution for Life After Salah: Jarrod Bowen
The Premier League has barely drawn breath after the season’s final whistle, and already Liverpool are being pushed towards a solution for life after Mohamed Salah: Jarrod Bowen, freshly relegated and suddenly available.
West Ham’s 14-year stay in the top flight is over. Bowen, their captain and standard-bearer, goes down with them, despite a season that would usually guarantee safety, not the drop. Nine goals. Eleven assists. Thirty-eight league games. He turned up, produced, and still watched the trapdoor open.
Now, with four years left on his contract but no Premier League football on offer in east London, the 29-year-old looks destined for a move. Anfield is being marked out as a logical landing spot, and one former Liverpool midfielder is adamant it makes sense.
‘No risk’ Bowen backed for Anfield
Speaking on talkSPORT’s Kick Off, Danny Murphy didn’t hesitate when asked by Natalie Sawyer whether Bowen should be on Liverpool’s radar.
“I wouldn’t be disappointed seeing him at Liverpool,” he said, laying out the case with the clarity of someone who knows the club’s recruitment habits inside out. Goals. Assists. Durability. In Murphy’s eyes, Bowen ticks the boxes that matter on the pitch.
He also knows Bowen doesn’t fit the usual Liverpool template. At 29, there’s limited resale value, little scope for the kind of profit that has underpinned so much of their recent business. Murphy admitted as much, calling it “a change of tact” from the Anfield hierarchy’s preferred model.
But that, he argued, is exactly why this could work.
If Liverpool want an elite right-sided forward in Salah’s mould, the market is brutal. “You’re going to have to pay £50m to £80m, aren’t you,” Murphy said. For a player still in the Premier League, still in his peak years, that’s the going rate.
Relegation changes everything. West Ham’s slide into the Championship has dragged Bowen’s value into a different bracket. Murphy suggested a fee in the region of £20m–£30m, and even floated the idea that a deal closer to £20m could be possible if the player pushes to leave and the club want his wages off the books.
At that price, he called it “no risk”.
The Salah shadow
Any right-sided forward walking into Anfield this summer will feel it: the shadow of Salah. Nine years. 257 goals in 442 games. Four Premier League Golden Boots. Fourth on the all-time Premier League scoring list with 193 goals. Those are not numbers, they’re a monument.
Murphy doesn’t think Bowen should be buried under that weight.
Asked whether Bowen should inherit Salah’s iconic No.11 shirt, he pushed back. He wouldn’t deny it to him if Bowen wanted it, but he wouldn’t force the symbolism either. The message was clear: let Bowen be Bowen, not a tribute act.
“He’s not going to get Salah’s numbers, they’re just ridiculous,” Murphy admitted. That’s the reality for almost any winger on the planet. What Bowen does offer is something different: a proven Premier League output, year after year, and the reliability of a player who knows the league, the physicality, the grind.
Murphy stressed he wasn’t arguing against Liverpool chasing the elite tier. He namechecked Kvicha Kvaratskhelia as the kind of superstar you pursue if you can prise him out of a giant club and a comfort zone where he has already “won everything”. If a player of that calibre wants Liverpool, you roll out the red carpet.
But the former midfielder sees Bowen as a smart, pragmatic move in a summer where Liverpool’s to-do list is long. Get that right-hand side “sorted” at a reasonable price, he suggested, and Slot can turn his attention to the rest of the rebuild.
Slot’s summer puzzle
Arne Slot walks into a club that finished fifth and expects more. He also walks into a dressing room losing one of its greatest ever players on a free transfer. The attack must be reshaped, not just tweaked.
Liverpool are understood to be weighing up whether to bring in two wingers or to split the brief: one wide forward to operate on the flank, another more versatile attacker who can shift across the front line. The right-hand side, Salah’s old territory, is the most glaring gap, but not the only one.
Yan Diomande of RB Leipzig has emerged as a leading target. The Ivorian international fits the modern Liverpool profile: explosive, upward trajectory, and with years ahead of him. He also comes with a price tag to match. Leipzig value him at £86m, a figure that would make him one of the most expensive signings in the club’s history.
Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester United are also circling, which only drives the price and pressure higher. That kind of deal shapes a club’s transfer window.
Liverpool’s recruitment team are not short of options. Bradley Barcola is on the list. So is Anthony Gordon, whose form and homegrown status make him a tempting, if expensive, Premier League-ready choice. Each name brings a different profile, a different fee, a different level of risk.
And then there is Bowen: older, cheaper, tried and tested.
A different kind of statement
Liverpool have built an era on spectacular statements. Salah, Alisson, Virgil van Dijk, Darwin Núñez – each signing carried a sense of ambition and risk, a belief that they were buying not just players, but pillars.
Bowen would be a different kind of statement. Not a marquee unveiling, but a calculated move for a player whose numbers survive the glare of the Premier League, whose work rate suits Anfield’s demands, and whose fee leaves room for the rest of the squad surgery Slot needs.
The question now is simple: in a summer where Liverpool must replace a legend, strengthen multiple lines, and keep pace with rivals spending aggressively, does a “no-risk” move for a relegated captain become the smartest play on the board?
