Liverpool's Next Bold Move: Matias Soule as Salah's Successor

Liverpool stand at a familiar crossroads. The last time they were here, they walked away with Mohamed Salah and rewrote a decade of club history.

Salah did not arrive at Anfield as an inevitable superstar. He came with baggage: a failed spell at Chelsea, doubts about whether his Serie A form would translate, a reputation that lagged behind the numbers he was quietly stacking up at Roma. Liverpool bet that the data told the truth and the noise was wrong.

They were right. Spectacularly so.

From his first outings in red, Salah tore into the Premier League and never really eased off. He leaves as one of Liverpool’s greatest players and one of the most prolific forwards English football has seen. That outcome was never guaranteed. It came from a club willing to trust their conviction when the wider market hesitated.

Now they need to do it again.

Salah’s departure has ripped a hole on the right side of Liverpool’s attack, and the options to fill it are thin. The current market for right wingers is not just expensive, it’s underwhelming. Targets have slipped away, and Yan Diomande choosing Paris Saint-Germain has only underlined how quickly carefully laid plans can unravel.

This is where Matias Soule enters the conversation.

Soule, an Argentine currently at Roma, sits in a similar bracket to the Salah of 2017: a player whose output outstrips the way people talk about him. The numbers are there. The perception has not caught up.

Across Europe last season, very few right wingers delivered the kind of value Soule produced. Among players under the age of 24, only Lamine Yamal, Maghnes Akliouche and Dango Ouattara matched that level with the same degree of consistency. That is elite company for a 23-year-old who still feels like a niche name outside Italy and the data rooms of recruitment departments.

The key difference this time? Availability.

Roma are open to a sale. Gazzetta dello Sport report that a bid of around €40m would be enough to get Soule. In a market where unproven wide players are routinely pushed towards the €70m–€80m bracket, that figure stands out. For a creative, versatile attacker who can operate across the line behind the striker and is still only 23, it looks like one of the few genuine value plays on the board.

This is exactly the kind of profile Liverpool once specialised in spotting before everyone else did.

Back then, they saw Salah’s pace, movement and underlying numbers at Roma and decided his Premier League story was not finished. Now they can see Soule, another Roma forward whose data hints at a far higher ceiling than his current reputation suggests.

No one is seriously claiming Soule will match Salah’s output or status. Those heights are reserved for the very few, and even inside Anfield almost nobody predicted the scale of Salah’s impact. That is precisely the point. Transformative signings often arrive dressed as calculated risks.

Soule looks like one of those. Young, productive, underappreciated, attainable.

Liverpool can wait for the market to present a “sure thing” at twice the price, or they can lean into the kind of bold, evidence-backed decision that once changed the course of their modern era. The opportunity is there.

The real question is whether they still have the nerve to take it.