Liverpool's Next Gamble: Matias Soule as the New Salah

Liverpool know this story by heart.

A wide forward, talented but tarnished, slips out of Italian football with big numbers and a smaller reputation. The data loves him. The market shrugs. One club looks a little closer and decides everyone else has misread the player.

That was Mohamed Salah in 2017. It could be Matias Soule in 2024.

Remembering the first Salah gamble

It’s easy to rewrite history and pretend Salah was a guaranteed superstar when he walked through the doors at Melwood. He wasn’t. He arrived with a failed Chelsea spell hanging around his neck and the lazy tag of “good in Serie A, not sure about the Premier League”.

Liverpool ignored the noise and backed the evidence. Salah’s output for Roma was outstanding: goals, assists, chance creation, relentless threat. The numbers screamed elite. The narrative did not.

From his very first fixtures in red, the doubts evaporated. Salah scored, then scored again, then just kept going. He left as one of Liverpool’s greatest ever players and among the most prolific forwards English football has seen.

That outcome was never guaranteed. It came from a club willing to trust their judgement when the wider market hesitated.

A brutal right‑wing market

Now Liverpool stand at a similar crossroads on the right side of their attack.

Salah has gone. A giant hole opens up on that flank, and the timing could hardly be worse. The current market for right wingers is thin, wildly inflated, or both. Targets are scarce, prices are absurd, and even the obvious names come with heavy caveats.

Yan Diomande choosing Paris Saint‑Germain underlined the problem. One serious option gone, and Liverpool left scanning a list that looks shorter and less convincing by the week.

This is where Matias Soule enters the conversation.

Soule: big numbers, muted noise

Soule’s name does not dominate transfer chatter. It should.

The Argentine, currently with Roma and available this summer, sits in that intriguing space where production and perception don’t quite match. His numbers last season stack up impressively against his peers on the right.

There were not many right wingers who delivered his level of value. Very few, in fact. Among players under 24, only Lamine Yamal, Maghnes Akliouche and Dango Ouattara matched that sort of certainty in their output.

That’s elite company for a 23‑year‑old. Yet Soule’s name rarely tops the lists when Europe’s biggest clubs talk about attacking reinforcements.

The price of opportunity

This is where the comparison with Salah becomes impossible to ignore.

Roma are open to selling. Reports in Gazzetta dello Sport suggest a bid of around €40 million would be enough to get a deal done. For a versatile attacker who can operate across the line behind the striker, is still only 23, and already posting standout numbers, that is serious value.

In a summer where ordinary wide players are attracting extraordinary fees, Soule looks like an anomaly. A player whose statistical profile hints at a much higher ceiling than the market currently recognises.

Liverpool have been here before. They once looked at Salah, saw a player misjudged by reputation, and trusted that their structure, style and coaching could unlock something spectacular.

Soule is not Salah. Expecting anyone to reproduce that level of output would be naive. But the pattern is familiar: a right‑sided attacker with underappreciated numbers, available from Roma, and seemingly overlooked by rivals.

Another leap of faith?

The temptation is obvious. A club that built an era on smart, brave recruitment now faces a decision that feels very much in character: do they back their eye again and go for the undervalued outlier?

Soule looks like a player on the verge of a serious jump, the kind of forward who could explode at the top level in the right environment. The question is not whether he will ever match Salah’s legacy. Almost no one will.

The real question is simpler, and more pressing for Liverpool’s new era: when a golden chance like this appears again, do they recognise it – and take it?