Arne Slot has warned Real Madrid that their pursuit of Trent Alexander-Arnold will not be easy, citing the example of their failure to convince Steven Gerrard to leave Merseyside for Madrid.
Madrid approached Liverpool on New Year's Eve to sign Trent Alexander-Arnold in January but this was emphatically rejected. Although the 26-year-old's contract expires this summer, the Spanish giants were able to get him for free at the time.
Asked by reporters if he was concerned that Madrid were tending to get their way, the Liverpool boss said: 'There was one player (Gerrard) who they would have really liked to have but he didn't come. You know him better than I do. So it happened.'
Jose Mourinho tried to sign Gerrard for Madrid in 2010, but the former Liverpool captain turned down the opportunity. Earlier this year, Gerrard said: 'I had offers from Real Madrid and Chelsea, but my heart was always with Liverpool. I have never regretted my decision. If I could go back in time, I'd do the same thing.'
Like Gerrard, Alexander-Arnold is a Liverpool academy graduate, but if he were to move to the Spanish capital he would follow in the footsteps of former Liverpool players such as Steve McManaman and Michael Owen.
En Slot emphasized that the growing speculation surrounding Alexander-Arnold, as well as Virgil Van Dijk and Mohamed Salah, both of whom are also out of contract this summer, will not cause any distractions in the run-up to Liverpool's match against Manchester United on Sunday.
When asked how much it would hurt Liverpool if Alexander-Arnold were to leave, Slot replied: 'These are all if questions. My answer is that he is with us and his entire focus is on us. This is what you saw in the West Ham game and the games before it. He is on almost everyone's team of the year for the first half of the season. That shows how often he's here at the moment.
“For me there is no distraction at all and I don't see any distraction with Trent, just looking at his performance and how he trains. I see him training every day and it's the same with Virgil (Van Dijk) and Mo (Salah) and everyone else, because when you play at a club like this, every player is probably in someone's interest. That's part of football and that's why we don't let it distract us.'
A win for Liverpool against their arch-rivals would take them to 48 points, eight ahead of Arsenal after 19 games and on course for 96 points, but Slot insisted it would not be a 'bottle job' if his side failed to win the Premier League to win. in its first season.
'I have a lot of confidence in the players in every aspect of football: their mentality, their quality on the ball and their work rate, but for me it's not about getting it over the line because there are still 20 games to go go and it's still like that. still a long way to go,” he said.
'There have been so many seasons in the Premier League – and even in the league I've worked in before – where so many teams that have a comfortable lead, sometimes win and sometimes other teams come back. If you have this lead in the Eredivisie, you are 90 percent sure of winning the league, because losing against the lower teams is virtually impossible.
'But this week we saw Chelsea lose to Ipswich, so that says it's impossible to look that far ahead. It is possible in the Eredivisie, but impossible here because there are so many good players and good teams. So it's a good lead, but not enough to be comfortable. That's a nice way of putting it.'
And Slot added that after a stunning 2024 that saw him lose just one match during his time at Feyenoord and Liverpool, he would take nothing for granted going into his first game of the new year.
'There are no guarantees for 2025, so we just have to earn it – all these wins again. That's what we're going to try to do, starting on Sunday.”
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