Would Liverpool Welcome Trent Back? And Would He Forgive Them?
Could Trent Alexander-Arnold go back to Liverpool? Would the fans accept him back, and would he forgive them for the way they treated him when he left? Those questions may be answered sooner than anyone expected, because Trent’s days at Real Madrid look like they could be numbered.
The move he spent years dreaming about has turned into a struggle for minutes under Jose Mourinho, and the club with the most obvious need for him is the one he walked away from. On paper, a reunion would fix problems for both sides. Off the pitch, it might be the most complicated homecoming in Premier League history.
A Dream Move Gone Wrong
When Trent left Liverpool in the summer of 2025, Real Madrid paid around €10 million to bring him over a few weeks before his contract expired so he could play in the Club World Cup. It was supposed to be the start of the next great chapter of his career, a homegrown Liverpool star taking his talents to the biggest club in the world while still in his prime.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Real Madrid had already lined up Denzel Dumfries from Inter Milan before the club’s presidential election in June, and Mourinho signed off on the move once he took charge. Since then, Trent has made only three La Liga starts and one Champions League start against Inter, and the match against Sevilla marked a new low. Both Trent and Dumfries sat on the bench for the full 90 minutes while Mourinho started Federico Valverde at right back, a midfielder who has openly said it’s a position he’d rather not play.
Falling behind a proven international like Dumfries is something a player can live with for a while. Watching your manager leave both natural right backs on the bench and hand the position to a midfielder who doesn’t even want it sends a very different message, and with Trent now 28 and his best years slipping by, January is starting to look like his best chance to rescue his career.
Why Liverpool Makes Sense
Liverpool, meanwhile, have a problem on the right side of their back line. Jeremie Frimpong arrived from Bayer Leverkusen as Trent’s replacement, and while his attacking quality was never in doubt, he’s been a problem defensively and is currently sidelined through injury. Conor Bradley, the academy product who was supposed to grow into the role, is out as well and won’t return for some time. That leaves Andoni Iraola without a fit, reliable option at a position Trent owned for the better part of a decade.
The numbers back up the fit. SciSports, an analytics company that grades potential moves for players based on how well each destination suits them, rates a return to Anfield as Trent’s best option at 86, ahead of Aston Villa at 82, PSG at 80, and Manchester City and Arsenal at 76.
But no algorithm can measure how this relationship ended, and that’s the part that could stop a reunion before it ever gets started.
How It Ended
Trent wasn’t just another academy graduate. He joined Liverpool as a six-year-old from West Derby, grew up a few minutes from the club’s training ground, and became the kind of local hero every fanbase dreams of producing. He won the Champions League, he won two Premier League titles, he became vice-captain, and for years he was held up as proof that a kid from the city could become one of the best players in the world while wearing the shirt he grew up supporting.
That’s exactly why the ending hurt so much. Trent let his contract run down while speculation about Real Madrid followed him for months, and Liverpool supporters came away believing he’d assured them nothing was happening, right up until he announced he was leaving. Then came the unveiling in Madrid, where he showed up already speaking Spanish, which only confirmed to a lot of fans that the move had been in the works far longer than they’d been told.
The reaction at Anfield swung back and forth. When he came off the bench against Arsenal shortly after announcing his departure, with the league title already secured, sections of the crowd booed him. By his final appearance against Crystal Palace, the mood had softened enough that he got a warm send-off and said afterward that he’d never felt so loved. But when he returned with Real Madrid in the Champions League, the same supporters who had cheered him through the academy and into the first team booed him again. Whatever anyone expected the fallout to look like, the anger turned out to be far fiercer than even his harshest critics would have predicted.
Plenty of Liverpool fans would say that anger was justified. A homegrown vice-captain leaving for next to nothing, after the club had developed him from childhood, felt like a betrayal of everything he’d represented, and in a city where loyalty to the club runs deeper than almost anywhere else in football, that kind of departure doesn’t get forgotten quickly.
Forgiveness Has to Run Both Ways
The question that gets talked about far less is whether Trent would forgive Liverpool.
Trent gave Liverpool close to 20 years of his life. He delivered some of the most iconic moments of the Jürgen Klopp era, including the quick corner against Barcelona that sent Liverpool to the 2019 Champions League final, and he helped win the Premier League, the Champions League, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Super Cup and the Club World Cup. And despite all of that, he was booed by his own people at Anfield, first in the weeks after he announced his exit and then again when he came back in a Real Madrid shirt.
Players remember those moments. A footballer can understand anger from supporters, but being jeered by the fanbase you grew up in, after everything you won for them, is the kind of thing that leaves a mark. It’s fair to wonder whether Trent would ever want to put himself back in front of that crowd, knowing a single bad performance could bring all of that resentment flooding back.
Trent is still young enough, and still talented enough, to rewrite the story. A player who comes back and performs, who helps Liverpool win again, tends to find that supporters remember the trophies far longer than the grievances. But that only happens if both sides are willing to take the first step, and if Trent is willing to accept that winning back the crowd would be his job, not theirs.
The Verdict
Liverpool need a right back, and Trent needs to play. The analytics say it’s the perfect fit, and the football might well say the same. But football reunions aren’t decided by spreadsheets, and this one will come down to whether a fanbase can let go of a betrayal, and whether a hometown hero can let go of being booed by the people he played for.