Alexis Mac Allister's Future and Liverpool's Summer Strategy
Andoni Iraola knows exactly what he wants this summer – and what he cannot afford to lose.
At the heart of it all sits Alexis Mac Allister. Two years left on his Liverpool deal, a World Cup winner, and a name that keeps circling around Madrid. The noise is growing, but Iraola is not entertaining the idea of life without him.
“I think Alexis has been one of the best players of the club last year and has done a very good World Cup,” the Liverpool manager said, laying it out plainly.
For him, the logic is simple: big clubs chase big players. Liverpool have one of the biggest in Mac Allister, and they intend to keep him.
The midfielder is due to rejoin the squad after the break, his schedule still shaped by that gruelling run to the World Cup final with Argentina. Liverpool will welcome him back to a very different landscape.
Because while Mac Allister’s future is a priority, he is not the problem. The holes elsewhere are.
Key Exits
Salah. Robertson. Konate. Three pillars of recent Liverpool sides, three high-profile exits, three gaping spaces in the first-team structure. Iraola has not tried to dress it up. He has spoken openly about the “obvious” need for reinforcements, particularly out wide.
The search for a winger has moved to the top of the recruitment agenda. Not a luxury buy. A necessity.
“There are obvious situations where we need to sign players. Winger for example, we definitely need to sign a winger,” Iraola admitted.
The rest of the window, he suggested, will be a balancing act: what the market offers, what it costs, and how it all fits around the players already in the building.
He is not chasing numbers for the sake of it. He wants quality and fit, while still clinging on to his core. “I want to keep my good players,” he stressed, making it clear that incomings, not sales, are his priority. “Probably I'm looking forward more to signing new players than the ones we have here.”
Behind that line sits a manager trying to rebuild on the fly.
Injuries have complicated everything. Certain positions are “tricky,” as he put it, because the players in those roles are trusted but not yet fully fit. That uncertainty will shape how Liverpool move in the final weeks of the window. If key figures return quickly to full training, the club can be more selective. If they do not, pressure grows on the recruitment team to act.
Pre-Season Tour
All of this is playing out thousands of miles from Anfield.
Liverpool are currently in the United States on their Premier League pre-season tour, a crucial spell for Iraola to stamp his ideas on a squad in transition. The American leg is more than a commercial exercise this year; it is a live laboratory.
New signings Jeremy Jacquet and Victor Munoz are being folded into the group, tested in a new environment, asked to adapt at speed. Younger players are under the microscope as well, their technical levels and temperament assessed before Liverpool decide whether to trust them with bigger roles or turn back to the market.
Sunderland, Leeds United and Wrexham await on the tour schedule. For some, those games will decide their immediate futures. For others, they are just the first steps in a long season.
One key question lingers over the whole trip: when does Mac Allister walk back into this evolving dressing room and start his own preparations? His return will not just add quality; it will bring clarity. If Liverpool can keep him, build around him, and land the winger Iraola craves, this summer of uncertainty could yet harden into a new, defined era on Merseyside.
If they cannot, the rebuild becomes something far more delicate.
