Liverpool Targets Rayan as Salah's Successor
Liverpool are stepping into the 2026/27 season stripped of two pillars of their recent identity: a title-winning trajectory and the man who helped define it from the touchline and the right flank.
Arne Slot has gone, ushered out at the end of May after a league campaign that sagged badly in the shadow of the previous year’s triumph. Mohamed Salah has gone too, drawing a line under nine extraordinary years at Anfield and leaving behind a void that cannot be measured just by numbers – though his numbers are absurd enough.
Salah walked away with 380 goal contributions in 442 games. Even in a season where he never quite hit his old heights, he still tilted games, still terrified full-backs, still bent Liverpool’s attack around his left foot. That influence has vanished in a single summer.
Into the chaos steps Andoni Iraola, the man imported from Bournemouth to restart the machine. And, perhaps, with a very specific player in mind.
The Hunt for a Right-Sided Heir
Liverpool cannot replace Salah like-for-like. Nobody can. What they can do is find the next right-sided forward to grow into that role, and the club’s recruitment team have turned their gaze towards a teenager who has already shaken up the Premier League once.
According to reports, Liverpool are one of five European heavyweights circling Bournemouth’s Brazilian winger Rayan. He only landed on the south coast in January, arriving from Vasco da Gama for an initial £24.7 million with a further £5.6m in potential add-ons, but he barely needed a settling-in period.
Fifteen league games. Five goals. Two assists. A 19-year-old stepping into a new country, a new league, and helping drive Bournemouth to European qualification for the first time in their history.
That kind of impact does not go unnoticed. It certainly hasn’t now.
Rayan operates from the right, cutting in with the kind of directness and confidence that immediately draws comparisons with the elite. Inside the Bournemouth dressing room, he has already been tagged as a “world-class talent” by teammate Marcus Tavernier. Outside it, he has drawn the attention of clubs who tend to act quickly when they spot the next big thing.
Liverpool are not alone. Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid are all tracking the Brazil international. This is not a quiet, under-the-radar chase. This is a full-blown scramble for one of the most exciting young wide players in Europe.
Liverpool, though, are understood to be taking an active role in the pursuit. A figure of around £60m has been discussed in connection with the Anfield club, while a bid in the region of £85m has been suggested as “exceptional value” for Bournemouth’s owners given the speed of his rise and the scale of the interest.
For a player signed barely half a year ago, those are staggering numbers. For a club who have just lost Salah, they start to look like the going rate.
Iraola and Rayan: A Partnership Revisited?
There is another layer to this story, one that makes Liverpool’s interest feel less like a scattergun move and more like a targeted strike.
Rayan’s explosion in England came under Iraola. The 44-year-old coaxed both end product and industry from the winger, and the bond between coach and player was clear long before Liverpool came calling for the manager.
Rayan’s attacking flair is obvious. What endeared him to Iraola was something different: his willingness to embrace the ugly side of the game.
Speaking in May, Iraola described watching the teenager go toe-to-toe defensively with Manchester City’s Jeremy Doku, relishing tackles and duels, and admitted it almost moved him to tears. For a coach obsessed with intensity and collective work without the ball, that kind of attitude from a gifted attacker is gold dust.
“I know Rayan is going to score goals all his life,” Iraola said at the time, grouping him with fellow youngster Junior Kroupi and praising their natural finishing. In training, he recalled, Kroupi’s goalscoring was so outrageous that teammates would simply stop and applaud.
But the real step, in Iraola’s eyes, was their evolution into more complete players. He spoke openly about his initial doubts over whether Rayan and Kroupi could adapt to the demands without the ball. By the end of the season, he felt they had taken “incredible steps” to earn their minutes and round out their game.
Those words now echo differently. At Bournemouth, Iraola was shaping Rayan into a modern wide forward: ruthless in the box, relentless in the press. At Liverpool, with Salah gone and a right flank to rebuild, that profile suddenly looks tailor-made.
A Void, a Vision, and a Race Against Time
Liverpool’s attack is not starting from scratch. The squad still has goals, creativity and pace. But the structure of the front line has revolved around Salah for almost a decade – his runs, his gravity, his reliability.
Any successor must live with the comparison, fair or not.
Rayan would not arrive as a finished superstar. He would come as a 19-year-old with half a Premier League season behind him, raw and thrilling, walking into one of the most demanding attacking roles in European football. That is a gamble for any club, even one as historically bold as Liverpool in the transfer market.
Yet the pieces line up. A new coach who already knows how to use him. A right-sided vacancy in the long term. A club that has built its recent success on identifying and accelerating talent before the rest of Europe fully catches up.
The clock is ticking. The transfer window closes on September 1, and with Arsenal, Bayern, PSG and Real Madrid all hovering, Liverpool know hesitation can be fatal in this kind of market.
Salah’s era is over. The question now is whether Liverpool are prepared to bet big that the next chapter on their right wing belongs to a teenager who has already lit up the south coast – and whether Iraola is ready to reunite with the player who could define his reign at Anfield.
