Trent Alexander-Arnold has missed the deadline that Gary Neville suggested he should make his future plans known by. The Liverpool right-back’s contract at Anfield is due to expire at the end of June, and he is widely expected to join Spanish giant Real Madrid on a free transfer.
After the futures of Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk were secured in April, Alexander-Arnold‘s contract situation is the only significant one at the club which remains officially unresolved.
Speaking over a week ago, Gary Neville suggested that Alexander-Arnold would be being “distasteful” by not declaring his future plans by the time the title was wrapped up.
“He maybe just doesn’t feel the love and sense the love that maybe others do,” Neville said about why Alexander-Arnold might look to leave Liverpool.
“Obviously he’s not answered questions about his contract, he did an interview on the pitch at the end of the game [against Leicester] where I believe he said he didn’t want to talk about it again, so he’s bumping it down the road.
“But there’s going to come a point, probably in about seven days’ time, whereby he’s going to have nowhere else to go because the season’s over for Liverpool in essence.
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“They’ve won the league, there’s nothing else to talk about other than ‘are you staying at the club or not?’
“He’ll have to just say yes or no. He’ll have to get himself sorted this week I would imagine because once you start leaving it beyond next weekend, when you’ve won the league, it becomes a little bit distasteful.
“You’re better off just declaring your hand at that point, and just saying ‘yes I’m staying’ or ‘no, I’m not’.”
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Neville added that he thinks Alexander-Arnold’s future does lie away from Anfield, as he believes the right-back would have clarified his future a long time ago had he intended to sign a contract renewal with Liverpool.
Neville added: “My gut feeling is he would be leaving because, as a homegrown player, I can only imagine in Liverpool it would be 10 times worse than in Manchester.
“The pressure he’ll be getting put under in the community of Liverpool, and the noise he’ll be hearing and feeling in his family all the time. They’re born there, they live there.
“If he wasn’t leaving, he’d put them out of their misery. He would have said ‘look, what’s the point of carrying this on?’ and just get the contract signed.”
