In the wake of Liverpool’s 2019 Champions League victory against Tottenham Hotspur, fresh-faced right-back Trent Alexander-Arnold was ushered towards the camera for an interview.
The 20-year-old established himself as a regular starter for the Reds that season and began to demonstrate his enormous potential as the campaign reached its glorious finale.
“It is hard to put into words,” he told the broadcaster BT Sport bashfully, “the season we have had, we deserved it more than any other team. We have done something special.”
As is always the case at such moments, the interviewer pushed Alexander-Arnold a little further with a question that could have been a bit of a banana skin: Did he think victory was enough to give him legendary status?
“It’s hard to think of myself as a legend,” he said modestly, “I am just a normal lad from Liverpool whose dream has just come true.”
Rarely do statements made in the embers of a European final amid the scattered confetti become iconic remarks. Still, Alexander-Arnold’s last line almost immediately struck a chord with the Liverpool faithful.
It was one of those remarks that just felt pure. His words articulated a feeling many football fans have felt in a concise and beautiful way.
The comment was truly etched into Liverpool folklore when popular fan podcast The Anfield Wrap commissioned a three-storey mural featuring Alexander-Arnold’s quote on the side of a red-brick housing block around the corner from Anfield.
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A popular, often photographed image, it has been replicated many times on t-shirts and hoodies worn by fans, all of which emphasize the sentiment the mural communicates: ‘he’s one of their own.’
This, for many players, would be where the story ends. But not for Alexander-Arnold.
In the six years that followed that breakthrough season, something shifted inside the full-back.
When asked about his ambitions in a fairly innocuous interview by Sky Sports last year, the Liverpudlian was no longer bashfully batting away discussions about legendary status; he was raising the stakes.
“[I want to be] a legend of football, someone who changed the game,” he said.
“A saying I have is ‘don’t play the game, change the game.’ I want that legacy of being probably the greatest right-back ever to play football, to be honest.
“I know there have been many out there, but I have to reach for the stars. That’s where I believe my ceiling can go.”
It was an astonishing departure but not entirely unexpected for a player who had spent most of a decade at the game’s highest level.
But elite athletes constantly challenge themselves with more ambitious goals, and Alexander-Arnold is no different.
The trouble is that the goals he set for himself irritated some of the Liverpool fans because they appeared to be individual rather than collective aims.
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND - JULY 05: A general view of a Trent Alexander-Arnold of Liverpool mural is seen ... More outside the stadium prior to the Premier League match between Liverpool FC and Aston Villa at Anfield on July 05, 2020 in Liverpool, England.Football Stadiums around Europe remain empty due to the Coronavirus Pandemic as Government social distancing laws prohibit fans inside venues resulting in games being played behind closed doors. (Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)Getty Images
“I believe I can win the Ballon d’Or,” he added.
“I want to be the first full-back to ever do it. It’s only the morning after you retire that you’re able to look at yourself in the mirror and say you’ve given it everything you have got.
“It doesn’t matter how many trophies you win or medals you have got, it matters about what you have given to the game and if you reach your full potential. I’ve heard potential being thrown around with my name since the age of six.
“If you reach that potential and you know you have and you’ve given everything to maximize that potential and be the player you believe you can be, which is one of the best ever, then you’ll be happy. It doesn’t matter how many trophies you win, I guess.”
Well, it now appears he thinks Merseyside is not the place to win the Ballon d’Or.
Widespread reports suggest Alexander Arnold is poised to move to Real Madrid on a free transfer, as the full-back is running down his contract.
It has created a painful dilemma for the Liverpool faithful: Do they continue to eulogize the full-back and thank him for his efforts, or do they label him a traitor?
Betrayal might seem an overly strong sentiment, but as supporter Abigail Rudkin explained to the BBC, he wasn’t just any player in their eyes.
“As a Liverpool fan, you’re just devastated. But he has won everything there is to win at Liverpool,” she said.
“We are all living vicariously through Trent and now [it looks like] he has decided Madrid is the new dream. That’s why we’re all gutted.”
It’s the exact move that Steve McManaman made in 1999, when he, too, moved for free after declining to sign a new deal with his boyhood club.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the former Real star has cast the criticism as wrong, suggesting that the potential departures of other big-name players this summer will not be characterized in the same way.
“It’s unfair,” he said. “If Virgil van Dijk or Mohamed Salah leave, then it’s Liverpool’s fault; if Trent were to leave, then it’s Trent’s fault.
“His legacy, I hope, is one of an outstanding homegrown footballer who’s done incredibly well for this club.”
At the moment, those words will ring a little hollow for many Liverpool fans, but maybe that will change with time.