Jeremie Frimpong is poised to complete a transfer to Liverpool in the upcoming summer window, and there are several reasons why he’s the perfect Trent Alexander-Arnold replacement
No collection of footballers can become better when Trent Alexander-Arnold is removed from them, but that removal can provide some clarity.
The unique set of skills possessed by a player Liverpool nurtured from their academy have played a huge role in the Reds’ successes over recent years, and however angry some supporters are about his departure, his impact on the club and the team cannot be airbrushed away.
It was the fact that Alexander-Arnold was capable of mastering all that he surveyed while being ‘a normal lad from Liverpool’ which made his story so compelling, and ensures that whatever comes next is not going to be as romantic or as pleasing on the eye. But no matter.
In Jeremie Frimpong – the player who looks for all the world as though he will become Alexander-Arnold’s replacement at Liverpool – the Reds have identified an exciting signing who ticks almost as many boxes as Alexander-Arnold plays glorious raking long passes.
We’ll start on the field. There, Frimpong has cultivated a reputation as one of the busiest right sided players in the game today. He’s up, he’s down, he’s attacking, he’s defending, he’s scoring and he’s assisting, and he’s doing it all at what seems like 100 miles an hour.
Because whereas his likely predecessor’s calling card was his creativity, for Frimpong it is his raw speed which marks him out from the rest, and provides Liverpool’s data team with the much longed-for X factor they seek in a new signing.
Those sceptical of the move may point to the fact that all of Frimpong’s most effective football has come in the right wing-back position in Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen shape, but at Liverpool they’ll have no doubt that the 24-year-old can transfer his talents to a back four easily enough, partly because he’s already done it with Manchester City’s youth sides, in senior football with Celtic and for his national team.
As a right-back, Frimpong has much more in common with the man he will be competing for a shirt with, Conor Bradley, than either has with Alexander-Arnold, with both extremely quick, both good at progressing the ball from deep and both able to overlap down the right hand side.
What’s more, Frimpong will also offer the ability to cover for Mo Salah either late in games or when he’s at the Africa Cup of Nations come December and January, something that probably won’t be seen from Bradley who in turn offers a bit more strength defensively.
Far from seeing this as a selection problem, Arne Slot is likely to welcome the fact that he’ll have two footballers with similar but different skillsets that he can rotate in the right-back position, even though he is going to have to find a solution for the creativity he’s lost in Alexander-Arnold – something that’s likely to be a team burden and not an individual one.
You get the feeling the team will embrace that challenge though, just as they’ll embrace the arrival of Frimpong. Which brings us to the off-field boxes which are getting ticked too.
A compatriot of Arne Slot and international colleague of Virgil van Dijk, Cody Gakpo and Ryan Gravenberch, Frimpong had already set Liverpool supporters’ tongues wagging during the last international break when he was filmed greeting Gravenberch, who he is particularly close to, in a pretty spot on Scouse accent as they shared an embrace.
Frimpong’s mastery of UK dialects probably comes from the fact that he moved to England as a seven-year-old, eventually joining Manchester City’s academy at 10. It is because of this that he would qualify as a homegrown player in Liverpool’s squad despite being born in Amsterdam, and with each Premier League club required to have at least eight players trained at UK academies in their first-team squad then there’s another box ticked.
And if you want another one, he seems like a pretty good guy too. Popular with players and staff at every club he’s been at, Frimpong is a devout Christian who would occasionally attend mass in Glasgow while playing for Celtic, where he still regularly interacts with the club’s fans on social media.
What’s more, and in an eerie similarity with Alexander-Arnold, he started his own foundation, The Pathways Project, last year aimed at helping young footballers work out where to turn next should they fail to make the grade as a professional. Alexander-Arnold’s The After Academy, a similar initiative, was launched in April 2023.
And if there is one more box that needs ticking then let that be the fee, which – if Liverpool choose to pull the trigger on the move – will stand at £29.5million due to a release clause in Frimpong’s Leverkusen contract. Alexander-Arnold might be going on a free, or near enough, but by modern standards that’s cheap.
The perfect transfer then? Such things don’t really exist, but as they seek to move on from their vice-captain and take their right-back position in a new direction, Frimpong could move Liverpool there in the manner he does most things. Quickly.
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