Alexis Mac Allister: the midfielder Liverpool won’t extend and Argentina can’t spare

Alexis Mac Allister

Photo: Bryan Berlin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 24, 1998 Santa Rosa
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	World Cup ×2 · Copa América 2024 · Premier League 2024-25 · EFL Cup 2023-24 · CONMEBOL-UEFA Cup of 2022 · Liga Profesional
Individual awards	PFA Team of the Year · Premier League Player of the Month · Argentine Primera División

There is a kind of footballer whose value only becomes obvious when he is missing. Alexis Mac Allister has built a career on being that player: the midfielder who takes the ball under pressure, hands it to someone in a better position and then runs back to win it again. Liverpool, the club where he has done that for three full seasons, has now told him it is not in a position to offer him a new contract. Argentina, which has just lost Lionel Messi to international retirement, is asking him to carry more. The two messages pull in opposite directions, and his next move depends on which one he chooses to believe.

The surname tells half the story. Mac Allister comes from Santa Rosa, in the Argentine province of La Pampa, where he arrived on Christmas Eve into a football household: his father, Carlos, and his uncle, Patricio, both played professionally, and his older brothers Francis and Kevin followed them into the game. The name itself crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, when an ancestor called Joseph McAllister left Donabate, north of Dublin, to farm in Argentina, and the line runs further back to a Scottish forefather from Tarbert in Kintyre. An Italian grandmother on his mother’s side completes the family tree.

Like his brothers, he started at the youth club Parque before Argentinos Juniors, the academy that once produced Diego Maradona, gave him a first-team debut in the second division in October 2016, two months short of his 18th birthday. Argentinos went up as champions that season. In November 2017, away at San Lorenzo, all three Mac Allister brothers played for the club in the same match, and a few months later the youngest scored his first top-flight goal against Boca Juniors.

Brighton & Hove Albion signed him in January 2019 and loaned him straight back, first to Argentinos and then to Boca Juniors, where he scored on his debut in a Copa Libertadores knockout tie and left with a league title. The English club recalled him early in 2020. His first appearance came days before the pandemic halted the Premier League, and for two seasons he was a useful squad player rather than a fixture. The change came in the 2022-23 campaign: he finished as Brighton’s top scorer with ten goals, the club finished sixth to qualify for European competition for the first time, and Liverpool came for him.

That same season contained the tournament that changed how he was seen. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar he went from squad option to starter, scoring the opening goal against Poland that sent Argentina through as group winners and earning the man of the match award. In the final against France he started and set up Ángel Di María for the second goal before being substituted in extra time, ahead of the shoot-out that brought Argentina its third world title. Two years on he added the Copa América, with two assists in the run to a 1-0 final win over Colombia.

Liverpool paid a reported initial £35 million in June 2023, rising to as much as £55 million with add-ons, and handed him the number 10 shirt. Jürgen Klopp, in his final season, used him as the single holding midfielder, a job Mac Allister later described without sentiment: “I played as a lone five. I was much more defensive than anything else.” He won the League Cup that February. Under Arne Slot the following year he moved alongside Ryan Gravenberch in a two-man base and became the most complete version of himself. He scored in the 5-1 win over Tottenham Hotspur that clinched the Premier League title in April 2025, was named the league’s Player of the Month for that April, made the PFA Team of the Year and finished 22nd in the Ballon d’Or voting. He also developed a habit of scoring against Real Madrid, first in a 2-0 Champions League win in November 2024 and again in a 1-0 victory a year later.

The case against him has always been quieter than the case for him, and it grew louder in 2025-26. Liverpool’s title defence ended in fifth place, 25 points behind champions Arsenal, and Slot lost his job at the end of May. A player whose value lies in control is judged harshly when a team loses it. His numbers rarely help him: through his first five Premier League appearances of the new season he had neither scored nor assisted, a statistic that says little about what a holding midfielder does and a great deal about how easily his role is undervalued. Whatever the reasoning at the club, the outcome was blunt. Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai received long-term extensions. He did not.

The summer showed the other side of the argument. At the 2026 World Cup in North America he scored Argentina’s fastest goal of the tournament, a tenth-minute header from a Messi corner in the 3-1 quarter-final win over Switzerland in Kansas City. In the semi-final against England his shot came back off the post and led to the winner in a 2-1 victory. The final, at MetLife Stadium on 19 July, ended in a 1-0 defeat to Spain after extra time, decided by Ferran Torres in the 106th minute. Six weeks later Messi announced that he was leaving the national team.

Since then Mac Allister has occupied an unusual position: a senior figure in a national team looking for a new centre, and an uncertain employee at his club. Asked on ESPN who should inherit Messi’s number 10, he answered: “I wouldn’t give the number 10 to anyone.” At Liverpool, on the eve of the Champions League opener against Atlético Madrid in September, he was just as direct about a contract that still runs until 2028. “I received the news that the club was not in a position to offer me a new contract, which of course makes me very, very sad,” he said, admitting there had been options to leave during the summer before adding: “This is the right club. I love being here.” Manchester City were among the clubs linked with him in the window. Under Andoni Iraola, appointed head coach in June, he has kept his place in the side.

Away from the pitch he keeps a low profile. His partner, Ailen Cova, announced the birth of their daughter in September 2025.

The next test comes quickly. Fresh from setting up Lautaro Martínez for the opening goal in Argentina’s 4-0 friendly win over Bolivia, he returns to Merseyside for Liverpool’s Premier League meeting with Manchester City on 11 October, against one of the clubs that wondered over the summer whether he could be persuaded to leave.

Tags: sports, athletes, 2026 FIFA World Cup, Lionel Messi, footballers, Liverpool FC, Argentina national football team, Alexis Mac Allister