Dominik Szoboszlai: the Liverpool vice-captain who is done with excuses

Dominik Szoboszlai

Photo: Timmy96 / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 25, 2000 Székesfehérvár
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Premier League 2024 · EFL Cup 2023 · DFB-Pokal ×2 · Bundesliga Austria ×4 · ÖFB-Cup ×3 · Austrian Football League · Austrian Cups ×3
Individual awards	Austrian Bundesliga Player of the Season · Hungarian Golden Ball · Liverpool Men's Player of the Season

Deep in stoppage time at the Puskás Aréna, with Hungary a goal down to Ukraine, Dominik Szoboszlai shoved the winger Viktor Tsygankov and started a brawl that ended with four bookings and a red card. A few days earlier, as Liverpool’s newly named vice-captain, he had told his own club to stop hiding behind the word transition. “We don’t have three years to renew everybody and start again,” he said. Both scenes come from the same source. Szoboszlai is the most gifted Hungarian footballer in a generation, the captain of his country and one of the men now asked to lead Liverpool, and the impatience that makes him useful in those roles is also the part of his game his critics keep circling.

His last full season explains the impatience. He started almost every match Liverpool played, led the squad in assists and scored more direct free kicks in the Premier League than any Liverpool player had managed in a single campaign. Supporters voted him the club’s Player of the Season by a wide margin. The team around him finished fifth, a year after winning the title, and Arne Slot, the coach who had won it, was dismissed. It was the best season of Szoboszlai’s career and one of the most disappointing Liverpool have had in a decade, and he has made it plain that he will not sit through another one.

The ball came from his father. Zsolt Szoboszlai, a former lower-league footballer, began coaching his son at the age of six in Székesfehérvár, the city southwest of Budapest where Dominik was born in October 2000, first at Videoton and then at Főnix Gold, the academy the father ran himself. In the summer of 2016, at 15, he signed for Red Bull Salzburg. The Red Bull system sent him to FC Liefering, its feeder side in the Austrian second division, where he made his professional debut in July 2017 and scored his first senior goal two weeks later.

Salzburg turned him into a starter in a side that won the Austrian league in every season he spent there. He added three Austrian Cups and was voted the best player in the Austrian Bundesliga for 2019–20. RB Leipzig paid a reported €20 million for him in January 2021, then a record for a Hungarian footballer, but an injury kept him off the pitch until the following season. In Germany he won the DFB-Pokal twice and scored in the second final, against Eintracht Frankfurt in Berlin.

The national team gave him his taste for late moments. In November 2020 his last-minute strike against Iceland in the play-off final sent Hungary to Euro 2020, a tournament he then missed through injury. In June 2022 his penalty beat England, Hungary’s first win over them since 1962. Marco Rossi gave him the armband at 22, and at 23 he led Hungary into Euro 2024. He has won the Hungarian Golden Ball five times, and the comparisons at home now reach back to Ferenc Puskás.

Liverpool triggered his release clause, reported at £60 million, in July 2023. He won the EFL Cup in his first season and, in April 2025, became the first Hungarian to win the Premier League. That title season also brought the first public doubt. Early in the campaign Slot said openly that he needed more goals and more chances from his No. 8, and Szoboszlai answered later that season with goals against Manchester City and Newcastle.

The following year made him something closer to a complete player. He scored from a free kick 32 yards out to beat Arsenal, a goal that became the first Premier League monthly award won by a Hungarian, and he dropped to right-back whenever the squad needed him there. Liverpool, a team that began the season grieving Diogo Jota, never found the rhythm of the title year again and finished with 60 points. Szoboszlai started 53 of their 57 matches, scored 13 goals, provided a team-high 12 assists and took more than two-thirds of the supporters’ vote for Player of the Season.

The case against Szoboszlai has rarely been about talent. It is about where his emotion goes when a match turns. In February 2026 he scored a free kick against Manchester City and was sent off in stoppage time of the same game for a foul on Erling Haaland in the penalty area. In November 2025 Hungary went into the last night of World Cup qualifying ahead of the Republic of Ireland and lost 3–2 in Budapest to a Troy Parrott goal in the 96th minute. A tear-wiping gesture by Szoboszlai afterwards was read in Ireland as mockery; he insisted it had been “a joke between my own teammates”. His verdict on the night, “There is certainly a reason why this always happens to us,” was meant as frustration, and it sounded like a captain naming a pattern he had not yet broken. The people who pick him have answered by giving him more responsibility, not less: Rossi has never taken the armband away, and Liverpool handed him a new contract and a leadership role within weeks of each other.

That contract, signed in July 2026, runs for five years, to 2031. “I want to win everything that is possible in this country, also let’s say the Champions League,” he said. Andoni Iraola, appointed in June after Slot’s departure, named him one of three vice-captains behind Virgil van Dijk, alongside Alisson and Joe Gomez, in a squad that had just lost Mohamed Salah, Andy Robertson and Ibrahima Konaté. Szoboszlai has scored a stoppage-time penalty against Newcastle, the first goal of Liverpool’s Champions League campaign against Atlético Madrid, and a 25-yard strike in the 91st minute against Tottenham in the EFL Cup that BBC Sport compared to Steven Gerrard. Liverpool went into the international break unbeaten under Iraola but six points behind Manchester City.

Away from the pitch he keeps a small circle. He married Borka Buzsik in Budapest in March 2025 and became a father in August 2025. At both Liverpool and Hungary he shares a dressing room with Milos Kerkez, the defender who ran in beside him in the Ukraine brawl.

Hungary’s October Nations League double, Georgia at the Puskás Aréna and then Ukraine again, includes a rematch that will show whether the captain can keep his edge on the right side of the line. Then he goes back to a Liverpool he has told, in public, that it has run out of time to wait.

Tags: sports, athletes, Premier League, soccer, footballers, liverpool, Andoni Iraola, Hungary, Dominik Szoboszlai