Ryan Gravenberch, the Midfielder Who Won Liverpool a Title and Then Lost His Place

Ryan Gravenberch

Photo: crop by Sepguilherme / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 16, 2002 Amsterdam
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Premier League · Bundesliga · Eredivisie · KNVB Cup · EFL Cup · UEFA European Under-17 Championship · Premier League Young Player of the Season · Johan Cruyff Trophy

Early in Liverpool’s home game against Manchester City, Ryan Gravenberch produced a piece of skill that had Anfield on its feet. Shortly after half-time he was booked for a foul on Elliot Anderson. Just after the hour he brought down Jeremy Doku, the referee Chris Kavanagh hesitated and then showed him a second yellow, and City scored twice in the next six minutes on the way to a comfortable win. Wayne Rooney called the second booking “a bit naive and stupid”. Jamie Carragher saw a different match. “The big bright spark for me today was seeing Gravenberch back to being the player that he is,” he said, before adding that there was “no way Florian Wirtz should be playing ahead of Gravenberch.”

Both men were describing the same player, and that is the problem Gravenberch has to solve. Eighteen months earlier he had been the holding midfielder of a title-winning Liverpool side and the best young player in the Premier League. This autumn, under a new head coach, he has spent long stretches on the bench. His career has followed that pattern before: an early arrival, a stall, a reinvention that nobody predicted. The question now is whether the reinvention was permanent.

The youngest in Ajax history

Gravenberch was born in Amsterdam on 16 May 2002 to Afro-Surinamese parents, and joined the Ajax academy at eight; his older brother Danzell also became a professional footballer. In June 2018 he received the first Abdelhak Nouri Trofee, the academy’s award for its best talent, and signed his first professional contract the same day. Weeks earlier he had won the European Under-17 Championship with the Netherlands.

His first-team debut came in September 2018, in a 3-0 defeat by PSV, at 16 years and 130 days. No one had played in the Eredivisie for Ajax younger, and the record he broke belonged to Clarence Seedorf. Three days later he started in the KNVB Cup and scored in a 7-0 win over Te Werve, which made him the club’s youngest goalscorer too. Over the next four seasons he won three league titles and two cups, scored the opening goal in the 2021 KNVB Cup final against Vitesse and was named the Eredivisie’s talent of the year. He was tall and comfortable carrying the ball through midfield, and he played most of his Ajax football further forward than he does now.

The Bayern detour

Bayern Munich paid Ajax a reported €18 million in June 2022, with up to €5 million more in add-ons. He scored and set up a goal in a German cup tie in his first weeks, and he finished the season with a Bundesliga winner’s medal. He rarely started. Under Julian Nagelsmann, and then Thomas Tuchel, he was mostly a substitute, and by the end of that first season he was saying in interviews that he had expected to play far more. On 1 September 2023, the last day of the transfer window, Liverpool signed him for a reported €40 million.

The way he left Munich was not the only thing that drew criticism. Days after the move, he turned down a call-up to the Netherlands under-21 side to focus on his new club, and Ronald Koeman, the senior national coach, publicly condemned the decision along with the under-21 coach Michael Reiziger. It was an unusually public rebuke for a 21-year-old. His first season at Anfield did little to change it. He started games when Curtis Jones was suspended or injured, won the League Cup, and scored his first Premier League goal only in April 2024.

Slot’s number six

The change came from the touchline. When Arne Slot replaced Jürgen Klopp in the summer of 2024, he moved Gravenberch to the base of a 4-2-3-1, in front of the centre-backs, a deeper role than he had played at Ajax or Bayern. The move looked odd on paper. On the pitch it worked almost immediately, most visibly in a 3-0 win over Manchester United at Old Trafford, where his height, his first touch under pressure and his stride when he carried the ball out of defence made him the reference point of the side. Liverpool sealed the title with a 5-1 win over Tottenham in April 2025, Gravenberch setting up Alexis Mac Allister. He was named the Premier League’s Young Player of the Season and picked in the PFA Team of the Year.

That season is also where the honest argument about him begins. Slot built a team around his calm in possession, and Gravenberch was never a classic destroyer; the case for him as a holding midfielder rests on his ability to escape pressure, not on tackling. When Liverpool’s level dropped the following season, that profile became easier to question. The club finished fifth in 2025-26 and Slot was sacked on 30 May 2026, a year after the title. Gravenberch, who had signed a new contract to 2032 in March, lost the coach who had invented his best role.

World Cup, and the bench

He went to the 2026 World Cup as part of Koeman’s squad, having been at Euro 2020 and Euro 2024 before it. It ended in Monterrey on 29 June, when the Netherlands drew 1-1 with Morocco in the round of 32 and lost the shootout 3-2. Koeman resigned the following day.

Back in England, Andoni Iraola, Slot’s successor, started him on the opening weekend of the 2026-27 season and then left him out of the side for several games, preferring Mac Allister in midfield. For an hour, the City match showed what he could still do. Iraola said afterwards that the first foul was never a yellow card. Gravenberch served his one-match ban while Liverpool won 2-1 at Brentford.

He became a father in August 2025, when he and his partner Cindy Peroti announced the birth of their daughter. He is 24, tied to the club for six more years, and back in contention as Liverpool host Brighton at Anfield on 25 October with Dominik Szoboszlai injured. Whether Iraola sees in him the midfielder Slot saw will decide the next part of a career that has already been rewritten twice.

Tags: sports, athletes, footballers, liverpool, Andoni Iraola, Bayern Munich, Ryan Gravenberch