The 11 players who left Liverpool last summer and how they’re faring with next step

Much has been made of the fortunes of the players Liverpool signed in their summer spending spree, but it was also a major transfer window for players leaving the club.

Liverpool spent more than ever before in the summer transfer window on the back of winning the Premier League, breaking their transfer record twice to sign Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen and Alexander Isak from Newcastle United – and that wasn’t all.

To counter-balance the big spend, Liverpool agreed to let several players leave, either on permanent transfers or loan deals. But, now midway through the 2025-26 season, how have those players been faring at their new clubs?

Only including players with 10 or more competitive appearances for Liverpool to their name, TEAMtalk takes a look at how each have been doing since their exits.

Trent Alexander-Arnold

Liverpool managed to avoid the losses of Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk by securing them to new contracts, but one player they couldn’t prevent running his deal down was Alexander-Arnold.

It was a bitter blow, given his Liverpool roots and rise through the ranks from academy product to vice-captain. However, the right-back was swayed to take on a new challenge in Spain with Real Madrid.

Alexander-Arnold’s Madrid career began in the Club World Cup, before what has been an injury-affected 2025-26 campaign with only eight LaLiga appearances (of which five have been starts) to date.

Yet to score in the Spanish top flight, Alexander-Arnold made his first assist in LaLiga in the game in which he suffered his most recent injury in early December.

Caoimhin Kelleher

Kelleher finally got his long-held wish of becoming a first-choice goalkeeper for a Premier League club by leaving Liverpool for Brentford after a few seasons ably deputising for Alisson Becker.

He is now just one appearance away from having played as many league games for Brentford as he ever did for Liverpool (25), although it will take a while to catch up with his tally across all competitions due to his track record in cup games for the Reds.

Kelleher has kept six clean sheets for Brentford so far, averaging one shutout every four matches. Furthermore, he has saved penalties by Bruno Fernandes, Jorgen Strand Larsen and Enzo Le Fee this season.

Nat Phillips

Liverpool finally found a buyer for former stand-in centre-back Phillips after a wide range of loan spells, as West Brom paid £3m to sign him two-and-a-half years after his last appearance for the club.

It marks his third consecutive season playing in the Championship after his loans at Cardiff City and Derby County – the latter providing him with his busiest season of appearances in his career so far.

Phillips has built on that with West Brom, playing 30 times so far. Voted player of the match on his debut, he has since scored three goals and even donned the captain’s armband a couple of times around Christmas.

Jarell Quansah

In a deal that will have been beneficial for the Premier League’s Profit & Sustainability Rules, Liverpool cashed in on academy graduate Quansah to the tune of £30m as he headed abroad to join Bayer Leverkusen.

Four months later, Quansah was handed his senior international debut for England by Thomas Tuchel during a World Cup qualifier, as a symbol of his progress.

There was some slight chaos in between, with Leverkusen sacking Erik ten Hag very early into the season, but Quansah has been trusted by successor Kasper Hjulmand and has no regrets about his move.

“I had the opportunity to prove myself here and I’m super happy that I made the move,” he told BBC Sport in December. “You can’t live the game of football with regrets. Anything could have happened at Liverpool and I had to focus on what I wanted to do and what I felt was best.

“The feeling I got from Leverkusen was everything I needed for my development. It’s not about this year or next year – it’s about where I’m going to be when I reach the top of my level. I thought the best way of doing that was by taking a step abroad.”

Liverpool do have an option to buy Quansah back in the future.

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Luis Diaz

The biggest transfer fee Liverpool banked in the summer was for Diaz, whose contract they weren’t willing to upgrade too much. Thus, the forward signed a lucrative deal with Bayern Munich instead after costing the German giants an initial £60m.

It has been money well spent. Diaz has been thriving for Bayern, scoring 15 goals from 29 games so far. With 10 of those being in the Bundesliga, he is the joint-third highest scorer in the whole league so far.

Diaz certainly hit the ground running, scoring in each of his first three league outings for Bayern. More recently, he contributed to half of their goals in an 8-1 win over Wolfsburg, providing three assists and scoring once for himself.

One of Diaz’s goals, against Union Berlin in November – where he slid to stop the ball going out, cut in and quickly finished from a tight angle – was recently named by Sportschau as the Goal of the Year in Germany.

That same goal had already given him his second Bundesliga Goal of the Month award, the other being from August.

Tyler Morton

After a largely inactive 2024-25 season following his reintegration from a loan spell at Hull City, academy graduate Morton moved to French side Lyon in a permanent deal.

He has taken well to his new challenge, telling the Daily Mail in December that he is ‘loving’ playing for a ‘massive club’ whose style of play is ‘perfect’ for his game.

Usually operating as a holding midfielder, Morton has made 27 appearances for Lyon so far – one shy of double the number he ever managed for boyhood club Liverpool – and has scored twice.

Liverpool don’t have a buyback clause for Morton, instead having secured a sell-on clause for when he earns his next move, which at this rate could be a big one.

Darwin Nunez

Nunez was the casualty of Liverpool’s investment in Isak and Hugo Ekitike as their new centre-forwards, after three years of inconsistency since his big-money move from Benfica.

With 25 Premier League goals from 95 games behind him (which wasn’t dreadful, but also not the sort of clinical record Liverpool paid for), Nunez moved to the Saudi Pro League with Al Hilal.

So far, Nunez has scored six goals from 16 games for Al Hilal, but hasn’t been convincing enough for them to ignore the opportunity to upgrade with the signing of Karim Benzema from Al-Ittihad.

There have now been rumours that Nunez could be shipped off to Turkish Super Lig side Fenerbahce before their transfer deadline on Friday, which would complete a transfer merry-go-round after they sold Youssef En-Nesyri to Benzema’s ex-club, Al-Ittihad.

Ben Gannon-Doak

After spending last season on loan with Middlesbrough, Gannon-Doak was sold to Bournemouth for a sizeable £20m fee with a view to getting more gametime at Premier League level.

All four of his appearances in the league for Bournemouth so far have been from the bench, with his only start coming in the Carabao Cup, and he hasn’t been able to add to them since November due to a hamstring injury.

He did manage to make an assist on his third appearance for the Cherries, setting up Antoine Semenyo with a well-placed pass at the end of a counter attack in a win over Fulham.

But he may still be some weeks away from a return, having originally required surgery for his hamstring issue.

Kostas Tsimikas

Tsimikas was never a regular starter for Liverpool, but still managed to amass more than 100 appearances as Andy Robertson’s backup, before being demoted to third-choice left-back once Milos Kerkez was bought from Bournemouth.

A loan move to Roma was arranged towards the end of the summer, but he hasn’t been able to become a regular starter in Serie A either.

That’s despite Roma’s other left-back, Angelino, being unavailable due to health problems for the bulk of the season so far, with natural right-back Wesley preferred to Tsimikas on the left-hand side.

Tsimikas did produce an assist on his first start for Roma in the Europa League back in September against Nice, but couldn’t use it as a platform to break into the team.

There were suggestions of his loan being terminated in January when it looked like Robertson could leave Liverpool for Tottenham, but that move never went through either and Tsimikas has stayed in Rome, now looking to add to his four Serie A starts.

Harvey Elliott

Elliott made the emotional decision to leave Liverpool in search of what he expected would be a more prominent role at Aston Villa, who took him on loan with a conditional obligation to buy.

But in what has become an extremely frustrating situation, Elliott’s gametime has been severely limited, with Villa seemingly concerned about giving him the number of appearances that would trigger a £35m permanent deal.

Between October and January, Elliott went 14 games without even being named in a matchday squad in the Premier League, despite only being unavailable for two of those games.

Because he had played for Liverpool in the league before heading to Villa, Elliott is not allowed to play for another club following the same calendar, and was uninterested in a move to MLS that represented one of his only viable escape routes.

The attacking midfielder was recently brought back in from the cold by Unai Emery and is now on seven appearances for Villa, but there have been claims they could try to renegotiate the terms of his loan to avoid being forced to buy him.

For a player who only started twice in the league for Liverpool last season, the move to Villa hasn’t been the breakthrough he would have hoped for when deciding he had to leave the club he supports.

James McConnell

Following in the footsteps of goalkeeper Vitezslav Jaros (who only played twice for Liverpool before his move), McConnell headed to the Netherlands to link up with John Heitinga at Ajax on a season-long loan.

However, the midfielder only started once each in the Eredivisie and Champions League before Heitinga was sacked in November.

Having been injured since early December, McConnell was recalled by Liverpool earlier this week.

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