A move to perennial Champions League winners Real Madrid was supposed to afford Trent Alexander-Arnold a new start, and yet a little over three months after departing Liverpool, familiar questions are being asked of the most brilliantly esoteric right back on the planet. Is he a better fit in midfield than in defense? What should his role be with England?
That latter issue has reared its head once more with Thomas Tuchel opting against calling up Alexander-Arnold for England’s World Cup qualifiers at home to Andorra and away to Serbia. This was not an outright dispensing with the Real Madrid man, with Tuchel at pains to frame this less as a dropping and more as “the moment for him to settle and find his rhythm” in the Spanish capital. The England manager had acknowledged that calling Alexander-Arnold into the June international camp underestimated the personal and professional challenges that were faced by a player making the first transfer of his career. Tuchel remains “a big fan of Trent.”
England vs. Andorra viewing information
- Date: Saturday, September 6 | Time: 12 p.m. ET
- Location: Villa Park — Birmingham, United Kingdom
- TV: FS2 | Stream: Fubo (Try for free)
- Odds: England -3300; Draw +1800; Andorra +12500
All that can be true, but recent evidence suggests that he is also grappling with exactly how Alexander-Arnold fits into his side when the biggest games come around. Over the course of a domestic season, Alexander-Arnold has proven that the defensive weaknesses in his game are more than offset by what he creates in possession. Over the five Premier League seasons prior to this one, only Bruno Fernandes bettered Alexander-Arnold in terms of expected assists. No one across the entire competition completed more passes into the attacking third. Jurgen Klopp and, to a slightly lesser extent, Arne Slot built their ball progression and chance creation plans around their right back, moving him upwards and inwards because they knew he would give them more goals from there than the opposition would claim by attacking the spaces he vacated.
In knockout football, the calculus has to be a little different. Tuchel, a manager defined by a cautious possession style, knows from experience with Chelsea that if your starting point in a major tournament is that you are the team who keeps the most clean sheets, you have a very good chance of winning. And so for all the encouragement that he offered Alexander-Arnold last week, the German’s most telling comments seem to have come before the summer games where he preferred Kyle Walker and an out-of-position Curtis Jones.
“This major impact that he had for Liverpool over so many years … if he wants to have this impact in the English national team, then he has to take the defensive part very, very seriously,” he said. “Because when we are talking, especially about qualifying football, and then tournament football, the one defensive error, the one moment where you are not 100% awake, can be decisive. It can be the moment where you pack your suitcases and go home.”
It has happened to Alexander-Arnold before. He was brilliant in Liverpool’s run to the Champions League final in 2022 but fell asleep at the back post midway through the first half, allowing Vinicius Junior to ghost past him and score the game’s only goal. Would Tuchel turn to him in Serbia next week, let alone when it’s infamy or glory next summer? The answer to that question might be rather different when England also have a revitalized Reece James and Tino Livramento available to them. Ben White’s England exile has also ended; had it not been for an injury suffered with Arsenal, he could well have entered the frame this month.
Similar challenges face Alexander-Arnold at the Santiago Bernabeu. Already, he has felt the sting of being dropped from the starting XI, but is that really a cause for surprise when Madrid’s other right back is club captain Dani Carvajal? There is no great cause for concern over Alexander-Arnold’s long-term future — he performed impressively on his return to the starting XI against Mallorca, denied an assist only by a VAR offside from Kylian Mbappe — but the England international’s adaptation is already a talking point in the Spanish press. He was labelled “timid” on his home debut and his decisions decried as “conservative.” As early as the Club World Cup, questions were being asked about whether the new signing’s long-term future might be in central midfield, a dance as old as Alexander-Arnold’s career, no matter that it seemed to be largely answered by his difficulties in the position at Euro 2024.
His manager, Xabi Alonso, has done plenty to cool any issues, insisting last month that having Carvajal and Alexander-Arnold vying for one spot is “amazing for improving the level of the squad” and subsequently stating that he would make decisions based on the appropriate skillset for each game. With potentially 60 games to play on the back of a Club World Cup summer, it makes sense that many positions in the Madrid squad might be fluid. That is all the more true when Alexander-Arnold hurtled back from an ankle injury last season for his Liverpool farewell before going straight into international duty, a summer tournament and a shortened summer break that would have been filled with the practicalities of moving from Merseyside to Madrid.
Then again, Alexander-Arnold will want to change that. He has spoken about his ambitions to win the Ballon d’Or, and in a recent interview with GQ Spain, he reflected on his “desire to test myself in a new context.” He is certainly getting that challenge early on, but he won’t be able to win the biggest individual prizes in the game on a job share.
What can he do to make himself an undisputed starter for club and country? A step forward defensively would doubtless help, lessening the quality that Carvajal has over him and easing Tuchel’s doubts over how he fares in the biggest international games. To his credit, Alexander-Arnold did improve last season when deployed in a more conservative fashion by Slot.
For now, however, last season has not changed the mood music around Alexander-Arnold. When the actions of the England manager suggest he shares the view of many skeptics, it is going to be hard for Alexander-Arnold to answer some very familiar questions.
