Four league benchings. Two starts. A manager publicly raving about the man playing in your position. Trent Alexander-Arnold's move to Real Madrid is not going to plan, and the gap between expectation and reality is widening by the week.
The former Liverpool defender watched from the sidelines again on Sunday as Los Blancos dismantled Sevilla 4-1 at the Bernabeu — a result that only underlined how little room there is for Alexander-Arnold in Mourinho's best eleven. Fede Valverde started at right-back, played brilliantly by all accounts, and received the kind of public praise from his manager that Alexander-Arnold can only dream about right now.
"If we had four Valverdes, they'd play in four different positions," Mourinho said. "He's the captain of Real Madrid, and if he has to play as a goalkeeper, then gloves on and into the goal." When your manager is waxing lyrical like that about a player occupying your spot, the writing isn't just on the wall — it's been there a while.
No room at right-back
The arrival of Denzel Dumfries from Inter Milan in the summer made Alexander-Arnold's path to the first team narrower. The Dutch defender has already racked up nine appearances across all competitions. Meanwhile, Alexander-Arnold's one attempt at reinventing himself as a central midfielder — in the Champions League opener against Inter — lasted 79 minutes before Mourinho himself admitted the experiment had flopped.
So he's not the right-back. He's not the midfielder. And with Valverde now getting the nod ahead of Dumfries at full-back, Alexander-Arnold finds himself third in a two-man race for a position he was supposed to make his own.
He signed for Madrid at the end of last season with genuine ambition. "The Bernabeu is a sacred place," he said in an interview last September. "What attracted me was the ambition and the desire to prove myself in a new context." Noble words. The context has proved rather more resistant than expected.
A Premier League return is becoming a real conversation
Links to a return to England have started circulating, and it's not hard to see why. Liverpool, ironically, are short at right-back — Jeremie Frimpong and Conor Bradley are both sidelined, and while Ronald Araujo has filled in effectively on loan, Alexander-Arnold's name has been floated as a longer-term fix. A return to Anfield would be extraordinary given the circumstances of his departure, but stranger things have happened.
Manchester City have also been mentioned, though their ongoing battle over 114 Premier League financial charges — charges they've been found guilty of, with sanctions still subject to appeal — adds serious uncertainty to any significant transfer plans in the near future.
At 28, Alexander-Arnold has time to salvage this chapter. But with Mourinho publicly building his system around Valverde's versatility and showing no signs of changing course, the clock is ticking on whether Madrid is still the right place for him to do it.
