"The dream in the long term is that we have a team full of Scousers. Why not? They would fight like crazy." Jürgen Klopp said that when Curtis Jones signed his five-year deal in 2020. Five years later, Jones is at Inter Milan for €35 million, Trent Alexander-Arnold is at Real Madrid, and Liverpool are heading into a Premier League season without a single player from the city of Liverpool in their squad.
That has never happened before.
The mechanics of the Jones exit are straightforward enough. He had one year left on his contract. He wasn't in Andoni Iraola's first-choice midfield. He wasn't offered the kind of extension recently handed to Ryan Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai, which told him exactly where he stood. When Inter Milan — Serie A champions — came calling, the pull was obvious. For Liverpool, €35 million in pure profit for an academy graduate who'd have struggled for minutes is a reasonable deal on paper.
The frustrations had been building for months
This wasn't a sudden decision. Sources told ESPN that Jones had grown increasingly frustrated with his squad status, with things boiling over in January when he was dropped to the bench for the 0-0 draw at Arsenal — despite having started six Premier League games in a row. Just weeks earlier, he'd told Sky Sports he wanted to be captain, to be the next Gerrard, to spend his whole career at the club. A month later, he was open to leaving.
Iraola, for his part, was vocal about wanting to keep him. "It's very important that he's Scouse, that he's from here," the head coach said last month. That's not nothing from a manager who spent most of his playing career at Athletic Club, a team built entirely on regional identity. He understands what local connection means to a club's fabric. But sentiment doesn't override squad planning, and Jones wasn't going to accept a peripheral role indefinitely.
What Liverpool are left with is a first team stripped of its regional identity almost entirely. Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson have also departed this summer, further thinning the thread of continuity between this squad and the Klopp era. Striker Jayden Danns is the only Scouser with any realistic pathway to the first team, and he's spent most of the past year injured.
The history makes the absence feel heavier
It's worth putting this in context. Liverpool's greatest moments have almost always had a local fingerprint on them. Gerrard and Carragher in Istanbul in 2005. Robbie Fowler's contribution to the cup treble in 2001. Ian Callaghan, Phil Thompson, David Fairclough across the dominant decades before that. The club's identity and the city's identity have always been intertwined — not as a PR exercise, but as something genuine.
Compare that to where Arsenal are now: Bukayo Saka and Myles Lewis-Skelly as homegrown pillars of their title challenge. Or Manchester City, where Phil Foden remains central even as the squad evolves. Those clubs have local heroes embedded in their present, not just their past.
Liverpool don't, not anymore. The disconnect risk is real — and in a summer where the club has lost several long-serving faces alongside Jones and Alexander-Arnold, the supporter base is being asked to reconnect with an increasingly unfamiliar group. That's not a crisis, but it's a shift that will take deliberate work to manage.
Iraola knows the blueprint. Athletic Club built an entire footballing philosophy around regional belonging. Whether Liverpool can find any version of that in their academy pipeline is now a genuine long-term question — not a romantic one. Jones leaving for €35 million is fine business. A squad with no local players for an entire Premier League season is a different kind of accounting entirely.
