"It's actually Irish," Alexis Mac Allister told Gary Lineker on The Rest Is Football podcast in 2024. Simple enough answer — except the full story stretches back to 18th-century Scotland, a famine-era emigration from Dublin, and farmland purchased in Argentina in 1865. The name on the back of his Liverpool shirt has earned it.
Mac Allister confirmed he'd received a letter from relatives in Ireland inviting him over for a visit — family he had never met, despite spending years living just across the Irish Sea. "It feels weird because I'm 25 and it just came now," he said. "But hopefully one day I can go and meet all of my family."
From a Scottish village to the River Plate
The trail, as pieced together by The Athletic, starts with a Charles McAllister — thought to originate from a village in western Scotland — who arrived in Donabate, a coastal town north of Dublin, in the mid-1700s. Two generations later, his descendant Joseph McAllister was among three family members who left that same Irish coastline in 1865, emigrating to Argentina to buy farmland. The timing matters: they left only a few years after the Great Famine, which killed around a million people in Ireland and scattered millions more across the world.
Andrew MacKillop, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow who specialises in clan history, told The Athletic that a Scottish-Irish ancestral link is likely, even if not formally proven.
Once settled in Argentina, the McAllister name gradually shifted to Mac Allister — almost certainly to make it easier for Spanish speakers unfamiliar with the English pronunciation. A small adaptation with a lasting legacy.
Football runs deep in the Mac Allister family
The surname isn't the only thing passed down through generations. Father Carlos earned three Argentina caps in 1993. Brother Kevin plays for Belgian champions Union Saint-Gilloise and has one senior international appearance for the Albiceleste. Eldest brother Francis is playing professionally in Chile. Cousin Luciano Guaycochea is currently plying his trade in Indonesia.
As for Alexis — 2022 World Cup winner, Premier League title holder with Liverpool in 2024-25, and one of the sharper central midfielders in England right now — the family's journey from Donabate to Buenos Aires to Anfield turned out rather well.
He's yet to make the short trip across the Irish Sea to meet those Dublin relatives. Given his schedule, they may be waiting a while longer.
