Mac Allister next: How Liverpool’s six previous Argentina players fared at Anfield
Liverpool look set to complete the signing of Alexis Mac Allister from Brighton, with Fabrizio Romano tweeting on Wednesday morning that the Reds have ‘triggered the clause’ to sign the 24-year-old for a reported £35m.
Assuming there are no last-minute plot twists to scupper the transfer, the 2022 World Cup winner will become the seventh player from Argentina to represent the Merseyside club (as per lfchistory.net).
The other six have all been at Anfield between 2005 and 2012, so the Seagulls player looks set to ensure a long-overdue vested interest from South America’s second biggest country.
Here’s a look at how his former Liverpool compatriots have fared for the club, listed in chronological order of them signing for the Reds:
Mauricio Pellegrino
The defender was a member of the great Valencia side which won two LaLiga titles and reached two Champions League finals in the first half of the 2000s, but by the time he reunited with his former boss Rafael Benitez at Liverpool in January 2005, the then 33-year-old was past his prime.
He stayed at Anfield for just four months, making 13 appearances (coming in at just under 1,000 minutes, as per Transfermarkt) but not playing any part in the road to eventual European glory in Istanbul as he wasn’t in the Champions League squad.
A massive fan of The Beatles, Pellegrino returned to Merseyside in 2008 as a coach under Benitez and stayed for two years until the Spaniard’s departure.
Gabriel Paletta
Although the defender was never capped by Argentina at senior level and instead went on to represent Italy, he was born in the South American country and had won an underage World Cup for his homeland at the time that he came to Liverpool in July 2006, so we’ll count him for this list.
He went from Banfield to Anfield that year but made little impression on Merseyside, featuring just eight times for the Reds. Three of those were in the League Cup, although he did score in a 4-3 win over Reading in that competition, along with getting two assists in the crazy 6-3 defeat to Arsenal when Julio Baptista ran riot (Transfermarkt).
He was back in Argentina after only one year for us, joining Boca Juniors in 2007. Now 37, he helped Monza to achieve promotion to Serie A last year but injury precluded him from representing the club in the top flight.
Emiliano Insua
Liverpool continued to pluck Argentine defenders with the initial loan signing of Insua from Boca Juniors in January 2007 before a permanent move later that year as part of the deal which saw Paletta go in the opposite direction.
Unlike his two previous compatriots at Anfield, the left-back stayed with the Reds for more than a single season, racking up three-and-a-half years altogether. He was a bit-part player for the first two of those before the misfortunes of others saw him feature more regularly during the 2008/09 Premier League title challenge.
By the following season he was our first-choice left-back, but was often subjected to criticism from fans and media and was allowed to join Galatasaray on a season-long loan in August 2010 (making way due to the arrival of Paul Konchesky!). A year later, he was sold to Sporting Lisbon after the signing of Jose Enrique from Newcastle.
Javier Mascherano
After a bit of a legal wrangle with FIFA, Liverpool signed Mascherano from West Ham at the end of the January 2007 transfer window, and he’d go on to prove worthy of the hassle to get him.
Tigerish in the tackle and composed on the ball, he was arguably our best player in the Champions League final defeat to AC Milan and was the near-constant anchor of Benitez’s midfield for another three years, going on to play 139 times for the Reds before joining Barcelona in August 2010, having scored in a Merseyside derby win in his final season with us (although it was later credited as an own goal).
He was occasionally culpable of rash moments of indiscipline, most notoriously when he talked himself into being sent off at Old Trafford in 2008, but has gone down as a midfielder of class in his time at Anfield.
Sebastian Leto
A £1.8m signing from Lanus in Argentina in August 2007, the winger was unable to play in the Premier League due to problems with his passport, finding himself restricted to just four senior appearances in what would prove to be his one and only season with Liverpool (Transfermarkt).
Incredibly, 75% of his Reds appearances came against teams located outside of England (Toulouse, Marseille, Cardiff), which must be an incredibly rare distinction for anyone to have played multiple times for the club.
After a season-long loan to Olympiacos in 2008, he joined their arch-rivals Panathinaikos permanently a year later, with his LFC career amounting to a mere 280 minutes (Transfermarkt).
Maxi Rodriguez
Prior to his move to Liverpool in January 2010, Reds fans would’ve best remembered the winger for his stunning winner against Mexico at the 2006 World Cup and a goal against us at Anfield in a Champions League game for Atletico Madrid a couple of years later.
He was one of the few shining lights of a largely dismal 2010/11 season, scoring 10 Premier League goals in that campaign (Transfermarkt), seven of which came during a three-game hot streak towards the latter stages (remember that glorious Monday night hat-trick by the Thames against Fulham?).
He didn’t feature much the following year but popped up with some important goals, scoring in narrow away wins against Chelsea and Blackburn (two). In the summer of 2012, he returned to his homeland to join Newell’s Old Boys.
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