Why Liverpool Cannot Afford to Lose Joshua Abe

Rival interest and Tyler Alexander-Arnold’s agency turn a routine scholarship into a high stakes struggle

Liverpool have always sold a simple dream to their brightest kids. Work hard, learn your trade, and if you are good enough, then the first team door does not stay locked. It is a promise stitched into the club’s self-image, from the Kop’s hunger for graft to the academy’s belief that talent should not be left to gather dust.

Joshua Abe has become the next test of that promise.

He is 15, left-footed, a right winger with the kind of pace that makes defenders look as if they are carrying wet sand in their boots. He has been fast-tracked into older age groups, he has had a taste of first-team sessions at Kirkby, and he is already producing numbers at the Under-18 level that do not happen by accident. When you watch him, you see what Liverpool themselves see: a player with a clear route to senior football if he keeps moving forward.

You also see why other clubs are circling.

The scholarship decision sounds like paperwork, a formality, a tidy step on a tidy pathway. It rarely feels tidy when a teenager knows he can set the market. Liverpool are trying to convince Abe to stay, and they will have to do it in a world where rival academies, agents, and “projects” are sold with glossy certainty. If there is hesitation, if there is a crack, someone will try to widen it.

This is where my nerves kick in. Not because Abe owes Liverpool blind loyalty, a kid should look after his future, but because Liverpool cannot afford to drift into a shrug. Losing a homegrown talent of this profile, in this era, would be an own goal with nobody even challenging the cross.