Andoni Iraola's Plans for Liverpool: Keeping Alexis Mac Allister

Andoni Iraola knows exactly what he wants this summer – and what he cannot afford to lose.

At the heart of it all sits Alexis Mac Allister, a World Cup winner with two years left on his Liverpool deal and a name that keeps circling around Madrid. The speculation has grown loud enough, often enough, that the new Liverpool head coach felt compelled to draw a clear line.

Mac Allister, he insists, is non-negotiable.

“I think Alexis has been one of the best players of the club last year and has done a very good World Cup,” Iraola said, spelling out why Europe’s elite keep looking in Liverpool’s direction. Other clubs want him. Of course they do. That is the price of having a midfielder of that calibre on Merseyside.

The message from the dugout, though, is blunt: Liverpool are a buying club in this window, not a selling one.

“I want to keep my good players,” Iraola stressed, before hinting where his real focus lies. He is “looking forward more to signing new players than the ones we have here” – a telling phrase from a coach who has walked into a squad stripped of some of its most recognisable faces.

The scale of the rebuild is obvious. Mohamed Salah has gone. Andy Robertson has gone. Ibrahima Konate has gone. Three pillars of the first team, three positions that suddenly feel exposed.

Iraola did not try to dress it up. He talked openly about the “obvious” need for reinforcements, especially out wide. The recruitment team’s priority is clear: find a winger, and fast.

“I think it is difficult to say a number,” he admitted when asked how many signings he wanted. The market rarely works to a neat checklist. Doors close, others open. But there is no ambiguity over the most urgent task. “Winger for example, we definitely need to sign a winger,” he said, before pointing to the sliding puzzle that is the rest of the window – what the market offers, what it costs, and how that stacks against the options already in-house.

That in-house picture is complicated. Liverpool’s depth has already been tested by lingering fitness problems. Some players are trusted, some are pencilled in for important roles, yet they remain on the treatment table. That uncertainty shapes everything.

“We have some tricky positions where we have injured players that we trust, but it is still not the ideal situation, so it will depend on a lot of things,” Iraola explained. His tactical plans for the opening weeks of the season, and for the final stretch of the window, hinge on how quickly those players step back into full training.

All of this is unfolding thousands of miles from Anfield. The Reds are currently in the United States on their Premier League pre-season tour, a crucial laboratory for Iraola’s ideas. This is where his pressing patterns, his positional demands, his tempo, must start to take hold.

It is also the first real look at the new faces. Jeremy Jacquet and Victor Munoz have joined the group, and the American tour doubles as their induction into Liverpool’s standards. Every training session, every friendly, becomes an audition – not just for them, but for the younger players hoping to convince the staff that the club can look inward as well as outward for solutions.

Sunderland, Leeds United and Wrexham await on the tour schedule, fixtures that will matter little in the record books but a great deal in Iraola’s mind. They will tell him who is ready, who needs time, and where the gaps are too big to ignore.

Somewhere in that equation sits Mac Allister, still to rejoin the squad after a gruelling season that ended on the biggest stage of all with Argentina. His return date is not yet fixed, his name still drifts through the Madrid rumour mill, but his coach has already placed a marker in the ground.

Liverpool may be reshaping themselves under Iraola, but they plan to do it with their World Cup winner at the centre of the project, not as a headline departure that defines it.