Alexis Mac Allister is considered one of the Premier League‘s best midfielders and was key to Liverpool’s Premier League title success, but he once actually came very close to quitting English football.
At Liverpool, we have come to know Mac Allister as a smiling figure who is supremely confident on the ball and a key member of the Reds’ squad.
He wasn’t always as confident, however, as he outlined in his piece for The Players’ Tribune.
He arrived at Brighton with plenty of potential in January 2020, but his first couple of years at the club weren’t plain sailing for a myriad of reasons.
“Maybe you would not even know my name,” Mac Allister pondered when wondering what would have happened without his mother’s intervention.
“In December 2020, I got on FaceTime with her and I was sobbing. I was at my flat in Brighton, and she was back home in Buenos Aires. I had lost my head.
“I said, ‘Mum, I can’t do it anymore. I’m coming home. I need to get out of here.’
“At the time, I was barely playing for Brighton. It was embarrassing, because I had the No. 10 shirt for a Premier League club, which is the dream of so many kids in Argentina, but I was a nobody.
“My name was nothing. I thought that I was cursed.
“When I first moved over to England from Boca Juniors at the beginning of 2020, I came on as a sub for one match, and a few days later, the world came to a stop. COVID.
“Bang. Everything shut down. No football. No friends. And the worst part was that I was stuck in a country where I didn’t speak the language. I actually started taking basic English classes over Zoom.”
Living away from home in isolation must have been incredibly difficult for the Argentine.
He was turning 23 years old when this conversation with his mother took place, and the speed at which footballers grow up was something Mac Allister was keen to highlight.
The midfielder said: “As footballers, we always say that you become a man very early. But in other ways, you’re still a boy.
“I was calling my mum on FaceTime every day, asking how to turn on the oven and where to put the detergent. And being alone, without playing, you get depressed.
“Many don’t know this, but by that Christmas, with no fans in the stadiums, I had my bags packed. Literally, they were packed.
“I had two offers to leave — one from Russia and another from Spain, and my mind was made up. My mum was back in Buenos Aires, and I called her one day crying my eyes out, telling her, ‘I quit. I can’t do this anymore.’
“But mums, they always know what to say, don’t they?
“No matter how old you are, you’re still a little kid when you’re talking to your mum. She took me back to the times when I was playing in the backyard every day with my brothers.
“At the start of summer, the grass would be completely green and smooth and perfectly cut, and by the end of the summer it turned into a brown mud pit from us trying to kill one another with sliding tackles…
“I was so nostalgic for those times when I was in Brighton, all alone, sitting on the bench. The grass is always greener, isn’t it? I wanted to go home so bad. But my mum made me see the light.
“Ale, remember how much you always wanted this? Remember La Cuca? You have to be brave. You can’t quit now.”
“Can you imagine if I had left for Spain? For Russia? I would be an answer in one of those pub quizzes they have in England.
“’Next question: who was the Argentinian guy with the Irish name who played 15 games for Brighton?’”
“’Ahhhh, damn. Who was that guy? Mac something… What happened to him?’”
“But no, that was not my fate. My mum saved me.”
And thank goodness she did.