Every football club has the story of the one that got away.
Kylian Mbappe was on trial at Chelsea as a youngster, Zlatan Ibrahimovic was asked to train with Arsenal at one point, while Jan Oblak spent a bit of time with Fulham as a 16-year-old.
Liverpool have a few examples of this in their recent history with the most notable possibly being Jude Bellingham.
The Athletic reported last year that Jude Bellingham had spent time with the Reds as a nine-year-old, but, in our view, that isn’t the biggest missed opportunity Liverpool have had in recent years.
Indeed, in a recent tweet, Jose Enrique recently reminisced on the time Martin Odegaard spent training with Liverpool’s first-team as a 15-year-old, and, in hindsight, not snapping the Norwegian up at that juncture was a huge mistake.
Odegaard would, of course, eventually end up at Real Madrid, and for quite a long time it looked as though he would never fulfil his potential.
However, now, he is the captain of an Arsenal team that are challenging for the Premier League title, and there is a real case to make that Odegaard has been the Player of the Season in the Premier League this term.
The ‘amazing’ midfielder has been turning up when it matters most for Arsenal, scoring vital goals and creating chances when nobody else can stand up and be counted.
Bellingham in himself is a missed opportunity for the Reds, but as of yet, he’s unproven at Premier League level, while Odegaard is doing the business week-in, week-out in the hardest league in the world.
If the Reds had a time machine and could go back to fix one of their past mistakes, we have to imagine that they’d transport themselves back to January 2015 and snap Odegaard up after he’d trained with the club.
