What does the future hold for Cody Gakpo, who’s been a consistent starter on the left-wing for Liverpool this season?…
WHO AM I to shit on a good vibe?
Nottingham Forest was nothing if not a deeply perplexing search of the soul to ask ourselves what Liverpool Football Club is right now.
The answer will not be clear after West Ham. It won’t be clear if we qualify for the Champions League, or even win it this season.
To sit in such uncertainty is disconcerting. You want to see a pathway. You want to look around your own dressing room and know who you can rely on. These are my lads, our lads.
You want to love them. Last season I loved the bones of them. Proud as punch of them. When they lifted the Premier League trophy aloft I was gleaming like a father on graduation day.
Sometimes you want to stop the world right there, at that very moment. For them now, for us then. For Diogo.
I hate knocking them but I’m going to. I need to segue into a piece about how Cody Gakpo is driving me insane because he’s seemingly made it his mission this season.
Gakpo isn’t a decisive footballer. He isn’t a puzzle which needs solving. He isn’t some charlatan parading as a Liverpool player.
But he is a confidence man in every sense. Moreover, he’s a player who relies on end product, a thriving environment and possibly rotation.
This season was an opportunity for him and a leap of faith from Arne Slot. It was a chance to nail down left sided forward and become the automatic first pick in that position.
It hasn’t been taken.
We all know the issues. Seven goals and four assists isn’t good enough for February. It isn’t good enough for Mohamed Salah, either, who has seven goals and eight assists in all competitions.
We can talk about why, and squad depth is a big issue here. But the key difference between both players is that Gakpo has so much more to prove than Liverpool’s third greatest ever goalscorer.
The fact Liverpool are operating with both players as semi-automatic choices for their positions and have no viable rotation option for them has been negligent all season.
Rio Ngumoha and Federico Chiesa are not realistic competition on either wing despite them being promoted to such roles.
Having a Luis Diaz equivalent around would have been beneficial for many reasons.
One of them being Gakpo seemingly prefers rotation. We assume every footballer wants every minute of every game. That they’re a nightmare to handle when they’re rested or subbed.
The reality is some players can thrive in competition and accept, even embrace having games picked for them. We’ve seen this over many years at clubs like Manchester United and City, for example.
I’ve always thought of Gakpo as being a horses-for-courses player. Certain players just aren’t suited to every game of football.
It’s reasonable to think this simply comes down to ability. That Gakpo is more Ryan Babel than John Barnes and that’s fine. But again we come back to decision-making in the summer of 2025 and that someone, somewhere believed Gakpo could be the main fella for Liverpool’s left-sided attack this season.
Having only signed a new long-term deal last summer, Gakpo should remain at Liverpool for at least one more season. But he needs actual competition.
Liverpool should be looking at two wingers in the £60million plus category. Salah will be his own story and we might get a clearer picture of Ngumoha’s development during the run-in, but the situation with Gakpo simply can’t continue as it is.
Gakpo clocked 3,017 minutes for Liverpool in 2023-24 and 2,696 in 2024-25. He’s already at 2,475 for 2025-26.
It’s worth remembering he’s a 16-18 goal-per-season forward in the right conditions. But these aren’t them.
The hope was clearly that he’d step up and embrace being top dog. That hasn’t happened, which is a lesson for the club and a missed opportunity for him.
Either way, he must give everything for Liverpool to salvage something from a difficult season.
He has no choice.
