Attributes Liverpool Saw in Jeremie Frimpong Before Making Him Their New Right-back
- Think Football Ideas
- Aug 7
- 3 min read
What Liverpool Saw in Jeremie Frimpong Before Making Him Their New Right-back
When Liverpool made their move for Jeremie Frimpong, they weren’t chasing a mirror. They were scouting a disruptor. Replacing a figure like Trent Alexander-Arnold was never going to be about replication.
That path leads only to disappointment. Instead, the Merseyside club leaned into evolution, not in system tweaks or safe bets, but in profile, tempo, and mentality. Frimpong isn’t a stylistic cousin to the player he succeeds; he’s a reset button on the right flank.
At first glance, he’s chaos, but look closer, and there’s method in the madness. This is a player built on relentless energy, not calculated orchestration. His gift isn't in how he controls the rhythm, but how he breaks it.
Liverpool saw that: a wing-back with the instincts of a forward, the feet of a winger, and the motor of someone who never stops checking the clock because he thinks he's late.
There’s something deliberately unrefined about Frimpong's game, and that's what makes him such a fascinating fit. This isn’t about who can spray a diagonal pass or thread a line-breaking ball from 40 yards out.
It’s about thrust. It's about making the opposition's left side second-guess every step forward, knowing there's a Dutch blur looking to punch a hole in their shape the moment they overcommit.
Where Frimpong thrives is in his instincts. He doesn’t dwell. He drives. Carries, bursts, sprints, and the man treats space like an open invitation. He’s not trying to control the tempo of a match. He’s trying to turn it inside out.
Defensively? He’s raw, but not reckless. And in truth, Liverpool didn’t bring him in to shut games down. They brought him in to make games more difficult for the opposition to control.
His recovery pace is elite. His tackling is tidy when it needs to be. In fact, he was only beaten 13 times from 53 true tackle attempts in the Bundesliga last season, and that’s a 24.5% dribble success rate for opponents, remarkably efficient for a player who often operated in high-risk zones.
By contrast, Alexander-Arnold was dribbled past 56 times in the league, the most of any defender, with a rate of 2.1 per 90 minutes. That’s not a dig, but it frames the profile shift, which is that Frimpong isn’t safer, he’s sharper in transitional chaos.
And while his positioning can occasionally invite pressure, his ability to recover, physically and mentally, puts him in the kind of category where risk feels less like a gamble and more like a feature.
Then there’s the question of fit with Salah, with Slot, and with the system. On paper, it raises eyebrows. In practice, it might just be chaos perfected. Salah, no longer the all-action speed merchant, now operates more like a surgeon - precise, lethal, and spatially aware.
Frimpong brings the noise. He creates the storm that allows Salah to cut through the calm. Together, they could form a right-side partnership built on contrast, with one pulling wide, and the other slipping in unnoticed.
And yes, there’s baggage here. Any signing that follows a local hero carries that. But Liverpool didn’t sign Jeremie Frimpong to remind fans of what they had. They signed him because what they need is different now.
Alexander-Arnold offered control, vision, and elegance. Frimpong offers chaos, acceleration, and danger. And maybe that’s the evolution Liverpool were after, which is a shift from dictating play to disrupting it.
Not a like-for-like. A like-for-next - a remixed identity.
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