Liverpool’s most significant exit this summer could well be a free transfer, but there could be a big-money sale too, so which players have they banked the most money by getting rid of in the past?
While Liverpool have managed to renew the contracts of Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk, they still look likely to lose Trent Alexander-Arnold on a free transfer at the end of the season. The prospect of not receiving any money for one of the best players in the world in his position, for whom a transfer fee would have been pure profit as an academy graduate, has led to an increased sense of bitterness about his proposed move to Real Madrid.
However, there could yet be a new entrant into Liverpool’s top 10 sales of all time this summer, since club-record signing Darwin Nunez is a candidate to be sold. Despite his struggles for consistent form, Liverpool want most of their money back.
But until any such deal goes through, what are the biggest transfer fees Liverpool have agreed to sell players for? Here, TEAMtalk takes a look at the top 10.
Note, all fees are inclusive of add-ons, although not all will have been fully activated.
10. Mamadou Sakho – £26m
After three seasons of service, Sakho rapidly fell out of favour with Jurgen Klopp in 2016. Punctuality issues in pre-season led to Sakho being dropped from the first team, before he managed to escape by joining Crystal Palace in January 2017.
By the end of that season, the loan deal became permanent, which led to Liverpool receiving £24m – with £2m in add-ons to follow.
It gave Liverpool a profit on the defender, who they’d signed from Paris Saint-Germain for £18m in 2013.
Sakho left Liverpool with 80 appearances behind him and went on to play 75 times for Palace over four-and-a-half seasons, including his loan spell.
9. Fabio Carvalho – £27.5m
Liverpool spent up to £7.7m to sign Carvalho from Fulham in 2022 after he helped the Cottagers win the Championship.
Despite a promising start to his Liverpool career, the young attacking midfielder slipped down the pecking order. He ultimately only made 13 Premier League appearances for the Reds.
Loan spells with RB Leipzig and Hull City followed in his second season, before Liverpool agreed to sell him to Brentford for £20m, rising to £27.5m with add-ons.
It formed part of a double sale, since Brentford also signed Sepp van den Berg from Liverpool for £20m rising to £25m in the same window.
8. Xabi Alonso – £30m
A key part of the famous squad that won the Champions League in 2005, Alonso cost Liverpool just £10.7m to sign from Real Sociedad.
He ultimately left Liverpool in 2009, a year after they had explored selling him to help regenerate the squad.
Real Madrid bought the Spanish midfielder for £30m, which marked the beginning of a five-year spell at the Bernabeu.
While at the time that was a record fee for Liverpool to receive, the decision to sell Alonso didn’t go down well.
Steven Gerrard said at the time he was ‘devastated’ by the loss of his midfield colleague and insisted in an interview six years later that it was a ‘stupid’ and ‘disastrous’ decision.
Matters were made worse when Liverpool replaced Alonso with the injury-prone Alberto Aquilani, who only ever made 18 Premier League appearances.
GO FURTHER – Alexander-Arnold next: The last 10 Liverpool players to leave for LaLiga – hits or misses?
7. Christian Benteke – £32m
Benteke lasted just one season at Liverpool and was largely seen as a disappointment, but they still managed to recoup most of their money for him.
Liverpool signed the Belgian striker from Aston Villa in 2015 by meeting his £32.5m release clause. He went on to score 10 goals from 42 games for them.
However, the manager that signed him, Brendan Rodgers, was replaced by Jurgen Klopp just three months after his move. Benteke’s gametime subsequently dwindled.
All six of Benteke’s appearances under Rodgers were starts. In contrast, he made 14 starts out of 36 appearances under Klopp.
In 2016, a year after signing his long-term Liverpool deal, Benteke was sold to Crystal Palace for an initial fee of £27m, with up to £5m in add-ons.
Benteke’s spell at Selhurt Park lasted a lot longer; he spent six seasons there and scored 37 goals from 177 games.
6. Sadio Mane – £35m
One of the best bits of business Liverpool did in the Klopp era was to sign Mane for £34m, rising to £36m. The winger enjoyed six impressive seasons after leaving Southampton, never failing to hit double figures of goals.
However, as his contract approached its final 12 months, Liverpool cashed in on the Senegal international in the summer of 2022.
Bayern Munich bought him for an initial £27.5m fee, which would become up to £35m with add-ons.
The Bundesliga giants chose Mane as an attacking reinforcement in the same summer they sold Robert Lewandowski to Barcelona, even though they were different types of players.
And although Mane never had a bad season for Liverpool, they might have sold him at just the right time, since he struggled at Bayern and was sent to the Saudi Pro League after a single season in Germany.
Mane only scored seven Bundesliga goals for Bayern. It was his least productive season in front of goal since his debut campaign in the French second tier with Metz.
5. Fabinho – £40m
Liverpool caught rivals off guard by signing Fabinho for £39m in 2018. The former Monaco ace became a key player as the pivot in Klopp’s preferred midfield.
The Brazil international spent five seasons with Liverpool, but the last of those was below his usual standards, despite it also being the one in which he made more appearances than any that came before.
As the time came to freshen up the middle of the park, in a summer in which Jordan Henderson, James Milner, Naby Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain also left, Liverpool accepted an offer from Al-Ittihad for Fabinho in 2023.
The Saudi Pro League side paid £40m to sign him, which was a significant fee for Liverpool to recoup given that he was by that point 29 years old.
Fabinho is still playing in Saudi Arabia now and has more than 60 Al-Ittihad appearances to his name.
READ MORE – The 12 players Liverpool made a profit on in the Jurgen Klopp era
4. Raheem Sterling – £49m
One of the more controversial exits that tarnished the view of a player at Liverpool, Sterling became unpopular for the manner of his British-record move to Manchester City.
Sterling had impressed over 129 appearances for Liverpool at the start of his career, but refused to sign a new contract with the club.
Thus, in the summer of 2015, and after rejecting two bids, Liverpool agreed to sell Sterling to City for £44m, rising to £49m.
Sterling put the saga behind him by enjoying a successful seven years in Manchester. He scored 131 goals for City from 339 games, becoming a Premier League champion four times.
“You want to make sure you’re playing at the highest level,” he said a year after his move.
“Liverpool are a great team, I never said that wasn’t the case. But at the time it was a great opportunity to come here and work with some of the best players in the world.
“I’m not saying there aren’t some great players at Liverpool because there are but it was for me, my development and where I wanted to be.”
3. Fernando Torres – £50m
Another hurtful move by a Liverpool player to a Premier League rival was when Torres quit for Chelsea in January 2011.
Torres at Liverpool was something special. It took a club-record fee to prise him away from boyhood club Atletico Madrid and it was worth it; 81 goals from 142 games followed.
But after three-and-a-half years – and with no trophies to his name – Torres jumped ship to sign for long-term admirers Chelsea after submitting a transfer request.
The deal was worth £50m, which was a British record at the time.
“They wanted to bring in young players, to build something new. I was thinking to myself, this takes time to work,” Torres explained five years later. “It takes two, three, four, maybe even 10 years.
“I didn’t have that time. I was 27 years old. I did not have time to wait. I wanted to win.”
Torres went on to lift the FA Cup, Champions League and Europa League trophies with Chelsea, but his goals-to-games ratio wasn’t as good there. He scored 45 goals from 172 games across all competitions, but only 20 from 110 in the Premier League.
Chelsea lost almost their entire investment in Torres when selling him (after a loan spell) in January 2015 to AC Milan, who themselves got rid of him soon after as he returned to Atleti.
2. Luis Suarez – £75m
There once was a time when Arsenal thought they could get Suarez for £40m plus a pound. That was not the case.
Indeed, when the time came for Liverpool to bid farewell to their firebrand striker, it was for almost double the price that their Premier League rivals had tried their luck with.
Suarez signed for Liverpool from Ajax in the same window they sold Torres, costing £22.8m. It was one of the shortest-lived club-record transfer fees ever, as the addition of Andy Carroll for £35m a few hours later surpassed the record he had set.
But Suarez was the one who enjoyed the better Liverpool career. He won the European Golden Shoe in his final season with the club, ending up with 82 goals from 133 games in his Liverpool career.
That illustrious season might never have happened, since Suarez asked to leave Liverpool in 2013. Ultimately, he committed to the club for the 2013-14 season, but Barcelona came calling thereafter.
That summer – after he bit Giorgio Chiellini while playing for Uruguay at the World Cup – Liverpool sold Suarez. The reported fee was £75m, although some sources have claimed it was actually £10m lower than that.
Suarez became a Barcelona great, scoring 198 goals from 283 games for them and winning four La Liga trophies.
They made a massive loss on him financially, though, as he later left for Atletico Madrid in a deal worth around £5.5m – and won La Liga again in his first season in the Spanish capital.
1. Philippe Coutinho – £142m
Not many clubs can say selling one of their best players would go down as one of their best ever pieces of transfer business, but that may well be the case for Liverpool.
Coutinho was a gem of a playmaker at his peak for Liverpool. They picked him up from Inter Milan for a modest £8.5m in January 2013 and he blossomed into a brilliant creative midfielder, capable of scoring some spectacular long-range goals.
But in January 2018, Liverpool faced a difficult decision. Barcelona sought to add Coutinho to their squad and offered up to £142m to tempt the Reds into a sale. The bid was accepted.
“I had this dream to play for Barcelona,” he reflected recently. “Then the opportunity presented itself and I couldn’t say no to my dream.”
Although he finished the season in decent form, Coutinho struggled beyond then at Barcelona. He only scored 26 goals in 106 games in their colours and didn’t prove to be value for money.
Meanwhile on Merseyside, Liverpool used the Coutinho money to cover the costs of two influential signings of their own: Van Dijk that January (which technically went through before Coutinho’s sale) and Alisson Becker in the summer.
While Coutinho brought excitement to Liverpool, they still had Mane, Salah and Roberto Firmino to light up their attack. But they needed to strengthen in defence and in goal – and the signings of Van Dijk and Alisson, worth exactly the same £142m fee put together, saw to that.
Barcelona got just £17m back when they sold Coutinho to Aston Villa in 2022.
