Trying to pick Liverpool’s ten greatest players is a ridiculous job.

Not difficult. Ridiculous.

This is a football club that has been producing legends for well over a century. European champions. League winners. Local lads who lived the dream. Foreign superstars who arrived in Liverpool and somehow ended up understanding the club as if they had been born five minutes from Anfield.

So somebody is going to be left out.

Robbie Fowler? Out.

Luis Suárez? Out.

Kevin Keegan? Out.

Jamie Carragher, Billy Liddell, Ray Clemence, Phil Neal, Michael Owen?

You see the problem.

But this is my ten.

Not necessarily the ten most talented footballers ever to pull on the shirt. This is about ability, longevity, trophies, influence, unforgettable moments and, above all, what they meant to Liverpool Football Club.

Let the arguments begin.

10. Ian Callaghan

There are football records that eventually get broken.

Then there is Ian Callaghan.

857 appearances for Liverpool.

Eight hundred and fifty-seven.

He played his first Liverpool game in 1960 and his last in 1978. Think about what happened to the club between those two dates.

Callaghan was there when Liverpool were still in the Second Division. He was there for Bill Shankly’s revolution. He won league titles, FA Cups and UEFA Cups. Then, towards the end of his career, he was still there when Liverpool conquered Europe.

He played in Liverpool’s first European Cup triumph in 1977 and was part of the squad when they retained it in 1978.

There have been more glamorous Liverpool players. There have been bigger goalscorers and players with bigger personalities.

But nobody has played more games for the club.

Sometimes greatness is about brilliance.

Sometimes it is about being there, year after year, generation after generation, while the club transforms around you.

Callaghan did both.

9. Roger Hunt

Before Rush. Before Fowler. Before Torres. Before Suárez. Before Salah.

There was Roger Hunt.

And he scored goals. Lots of them.

Hunt finished his Liverpool career with 285 goals in 492 appearances, making him one of the most prolific forwards the club has ever had.

But the numbers only tell half the story.

Hunt was one of the players who helped turn Bill Shankly’s Liverpool from a Second Division club into champions of England.

That matters.

It is easy to remember the Liverpool sides that lifted European Cups and Premier League trophies. Hunt belonged to the generation that helped build the platform for everything that followed.

The Kop called him Sir Roger.

No actual knighthood required.

If the people standing on the Kop gave you a title like that, you had earned it.

8. Virgil van Dijk

There was Liverpool before Virgil van Dijk arrived.

And there was Liverpool after Virgil van Dijk arrived.

The difference was enormous.

Liverpool already had a devastating attack under Jürgen Klopp. They could score against anybody. They could overwhelm teams. They could produce extraordinary football.

But something was missing.

Then Van Dijk walked into the defence and suddenly Liverpool looked complete.

Calm. Powerful. Quick. Dominant in the air. Brilliant on the ball.

And almost ridiculously difficult to beat one-on-one.

Within 18 months of his arrival, Liverpool were European champions. A year later, they were champions of England for the first time in 30 years.

Then came another Premier League title in 2024-25.

Plenty of great defenders have played at Anfield.

Very few individual signings have changed the entire personality of a Liverpool team as dramatically as Virgil van Dijk.

7. Alan Hansen

If Van Dijk is the great Liverpool centre-half of the modern era, Alan Hansen is the standard from the old one.

And what a standard.

Hansen wasn’t simply a defender who stopped strikers.

He played football.

He read danger before everybody else had realised there was any danger. He stepped out of defence with the ball. He made difficult things look uncomplicated.

And he won.

Then won again.

And again.

Eight league championships. Three European Cups.

Hansen made 620 appearances for Liverpool during one of the most successful periods any English club has ever experienced.

Modern fans sometimes assume ball-playing centre-backs are a relatively new invention.

Go and watch Alan Hansen.

Liverpool were doing it decades ago.

6. Graeme Souness

Imagine combining the aggression of an old-school midfield destroyer with the technique of an elite playmaker.

That’s Graeme Souness.

Opponents knew he could hurt them physically.

The problem was that he could destroy them with a football as well.

Souness controlled midfield for arguably the most dominant Liverpool sides in the club’s history. In six-and-a-half years at Anfield he won five league titles and three European Cups.

And he captained Liverpool to the European Cup in Rome in 1984.

There have been plenty of tough midfielders.

There have been plenty of technically gifted midfielders.

There haven’t been many who possessed both qualities at Souness’s level.

Put prime Souness into virtually any era of football and I suspect he’d eventually be running the midfield there too.

5. John Barnes

There are statistics.

There are trophies.

And then there are players you simply had to watch.

John Barnes was one of those players.

At his peak, Barnes didn’t seem to run with the football. He glided with it.

Defenders backed away because getting too close was dangerous. Give him space and that was dangerous too.

His first season at Liverpool, 1987-88, remains one of the great individual campaigns by a Liverpool player. Barnes was the outstanding talent in a side that played some breathtaking football.

But reducing Barnes to a winger does him a disservice.

As his career progressed, he adapted. The explosive pace declined, so he moved deeper and became a hugely intelligent midfielder.

Great players beat opponents.

The really great ones reinvent themselves when opponents finally think they’ve worked them out.

Barnes did exactly that.

4. Mohamed Salah

At some point we stopped being surprised.

That might be the greatest compliment you can give Mohamed Salah.

He arrived from Roma in 2017 and started scoring.

Then he kept scoring.

And kept scoring.

Season after season.

Big games. Small games. Europe. Premier League. Manchester United. Manchester City. Everton. It didn’t particularly matter who was standing in front of him.

Salah became a central figure in the Liverpool side that won the Champions League in 2019 and ended the club’s 30-year wait for the English league title in 2020.

Then, five years later, he produced another extraordinary campaign as Liverpool won the Premier League again.

By the time his Liverpool career ended in 2026, Salah had scored 257 goals in 442 appearances.

Read that again.

257.  

From a player who spent much of his career starting from the right wing.

Salah didn’t merely belong in Liverpool’s modern golden era.

He was one of the biggest reasons it happened.

3. Ian Rush

Liverpool have had some outrageous goalscorers.

Roger Hunt.

Robbie Fowler.

Fernando Torres.

Luis Suárez.

Mohamed Salah.

And still, sitting above every single one of them, is Ian Rush.

346 goals.

Nobody has scored more for Liverpool.

Rush wasn’t interested in making finishing look complicated. His brilliance was that he seemed to know where the ball was going before defenders did.

One touch.

Goal.

Loose ball.

Goal.

Mistake from a defender.

Goal.

And if Everton were playing Liverpool, there was a decent chance Rush would score just for good measure.

But he wasn’t merely a penalty-box poacher. Rush worked relentlessly without the ball and became the perfect attacking partner for Kenny Dalglish.

Dalglish created.

Rush finished.

It became one of the great partnerships in British football.

Goals win football matches.

Ian Rush scored more of them for Liverpool than anybody else.

That alone guarantees his place near the very top.

2. Kenny Dalglish

There is only one King.

Kenny Dalglish arrived at Liverpool in 1977 with what looked like an impossible assignment.

Replace Kevin Keegan.

Keegan had just helped Liverpool win their first European Cup and then left for Hamburg.

How do you replace someone like that?

Apparently, you sign someone even better.

Dalglish scored the winning goal in the 1978 European Cup final at Wembley and spent the next decade becoming one of the most beloved figures in Liverpool’s history.

He could score. He could create. He could hold the ball. He could see passes other players couldn’t see.

Most importantly, he made everybody around him better.

His partnership with Ian Rush became legendary, but Dalglish was far more than one half of a great strike partnership.

He was the brain of the attack.

And his connection with Liverpool eventually went far beyond what he achieved on a football pitch.

Player.

Manager.

Leader.

King.

For many supporters, Kenny Dalglish will always be Liverpool’s greatest.

And I wouldn’t argue very hard against them.

But I’ve got one man ahead of him.

1. Steven Gerrard

Steven Gerrard.

Where do you even start?

The goals?

Olympiacos.

The FA Cup final against West Ham.

Manchester United.

Everton.

The tackles?

The 40-yard passes?

The last-minute winners?

Or maybe you start in Istanbul.

Liverpool were 3-0 down to AC Milan in a Champions League final against a team packed with some of the greatest footballers of their generation.

The game looked finished.

Then Gerrard scored.

And suddenly Liverpool believed.

That was Gerrard.

He made Liverpool believe.

He didn’t spend his entire career surrounded by the level of teammates Dalglish, Rush, Hansen or Souness enjoyed during Liverpool’s years of domination.

Sometimes he looked like he was trying to drag Liverpool to victory through sheer force of personality.

And sometimes he actually did.

He finished with 710 appearances and 186 goals for the club.

A midfielder.

186 goals.

But Gerrard’s Liverpool career can’t really be explained by numbers.

You had to experience those moments when a match was disappearing and suddenly No.8 appeared.

A tackle.

A pass.

A 30-yard thunderbolt.

Something.

Anything.

Steven Gerrard could play almost anywhere on a football pitch and dominate a game in almost any way.

For me, he is the greatest footballer ever to play for Liverpool.

The Final Ten

1. Steven Gerrard
2. Kenny Dalglish
3. Ian Rush
4. Mohamed Salah
5. John Barnes
6. Graeme Souness
7. Alan Hansen
8. Virgil van Dijk
9. Roger Hunt
10. Ian Callaghan

And yes, I already know what you’re thinking.

Where’s Fowler?

Where’s Keegan?

Where’s Carragher?

What about Billy Liddell?

What about Suárez at his absolute peak?

That’s the beauty of Liverpool Football Club.

You could probably name another ten players and still have a team full of legends.

But these are my ten.