Rank, it seems, still has its privileges. For Trent Alexander-Arnold that means on the Liverpool coach his teammates are out of luck if they want to watch something that clashes with Formula One. Alexander-Arnold adores the sport and he has a powerful ally with a shared interest.
“Virgil van Dijk loves F1, too, he’s a huge Max Verstappen fan of course,” says Alexander-Arnold of his teammate’s fellow Dutchman.
“Him being captain and me being vice-captain means we get to decide what’s on the TV if we are travelling on the coach. So we overrule any other sport. A race clashed with golf and we had to pull rank to get the race on. A lot of the lads are golf fans so they weren’t happy.”
Football has always come first for the Liverpool and England right-back but he has an enthusiasm for F1 stretching back to watching it when he was six with his father. This past week he became directly involved in the sport as one of the backers in the Apex investment group that has bought a stake in the Alpine F1 team.
The pleasure it brings to be part of the sport is writ large as he discusses the decision to get involved. He attended his first race at Silverstone last year and was at the Spanish GP in June. “TV doesn’t do it justice. It was one the most special things I have ever seen up close,” he says. “Seeing how the team works and operated it was mind-blowing. It was one the best experiences I’ve ever had, it was incredible.”
For Alexander-Arnold, his investment is an opportunity to be part of something he holds dear. The 25-year-old reels off a list of summer grands prix that he will try to attend when his footballing commitments wind down with the ease of a man who has already thought long and hard about them. He also feels the sport, for all that it is a world away from football, shares some common ground in the nature of top-level competition.
“I like to see how the F1 teams can squeeze out the finest details just to get a little bit ahead of the opposition,” he says. “That was something that was really intriguing to me, because – at the highest level – as players and as teams we compete at a fairly similar level. It comes down to the small differences that you can make so you have that edge. Every day, every year, every time you train and compete it’s about finding those fine margins that the opposition is not doing. That was something that resonated with me.”
Alexander-Arnold grew up admiring Michael Schumacher and Ferrari during their all-conquering prime of the early 2000s after which, while football has dominated his life, he stayed in touch with F1, not least in noting the arrival and talent of Lewis Hamilton, whom he came to appreciate as a pioneering black athlete in a predominantly white sport.
“In my sport there are a lot of players that look like me so I thought it was the same in every sport,” he says. “But in F1 it was a lot different for Lewis. The struggles he went through to make it and not only getting into F1 but also being one of the best drivers to ever live is incredibly inspiring.”
Alexander-Arnold’s Liverpool teammates greeted his entry into F1 with great interest and he concedes Alpine’s performance will be under no little scrutiny at Anfield. “All the lads were asking questions wanting to know about it,” he says. “They were really excited by it because it’s something that doesn’t really happen in football. So if we have a bad weekend on track then I will get a bit of stick but hopefully I will be the one laughing in the end.”
