Calvin Ramsay's Career Shift: Loan to St Mirren Signals Liverpool Exit
Liverpool’s summer rebuild is still crackling with activity, but one story has already reached its quiet conclusion: Calvin Ramsay is heading home to restart his career.
Liverpool weigh up huge winger deals
At the top end of the market, Liverpool’s recruitment team are wrestling with eye-watering numbers.
Talks are active for Bradley Barcola and Yankuba Minteh, two wide forwards who fit the club’s long-term profile, but the price tags are brutal. Barcola is being quoted at around £120m as Paris Saint-Germain prepare for the 23-year-old’s possible exit. Brighton, sensing the market and their own leverage, have pushed Minteh’s valuation for the 22-year-old up towards £80m and are said to be increasingly confident of squeezing out the maximum fee.
Whether Richard Hughes is prepared to go that high is another matter. Liverpool, reigning 2024/25 Premier League champions, are not short of ambition, but there is a very real prospect they simply walk away if the numbers don’t move.
Outgoings gather pace
Before anything dramatic happens on the incoming front, Liverpool still need to clear the decks.
Stefan Bajcetic, Federico Chiesa and Harvey Elliott are all set to leave as the club trims and reshapes the squad. The churn is significant, and it underlines how aggressively this new era at Anfield is being constructed.
One departure is already signed and sealed – and it says plenty about how far one player’s stock has fallen.
Ramsay’s Anfield chapter winds down
Calvin Ramsay has joined St Mirren on loan for the 2026/27 season, a move that effectively signals the end of his Liverpool career.
It has been a bruising spell for the 23-year-old since his £4m switch from Aberdeen in 2022. Instead of establishing himself as Trent Alexander-Arnold’s understudy, he has lived out of a suitcase: loan spells at Preston, Bolton, Wigan and Kilmarnock have brought minutes but not momentum.
For a section of the fanbase, Arne Slot’s swift decision to discard him stung. Liverpool’s issues at right-back last season were obvious, and the sight of a Scotland international being shuffled out again did not sit comfortably with everyone.
Yet the club’s stance is clear. Ramsay is under contract until 2027, but Liverpool are content for him to see out that deal away from Anfield. This St Mirren loan is not a springboard back to Merseyside; it is a shop window.
St Mirren’s big opportunity
St Mirren, though, see something different – and they are delighted.
Manager Craig McLeish has called Ramsay’s talent “exceptional”, a word that cuts through all the noise and loans and lost seasons. For him, this is a major coup: a young, attack-minded full-back with Premier League pedigree and international experience, dropped into the Scottish Premiership with a point to prove.
"It's a really important year for Calvin where he needs to find regular football to help kick on his career and we're happy to give him that platform because we get an exceptional young player to add to our group," McLeish said, via BBC Sport.
Regular football. A defined role. A manager who believes in him. Ramsay has not had that combination since he left Aberdeen.
A career at a crossroads
Strip it back and the situation is stark. Ramsay leaves Anfield having made just four senior appearances, all under Jurgen Klopp. The early promise, the excitement of a bargain buy from Scotland, the talk of him being groomed as a long-term option at right-back – it has all faded.
Now comes something simpler: a season at St Mirren, a chance to put his name back in circulation, to convince potential suitors he is more than a forgotten footnote in Liverpool’s title-winning era.
For Liverpool, the focus turns to nine-figure negotiations and a squad refresh at the very top of the game.
For Calvin Ramsay, the battle is more basic, and perhaps more brutal: can he turn “exceptional talent” from a compliment into a career?
