The sacrifices on the road to stardom have been so frequent that Trent Alexander-Arnold no longer worries about missing out on the carefree life enjoyed by most other 22-year-olds.
“I’ve always tried to be in football as much as possible - I’ve still never been to a music festival,” says the Liverpool defender. “It just feels normal now, making little sacrifices.”
Sacrifice is a common theme on the journeys of many Red Bull athletes.
For Alexander-Arnold, sacrifice continues to be a common theme of his success. At the start of the year, he sat down with Red Bull to find out how they could work together and continue the incredible start to his career.
Together they decided it was his in-game vision that set him apart and that could be developed even further to help him stay one step ahead of his opponents. This was already an area where Alexander-Arnold excelled, and his ability to spot the right pass, time his crosses, and even pick the right moment for a cheeky corner, is what has set him apart from his peers.
The right-back agreed to work with sports vision expert Dr Daniel Laby to try and take his game to the next level – everyone knows that the first five yards is in your head, and Laby believed that with the correct plan, Alexander-Arnold's training programme could give him the edge when it came to that quick decision-making.
This becomes clear in Trent's Vision, a new documentary about Alexander-Arnold, which you can watch free, exclusively on Red Bull TV.
“There’s always room for improvement in everything that you do, that’s the mindset that I’ve got,” he says. “If you can find something to tap into that others haven’t got then that one per cent improvement is worth so much.”
His early sacrifices began when he was at school. He moved to Rainhill High School in Merseyside which has a formal partnership with Liverpool, so that he could balance his football and formal education. He left school with seven GCSEs but the path wasn’t easy.
“Because I lived far away… I’d get picked up at 7am and then I’d do two hours in a car, get to school for nine, finish school, go straight to football and get back home at like 7.30,” he says. “After that I’d have to do homework. So that was my routine for about four or five years.”
A fierce competitive streak has also played its part. “It’s down to my brothers that I have that competitiveness,” he says. “The competitiveness between the three of us was frightening, there’d be tears, they’d be fights, there was everything you can imagine just to win.”
His brothers, Tyler and Marcel, also sacrificed their own dreams of becoming professional footballers to ensure that Trent achieved his. With their father working in London and mother juggling work alongside being a full-time parent, a painful decision had to be made.
“More often than not, my older brother’s football would be sacrificed for me to go to training because Mum couldn’t be in two places at once,” he says. “I can’t even explain how hard it must have been for my older brother being a teenager and not being able to go to school football matches because he had to come to my training sessions and just stand there and watch.”
All those sacrifices have created a hunger within Alexander-Arnold to ensure that all of the other memories that could’ve been made pursuing another life are replaced with the fulfilment of achieving his potential and living out the dreams he and his brothers shared when they were children.
To see what you can learn from Trent Alexander-Arnold and find out the full story behind his incredible rise to the top, watch the documentary on Red Bull TV now.
