The curious case of Divock Origi, the Liverpool 'legend' without a club

While Liverpool and Nottingham Forest renewed acquaintances on the most recent Premier League weekend, Divock Origi was 3,500 miles away, sipping courtside coffee at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and posting the NBA’s Nets-Pacers game to his Instagram story. It was the latest public sighting of a player whose absence from the game has become as conspicuous as his goals once were.

Origi, 30, has been club-less since AC Milan terminated his contract on 23 December. The January window came and went without an offer tempting enough to lure him back onto a training pitch. Instead, the Belgian striker closed the month in Paris, attending the Juun J menswear show during Fashion Week, the fashion capital’s catwalks replacing the technical areas he once haunted.

The numbers explain the confusion. His last competitive appearance came 671 days ago, a late cameo for Nottingham Forest against Everton on 21 April 2024. That match ended a forgettable loan in the East Midlands: 22 games, one goal, a 2-0 FA Cup replay win over Bristol City. Yet rewind exactly two years and two days from that Goodison curtain call and Origi was immortalised in red, steering a 94th-minute header past Jordan Pickford to seal a 2-0 Merseyside derby win that kept Liverpool’s quadruple dream flickering. Jurgen Klopp’s post-match tribute was unequivocal: “He is a legend on and off the pitch…our best finisher, he always was.”

Those words were no sentimental outburst. Origi’s Liverpool résumé spans 175 matches and 41 goals, many of them etched into Anfield folklore: the last-gasp winner against Everton in December 2018; the audacious quick-corner strike versus Barcelona that propelled the Reds to the 2019 Champions League final; the clincher against Tottenham in Madrid that delivered the club’s sixth European Cup. Small wonder Trent Alexander-Arnold predicted statues while Andrew Robertson joked about future museum tours.

Inside the dressing room the striker’s aura was equally singular. James Milner nicknamed it “Planet Origi”: multilingual, effortlessly calm, habitually the last to arrive yet never late, prone to leaving passports on planes yet capable of ice-cool finishes under seismic pressure. That combination of nonchalance and ruthlessness turned Origi into the archetypal cult hero.

Off the pitch he cemented legacy in a different currency, endowing the University of Liverpool with the Divock Origi Scholarship, supporting local students from 2021 until the programme’s final cohort graduates in 2029. “It’s made larger, more noticeable impacts…saving towards my first pair of dental loupes,” says current beneficiary Eloise, a 23-year-old dental student.

Klopp’s parting wish in 2022 was that Origi find a coach who would “play him more than I do”. Instead, the forward landed at Milan on a four-year deal, among the club’s top earners, but injured before he kicked a ball in anger. When fit, opportunities were sparse: two goals in 36 appearances, the last of them 18 months ago. Sporting director Paolo Maldini, who over-ruled analytics misgivings to sign him, later conceded, “We expect so much…he hasn’t given us what we expected.”

By summer 2023, Origi was deemed surplus by head coach Stefano Pioli, exiled to Forest, and upon return informed by club advisor Zlatan Ibrahimovic that he and defender Fodé Ballo-Toure would train with the Primavera squad. Tax considerations and a private fitness plan kept him in Milan through 2024, but three managerial changes—Fonseca, Conceicao, Allegri—offered no reprieve. A mutual termination finally arrived three days before Christmas.

Now the market must decide whether a 30-year-old with Champions League medals, a derby catalogue and a famously unflappable temperament still has chapters to write, or whether Origi’s remaining storylines will play out courtside, front-row, or elsewhere beyond the white lines.

Divock Origi, legend, remains in limbo—waiting for the call that revives a career the game isn’t quite ready to forget.