Well, there it is

Liverpool part ways with Arne Slot

First, the caveats: It shouldn’t need mentioning that trying to guide a squad through a season that begins a few weeks after one of their teammates dies in a tragic accident is something that would challenge most managers. Also, in the end, it can’t be forgotten that Arne Slot brought Liverpool our 20th top flight title, tying us with Manchester United, who have held that lead in glory since 2013, after we had been looking down (far, far down) on English football since 1990.

But as I stated in my rather lengthy (and wordy) end of season summation, there were a number of factors involved in this season’s failure, just as there were in the prior season’s success. This is a reality in almost any season. You can’t point the finger at one person or one factor and state: “This is why we lost X games and won Y games.” Many of Arne’s detractors suggested that he won the ‘24-’25 title “with Jürgen’s team”, suggesting that if he hadn’t had that squad constructed for him by his predecessor, he wouldn’t have won it. Well, yes. Without that enormously talented squad, we would not have won the 20th. That’s a tautology. But what’s equally true is that with that same talented squad (the only player difference between ‘23-’24 and ‘24-’25 was the addition of Federico Chiesa, whom Arne barely used for two years), Jürgen didn’t win the title. At that point, we start getting into the question of players maturing or adapting to the environment or yadda, yadda, yadda. As noted, there are a lot of factors involved with success and failure every season.

This is neither a defense of Arne Slot nor a an attack on management for letting him go. As I’ve stated multiple times, I was basically convinced that Arne was not the guy for us after the 0-3 loss to Forest, which had followed the 3-0 loss to City and preceded the 1-4 pasting we took from PSV. The players weren’t responding to him and he seemingly wasn’t able to change the direction we were heading, which was down. Now, of course, this was a group of players that had been through a collective trauma, so there were certainly factors that were beyond his control. But the sharpest contrast between Jürgen and Arne is that the latter isn’t a man manager. He’s not going to hug you in the dressing room and tell you everything is going to be OK and that he’s there for you. He’s going to tell you to get back out on the pitch and do your damn job. Some people respond to that kind of therapy better than others. But it’s the same kind of therapy that most supporters are going to level at the head coach, as well.

What I’m most concerned about isn’t who is going to replace our coach. The headlining candidate of the moment seems to be Andoni Iraola, who has worked wonders at Bournemouth for the past three years since they returned from the Championship, getting them to their first ever experience of European play in the Europa League next year. I have reservations about him but we’ll see what turns out. No, my biggest concern right now is the question I posed in part I of my end-of-season ramble, which centers around upper management and team construction. If you bring in a guy whom you say is your guy, the only person you’ve looked at and the guy that the numbers say will work out the best as the successor to one of the greatest managers of the modern era, then you’d best go about getting him everything he needs in order to succeed and not simply continue to pursue your “sustainable”, value-based model that said greatest manager largely abandoned at one point to pursue his own path. Despite having neither the ego, presence nor reputation of Jürgen Klopp, Arne was brought here to pursue a path and he’s going to pursue it. If that’s what you want and that’s what your numbers say would work, then you’d best jump on board with where he’s going.

That didn’t happen, not least because we spent an abominable amount of money on a striker who, as I’ve noted before, doesn’t play the way we’ve played for the past decade but also doesn’t play the way your new head coach does. In the end, what that expenditure (along with all of the rest that seemed to make far more sense) and the departures that were allowed to happen in concert (at least one glaring one- Luís Diaz -based on that same value-based approach) resulted in was a sorely unbalanced squad that lacked threat and was therefore easy to resist and easy to counter. It also kind of lost the plot with the way the league was changing over the past couple years, since we recruited a technician like Florian Wirtz, rather than a couple more beasts like Dominik Szoboszlai and Alexis Mac Allister. But, of course, part of the reason that we hired Arne in the first place was because he had experienced a squad in constant turnover while he was at Feyenoord, with his players constantly picked off by bigger clubs and had still found a way to succeed with what he was given. He didn’t do that this year and that’s what has led to his departure, but there were other structural issues, as well, like the inability to hire a set piece specialist coach when a couple other candidates were available but the club was unwilling to meet salary demands (Guess that turned out OK?) that make me think that the problems we currently have go deeper than just the coach.

For years under FSG, Liverpool have developed a reputation for being one step ahead of the rest of the pack when it comes to a lot of things, most notably recruitment, but also personnel management (we once had a throw-in coach but now were unwilling to pay for a set-piece coach), as well as general organization. Now I’m beginning to wonder if the squad of once-exiles (Michael Edwards, Julian Ward, now Richard Hughes who came with them) who had removed themselves because they disliked Jürgen’s power and the way he wielded it are a bit high on their own supply when it comes to decision-making. Was Arne really the guy who best suited the model on the pitch or the one in the board room? Certainly, the intent has been to run the club sustainably, which means that we need to make money even while spending crazy amounts on players. Why, then, are we again faced with a situation where we’re losing a highly-valued centerback in the form of Ibrahima Konaté for free this summer? And one of our greatest players ever, Mohamed Salah, is also walking for free? And both of these coming after we lost another of our best players, Trent Alexander-Arnold, for free last summer? And this coming a year after having spent more money in the summer window than any club in English history. Oh, and the fact that part of the sustainable model was to promote players from the academy who know our system and, yet, Jarell Quansah, Tyler Morton, Ben Gannon-Doak and now apparently Curtis Jones will all have been sold in the past year. Certainly, there are individual factors for all of those players and extenuating circumstances for many of them but collectively that doesn’t look like even the famed “concept of a plan”, to say nothing of a strategy that was once envied by most of the football world.

I am not traumatized by the departure of Arne Slot. I will forever be grateful for him winning the 20th. He deserves his spot on the Irish Kop banner. But I’m now seriously questioning the capabilities of the people who sacked him and whether they have an actual plan to move us forward. At the moment, we resemble nothing so much as Manchester United, spending torrents of money and getting little for it. The only saving grace in that respect is, again, that 20th title as they have now gone 13 years without winning one. What happens from here will cement either that or this year as the odd exception.