In around March 2024 I spoke to somebody who works both in and on football who said to me that agents weren’t sure about their clients going to Liverpool. Not sure about their players, not sure about managers. Nobody knew what would happen once Jurgen Klopp had gone.
We chatted about the manager pool and he suggested to me that nobody really wanted the job. No one was sure what the level of Liverpool and our players was once Klopp was taken out. I was somewhat haughty about all this as you can probably imagine: “These are really good players. And I love Jurgen but he isn’t perfect”.
But people were unsure, some could even say scared.
Arne Slot wasn’t.
It remains his greatest achievement. He looked at Liverpool and came in to win. The song sung for Federico Chiesa is actually for Arne Slot. He was here to win. That was the sense of him from the moment he arrived and it was at Old Trafford, in his third game, that sense was crystallised. Speaking post match with Dan Austin I remember him off-handedly saying “we’re just going to win the league with this fella”.
This fella took a look at the squad, a look at the rest of the league and knew he could do what it took to mount a major assault.
This takes some doing. He got exceptional seasons out of Mo Salah and Virgil van Dijk and excellent ones from Ryan Gravenberch and Ibou Konate who had both underperformed the season before. He settled the Trent Alexander Arnold argument by just playing him right back. He got more output from Luis Diaz and kept Cody Gakpo left sided forward.
And he set the standard. He made it clear what was expected game after game and a defeat to Nottingham Forest aside, his players obliged, going on an unbeaten league run from that Forest game until deep into April. When we had played 28 games we had 67pts. This was the proof of the maxim that you don’t need 90pts to win a league but you have to look like you have 90pts in you. Everyone else was burned away.
We saw Slot’s raw side, his desire, on the pitch at Goodison Park after James Tarkowski’s late equaliser and, frankly, we loved it as much as we hated that equaliser. But what that goal ended up setting up for us was the greatest daytime Anfield had seen since 1964, if not ever. The sun shone and all I could see for miles were the happiest faces imaginable, cheeks soaking wet with sweat and delight, faces and hearts redder than the deepest crimson because the thing we simply hadn’t had in so many adult lifetimes all together and in person was ours.
The day was the culmination of the work, the standards, the belief and, yes, the sense of mission and purpose that was Arne Slot’s. His view was about what a club like Liverpool should be, what a club like Liverpool should do. And he delivered.
We’re writing this now, today, because he has had to leave the club just 13 months on from that day.
But the cornerstone of him as a manager or head coach disappeared. He came to win and suddenly winning became exceptionally difficult for his side. In the summer the most devastating tragedy unfolded and Arne Slot handled himself and his squad brilliantly but the impact it had was undoubtedly enormous. What made matters even more difficult for Slot was the summer business, not just its nature but its fitness. Liverpool took signing Marc Guehi and Alexander Isak to the wall and only got one who was never fit over the course of the season. Hugo Ekitike and Florian Wirtz weren’t Premier League ready in terms of fitness and in losing Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez and, yes, the footballer that was Diogo Jota, Arne Slot lost his hardest runners in attack.
Liverpool stopped being winners and Arne Slot, where he had agency, and he had a lot, stopped being able to get Liverpool to look like a winning sign. This was the issue – he was here to win and for reasons partially to do with him, and significantly not, winning became exceptionally hard every week and practically impossible in the round.
Slot himself had little to fall back on in terms of players and ideas and Liverpool looked increasingly bereft even after he tried to lock down to stop the rot. Players too often looked disinterested and this began to bleed to the stands and the football became ever more like mush.
The decision should throw serious focus on Liverpool’s summer and on Liverpool’s decision makers because, make no bones about it, they made it harder for a manager who was a winner, who was about winning to actually win. I hope there is some serious reflection on that.
But it also is the right move. Liverpool again need a man who clarify a journey and make be on that everyone can feel a part of. This doesn’t need to be heavy metal football; there are a load of different way to be the Pope, you just need a sense of mission and a sense of belief. Liverpool – in the widest sense that includes you and I – had lost both over the course of the season in a big way. And so the decision was made.
This is a decision I think is the right course of action. Liverpool need that sense of mission. It is integral to who we are and what we are. Jurgen left behind a super club but that sense of feeling like an insurgency can still persist even with our comparable obscene riches. Slot wasn’t the right man to harness all of that in this very moment we find ourselves and we therefore need to find the man who is.
None of that should take away from what Slot gave us. He was a winner and he will be a winner again and he won with us in the most fantastic fashion. He also won at The Hill Dickinson this season and that is something else which was very, very special.
Nor does him going fix much – Liverpool don’t have enough players and aren’t fit to fight on two fronts. There is a lot of work to do.
There always is. This is the mission. We will do it. This is the belief. We will have the greatest night out of our lives because this is the point. This is the football club and it only makes sense if we are all in it together.
Neil
