Liverpool's biggest gamble was sticking with Slot
There's a multitude of risks with moving on from a Premier League winning manager, but the biggest gamble of all was persisting with Arne Slot.
As Arne Slot sat stony-faced in the Anfield dugout as the Kop serenaded Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson one more time before their departure, there must have been a lot on his mind.
One of them — as had been widely reported and reluctantly accepted by swathes of the fanbase — would’ve been how he was going to turn around this disastrous season and get the title-winning charge back on track.
He seemed to have weathered the ultimate storm and despite 20 losses over the course of the season, with so many mitigating factors taking into account, would be given one more chance to right the ship.
And then FSG, out of nowhere on the morning of the Champions League final, pulled the plug on the Slot project. Having seemingly backed their man throughout the tumultuous campaign in the face of substantial and audible grievances from the support, they took stock and decided too much damage had been done and the crackly foundation that had appeared was simply too unsteady to take forward into next season.
It’s hard not to have a lot of sympathy for the Dutchman. Having expertly guided the club to a Premier League title last season, Slot was making things look easy. He was quickly added to the hall of legendary managers on the Kop banner, joining his predecessor Jurgen Klopp, who had to do so much for his single league title.
He guided the club admirably past the death of Diogo Jota, and with so much credit in the bank it’s quite hard to believe that just under 12 months later he’d be removed from his role.
It’s a huge gamble from the powers that be. Slot is a proven winner across multiple leagues, and despite the issues that have sprouted, isn’t suddenly a bad coach overnight. He coaxed Salah towards his best ever season statistically. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him rock up at another club and be very successful.
It’s also a huge gamble to replace him with Andoni Iraola. The Spaniard guided Bournemouth to an unprecedented sixth place finish and Europa League football for next season.
Positively for the fans, his style of football is more akin to the “heavy metal football” that Mo Salah called for in his end-of-season missive, the strike that might have finally broken Slot’s future and in fans’ eyes may provided one last assist before moving on.
But he’s never won a trophy and his foot-forward, intensive style of football is largely untested twice a week. It worked for the most part under Klopp, who needed years of sweat and tears to fine tune everything, and even then there were downward years where the squad looked like they were running on empty.
His win rate leaves a lot to be desired, and by his own admission has spoken about how much he and his teams struggle against low block, an issue Liverpool have endeavored to overcome for over a decade.
But the biggest gamble of all would have been persisting with Slot heading into next season. With so much more tuning needed to the squad, you’d have thought FSG would gift Slot the chance to go again with a refreshed squad. But a slow start to next season and Anfield would have become even more toxic than ever before.
One of the biggest challenges to the keep Slot debate was that the football had simply become stale and boring. It’s hard to reverse that overarching sense of misgiving with the style, and as Salah crucially outlined, the Liverpool fanbase clearly demand and expect a swashbuckling style of football that Slot’s team simply weren’t delivering.
Even through low periods of the Klopp era, there was rarely a sense of apathy with the football and certainly not with the effort and endeavour of the squad. The work ethic persisted, and as reports dribbled towards the end of the season that Liverpool weren’t training to as high a standard as before, and that players were taking too many city breaks — something that been debunked — Slot began to lose the fans.
He had to fight numerous fires in the media but his combativeness was rarely seen as something to rally behind. There was complaints, washy excuses about conceding goals first in games, and set piece concerns that he baffling tried to justify.
There was also a lot of displeasure with how me managed academy players, and reportedly barely stepped foot at academy events and certainly saw no reason to lean more heavily on younger players, even with such strain on the senior squad, something his predecessor had done to great accomplishment.
Indeed, the stats boffins and decision makers clearly saw that Slot, despite his tactical acumen, had simply burned all his credit and letting it continue would have been calamitous. At least now, a new manager has a full summer to review and refine his squad, engineer a pre-season plan off the back of the World Cup, and hope the wheeling and dealing on the transfer front returns enough quality to replace Salah and fill the gaps that had appeared in the team.
It feels wrong in many ways, but if anything has been learned about Liverpool as a fanbase and an institution this season, is that they need a force of personality at the helm to unite and rally behind when times get tough. They want a coach who can extract a lot from very little. They need a manager in all but name, because the Kop will only ever demand 101% from their man in charge. Slot soldiered on admirably, but was missing that magic ingredient that gave fans hope for the future.
In the end, the decision to sack Slot was a straight forward one, but one that will have stung across every level of the football club nonetheless.