Comprehensive Breakdown

AN ARTICLE BY MATTY

       Oftentimes, we as human beings like to focus on a certain aspect of a problem rather than objectively look at the full picture. Especially in a world that feels like an Orwellian dystopian hellscape, reality is difficult to grasp. AI has become quite adept at obscuring reality, muddying the waters further than what our own brains are already capable of doing. We don’t like reality. Reality is dire and unforgiving. Reality is life, and life is depressing. Reality, however, is indeed real. The sooner this fact is accepted, the sooner one can start to look at the whole picture and make their own conclusions. Objectively, this Liverpool season has been a train wreck. The team looks selfish and disjointed, maddeningly inconsistent from game to game, the old guard of the Klopp era looks about as useful as burnt toast, and the new signings are either injured, disappointing, or both. Hugo Ekitike is the obvious exception to that last one, he and Dominik Szoboszlai are seemingly the only players who bothered to show up this season.  

       Fans have hurled a lot of abuse at Arne Slot, and I’d say much of it is deserved. The winning team mentality is gone and replaced by selfish personal ambition. Mo Salah, once a champion of Slot’s ideas, now has issues with Slot and probably still wants to leave the club. I imagine some fans would be all too happy to see Salah walk away. 

Editor’s Note: Thank goodness my computer was having problems in trying to send this to Stu earlier in the week because those comments about Mo would’ve looked rather nasty being submitted on the day he announced his departure. Mo Salah’s the greatest forward we’ve had in the PL era, a living legend whose exploits will surely not be forgotten for a long while. Even just last season, he had one of the greatest seasons for a player in the history of the league, leading the pack in both goals and assists totals for the season. But Father Time comes for all of us, and Salah’s diminished form is likely one of the reasons for the issues with the club this season. His bust-up with Slot, the attacking structure no longer funneling through him but rather being run through Wirtz and Szoboszlai to inconsistent results, it all goes back to his sharp decline. Not even mentioning his mental state after the death of his dear friend Diogo, more on him later. It was time to move on, for the sake of Mo’s reputation and the club’s ability to continue to transition into a new era. Mo leaves a hero instead of a villain, this season a footnote in his career rather than what we remember him by. He deserves that. Now, back to the article at hand. 

However, Slot also is quickly falling victim to the issue that every United manager has had since 2013: he’s not Jurgen. Just like the shadow of Old Fergy hangs like a pall over Old Trafford, Klopp’s shadow appears larger with every defeat or poor performance. Klopp’s preferred style of play became so synonymous with Liverpool FC that it’s now expected that every Liverpool team just plays like prime Klopp teams. Slot really cannot win. Either he wins a title and the credit goes to Klopp, which he’s already experienced, or he tries his own thing and gets blasted for not being like Jurgen. However, Slot is far from the only reason Liverpool have outright sucked for most of this season. As with most crises, everyone at the club is to blame for this calamity. 

         Let’s first look at the management team, led by Richard Hughes and former Liverpool superhero Michael Edwards. When Edwards and Klopp ran the show, there was a near perfect balance and harmony when building the squad. Just a reminder that most teams are lucky to hit on half of their transfers, while a solid 80% of transfers under Klopp and Edwards were slam dunk successes. Klopp understood the human element, Edwards had the most advanced analytics, and the blend produced a near-perfect union. Then Klopp began to get more power within the club structure, Edwards wasn’t too pleased and he left. Now he’s back, and as I’ve written before, it seems the human element is lost. It fascinates me that Klopp took a consulting role with the Red Bull football group mere months after leaving the manager role at Liverpool. Did we ever offer such a role to him? Would he have accepted it? Speculation, of course, but fascinating regardless. Every player Liverpool signed was objectively a good signing.   

      Bringing in the best striker and left back in the league, arguably the best young midfielder in the world, one of the best young strikers in the world, the next great Italian defender, and possibly the best attacking right back in the world, that’s all fine. But was it needed? Looking at the squad from last season at a micro level, friendships and relationships matter within a team. Elliott and Salah were really close. So were Darwin, Luis Diaz, and Mac Allister. In cutting those players from the team, is it possible that Salah and Mac Allister felt alienated? Could that play a factor in their dreadful performance this season? Did we really need Wirtz when we already had Szoboszlai and Elliott at his position? Did we really have to sell Diaz and Quansah to fund the purchase of a second big money striker? We left ourselves short of depth at both positions because of those sales. Was it worth it to immediately bench a club legend in Robertson when you could’ve signed a cheaper player with similar potential to Kerkez? Why didn’t we sign a young winger to not only replace our quickest player in Diaz, but also hedge against a potential decline from Salah? The squad is expensive, unbalanced, and doesn’t play with the same unity and passion as it once did. It’s a group of mismatched toys, with further spending in the summer likely required in order to balance out the mess that Edwards and Hughes created. 

        Of course, we cannot talk about this season without mentioning the massive loss of Diogo Jota. Going back to the topic of disrupting a harmonious room of players, Diogo was such a key part of that harmony because of who he was. An infectious and joyous personality, he surely would’ve helped some of these new players adjust to life in Liverpool. Surely his clutch goal scoring could’ve helped us rescue some of the close games we’ve lost. Dare I say out of all the Klopp era players, there are three who most exemplify the ultimate Klopp superstar: Roberto Firmino, Andy Robertson, and Diogo Jota. The passion, the joy, and the moments will never be forgotten, and it all traces back to the man himself. Losing Jota’s presence left a hole on and off the field. It turned preseason training into a mourning period. Players weren’t as fit as usual, nor were their minds fully locked on the game. Salah clapping towards the fans with tears in his eyes as they sang Jota’s song during the first game of the season against Bournemouth said all we needed to hear. This couldn’t be a normal season, no matter how much we wanted to pretend it could be. We can’t possibly know the impact of Jota’s death on each individual player and the club itself. Everybody deals with grief in different ways. But perhaps a stilted preseason, shortened due to the tragedy and then also having many players coming and going during that time, is to blame for at least the fitness issues and the consistent blown leads.  

          Lastly, I’m not going to have a go at FSG because some of these issues couldn’t have been foreseen. Who can possibly imagine or prepare for the sudden and tragic death of a loved one? However, their always-consistent model of prioritizing long-term success over short term gain, while prudent and successful, didn’t quite work this time. We’ve seen this before as well, with 2020 and 2022 standing out as other examples. We seemingly take years to solve problems that appear almost instantly. Just one CB signing could’ve changed the entire fate of the 2020 season. Starting the midfield refresh a year early could’ve prevented such a precipitous drop off in 2022. Likewise, perhaps signing a winger and CB in January could’ve helped us claw back some stability and pace in a side sorely missing it. We just seem to accept a manager either incapable or too stubborn to adjust to the changes in the Premier League this season. We just accept an unbalanced squad who had the depth blown to smithereens because we wanted to go hunting for big game. We never seem able to avoid the messes that we can see coming because the long-term plan always takes precedence. 

          Lastly, the players. Typically, they get the least amount of blame because they’re the people with the least power in this structure. But at some point, you must play like a team rather than a group of individuals. Szoboszlai is the perfect example of this. Brilliant player, but he’s all about himself. He’d rather look fancy and do a backheel to cost us a goal, instead of playing the simple pass and continuing to play on. Runs like the wind, only so his hair looks slicked back. There’s no cohesion in attack or defense, and at this point I’d guess it could be that the players might not be committed to working together. Chemistry would be developed by now if players bought into the system. Or maybe the system itself is flawed and relies too much on individual brilliance that grows or fades from game to game because players themselves are human. Salah, Mac Allister, Virgil, and countless others, we can talk about why their form fell off a cliff but the result is their form has gone off the cliff. They’re partly responsible for that drop off, and they’re also responsible for working themselves out of the slump. It seems to me that this group of players resembles the white suit boys of the 1990s. Yes, bags of talent and flair. No real cohesion and no real winning because of it.  

           I suppose the point of all of this is to say this season doesn’t have a singular culprit that explains such a rough season. Rather, everything that happened and everyone involved has a role. It was a bold new direction for the club to chase the high-profile glitz and glamour signings, to change the way the team played after a successful campaign, to boldly change so much. To not have the proper infrastructure in place to accept such change, exacerbated by the loss of a brilliant person in Diogo who almost certainly would’ve helped smooth things out with all the new signings. To sell the depth of the team because of perceived flaws, overlooking the importance of depth that we’ve all harped on for years now. The club decided that the Klopp way was not suitable for a new era, right after winning the league by slightly tweaking the Klopp way. Maybe next season will go better after some new signings are made and the team has a proper preseason to gel. That happened many times in the Klopp era. Rebounding from a disappointing season with another roaring title charge, 2021/22 and 2023/24 come to mind. The German largely responsible for that, however, is gone and won’t be coming back. Next season will be crucial for Slot. He’s started the transition needed for a new era, made it a bit more painful than necessary but perhaps in the long term it provides results. When the transition is finished, when his stamp is fully realized and the last vestiges of the Klopp era retire or leave the club, will he produce a truly dominant team that can stand up to what we’ve previously witnessed over the last ten years? We don’t know yet. It will be fascinating to find that answer. More fascinating still to see how exactly we get there.