Arne Slot Has Turned Supporters From Believers to Doubters
One year ago, in a sun-drenched Anfield, the future was painted beautifully for all to see. Liverpool were champions of England once more, and this time, in front of their supporters. Legends from different eras converged to salute the barely plausible achievement of Arne Slot, a man who appeared impervious to the risk of mistakes. As songs, flags and banners engulfed Anfield, Liverpool were back on their perch.
A year later, they’ve been knocked off it. The sun is gone. Instead, rain is falling without pause. Liverpool exited the FA Cup with a 4-0 defeat to Manchester City. They lost to PSG at home to depart from the UEFA Champions League rather tamely. The Premier League title race is being concluded without them so much as on the radar of the conversation.
Mohamed Salah is leaving, a forlorn legend, a fallen king deposed by the tactical inconsistencies of a man now vulnerable to a catalogue of mistakes. Another legend, Andrew Robertson, is also departing. From triumph to transition and turmoil. How did it come to this?
It has been a turbulent season for Slot, and much goodwill garnered across last season’s achievements is fading swiftly. Liverpool sit in 5th, and qualification for the Champions League is only a certainty because of the failings of a tumbling Chelsea than any sort of revival on the red half of Merseyside. There is little connection between the fans and the team, and that begins with the manager and the way he has sought to catalyse the post-Jürgen Klopp era by ushering in a change in style.
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The most notable criticism is that of how the team plays. Think of Liverpool in the past ten years and it evokes an image of heavy-metal football, of a team playing with electricity, a pulsing energy flowing around Anfield, creating a symbiotic energy connecting the team to the fans. It suited Liverpool to play aggressively at Anfield. It seemed like the quintessential blue-collar brand of football for a club that still clung to the old collectivist ethos. Liverpool were compact, aggressive, and outran opponents. Rivals crumbled when the noise grew. One goal suddenly became two or three. This was the Liverpool way.
Yet this season, Liverpool under Slot have eschewed that. Now statistics regularly paint a portrait of Liverpool being outrun, no longer compact and aggressive. It has resulted in a team that is slow and impotent, passive and fragile. These were criticisms you rarely heard in the past ten years.
The other issue has been Slot’s handling of players. Most Liverpool fans will tell you that there is something cold in how the club has dispensed of the likes of Harvey Elliott and others, how Curtis Jones is being overlooked continuously, in how a club legend like Andy Robertson had more to offer than simply warming the bench all season. Nowhere has this been embodied more than the rift between Slot and Salah.
Salah has been Liverpool’s leading light for the past ten years with a Premier League legacy only rivalled by Steven Gerrard for the club. His goals and assists speak to his contribution to the club, and he was the deciding factor between Liverpool winning the league title last season and not. And yet this season, Salah has been dropped across multiple games, culminating in an acrimonious interview in December where he claimed the club was throwing him under the bus and he didn’t have a relationship anymore with Slot.
On the surface of things, Salah’s form warranted an exclusion from some games, and Slot handled the fallout of that as well as could be expected. Yet pushing Salah to the periphery, to where he has decided to leave the club, could be a decision that both Liverpool and Slot come to regret.
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In trying to accelerate the post-Salah era by shifting the team’s reliance onto Florian Wirtz, Slot has failed to get the best out of the veteran who delivered the title in the previous season. Salah’s pace has gone, and Slot has responded to this by pushing him further out onto the wings rather than drawing him in more central areas. More bizarrely, he benched Salah for both games against PSG, in which Liverpool looked overpowered and completely lost for ideas.
Put simply, Slot is handling things in a way that supporters of the club are not accustomed to, certainly not in the past ten years when the guiding hand of Klopp bathed the club in a reassuring warm glow where you felt things were always going to turn out fine, even in difficult moments.
That name. It haunts Liverpool, and perhaps Slot, even if he doesn’t admit it. When Slot first arrived, he was seen as everything Klopp wasn’t and that wasn’t a favourable assessment. The German embodied the working-class blue-collar fighting style of the Liverpool fans; he was a people’s man, and this was the people’s club, or so how Liverpool supporters sought to see it.
But for a while, Slot slowly changed things. Liverpool fans naturally warmed towards him as they came to see him for who he was, a fundamentally decent man, an astute tactician, and the one who put them on course for title number twenty. He secured a place in the club’s history for what he achieved.
Slot, it must be remembered, handled Diogo Jota’s death with exceptional class and integrity. He led the club through its darkest moment in the 21st century and put into action the idea of never walking alone. And perhaps that itself is what should always be remembered.
Liverpool have mourned Jota and Slot is a part of that. If the players are now allowed to use grief as an excuse for their failings, their manager, their leader, is expected even more to appear as though he has moved through the grief, to lead his team. If Slot stays, most Liverpool fans will support him and desperately hope he turns things around. But the evidence on the pitch is damning.
Liverpool have endured poor seasons under Klopp, but there was always the existence of an identity that resonated with the fans, a team of effort and grit, that was betrayed by fatigue rather than lack of endeavour. What they see now is a team that is outfought, outrun, simply shrivels and cowers in the face of adversity. Where Liverpool once dominated opponents with intensity, they now sit near the bottom of the league for running and pressing.
The crisis for Slot is that when confronted with an avalanche of questions, he has seldom found the answer. And it may be now that the only answer for the club is to part ways with the man who delivered title number twenty. It shouldn’t have come to this, at least not so soon.
By: Rabbil Sikdar / @aziznahar_
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Soccrates Images – Getty Images