Arne Slot is deserving of plenty of criticism this season. Some of the decisions that he’s made throughout the campaign could be described as ‘odd’ if you were being generous, ‘bad’ if you weren’t. The Dutchman has said some strange things in his press conferences from time to time and the manner in which Liverpool have struggled to get a grip of games has often seemed to be down to what the ‘Head Coach’ has been asking the players to do. I have no problem whatsoever with people who want to discuss the manager’s performance in a fair and measured way. Where I have a massive problem is when people just want to declare him to be ‘rubbish’ or to do down his title win as being ‘Jürgen Klopp’s team’. If you want to slag off the manager but aren’t prepared to discuss any of the countless mitigating circumstances that surround what’s happened before and during the campaign then I am minded to think that you don’t want to discuss the situation in good faith. Sensible conversations should be taking place, but mean-spirited ones shouldn’t.
Leoni major knee injury
Bradley major knee injury
Isak broken leg
Endo broken ankle
Ekitike ruptured achilles
And Gomez acute tendinitis for first 4 months of season
Christ on a bike
#lfc— Dan Kennett (@dankennett.co.uk) 15 April 2026 at 10:47
From the moment that the death of Diogo Jota was confirmed, everyone who was even slightly sensible knew that this was going to be a very odd season for Liverpool. The players would all be handling his loss differently, whilst Slot himself would also be clearly impacted by it. His decision to curtail pre-season and to allow the players themselves to decide whether they were in the right frame of mind to work was the right one, even though it was obviously going to have an impact on the forthcoming campaign. That is exactly how it’s played out, no doubt contributing to the obvious drop off in form of Mohamed Salah. Then there is the horrendous luck that we’ve had with injuries from the get-go, practically none of which could’ve been avoided by the ‘Head Coach’ doing anything differently. Slot hasn’t had a good year by any metric, but anyone who wants to simply dismiss his achievements or suggest that he’s never been good enough shouldn’t be given the time of day in any conversation around what needs to happen next for the Reds.
The Smartest Men in the Room?
When Fenway Sports Group first took over at Liverpool, the men in charge readily admitted that they didn’t know anything about sport. They took their time to assess what they had to work with, which is why Roy Hodgson remained in charge for significantly longer than he should have. Then they made moves, bringing in a fan favourite in Kenny Dalglish and asking Damien Comolli to enact the same sort of ‘moneyball’ strategy that had been working in baseball. Given the impact of Jordan Henderson during his time at the club, ignoring his decision to let down the LGBTQ+ community in order to take the blood money of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as well as the obvious talent of players like Luis Suarez, it’s fair to say that it worked to some extent. Dalglish was almost too successful, forcing them to give him the role permanently when they almost certainly didn’t want to, later turning to Brendan Rodgers as a young coach seemingly heading in the right direction. In the end, they landed on Jürgen Klopp and were able to make hay.
LFC is crumbling before our very eyes. We thought we had the smartest men in the room.
Reality is we’ve got people in power who couldn’t give a shiny shite because they won’t be here in a years time.
FSG need to get a grip before its full on regression! Or are we already witnessing it?
Under Klopp, the various departments that FSG had been putting together in the background, such as Michael Edwards and Ian Graham, suddenly began to click into place. It felt as though every single decision the club made was the right one, pushing along to Champions League and Premier League glory, winning everything that there was to win during a period that would’ve seen us be the runaway success story, were it not for the existence of a club owned by a nation state that would end up facing 130 charges of financial impropriety. We had the smartest men in the room, making decisions based on data and information rather than feelings and ‘gut instinct’. It wasn’t that they ignored the senses of old fashioned scouts, more that they listened to what they had to say and then compared it to the facts that they had available to them. Everything was working in sync and it seemed as though we could do no wrong, even coping with the loss of Klopp by bringing in Arne Slot and seeing him win the Premier League at the first time of asking. All was golden.
An Unbalanced Squad
Many people, myself included, seemed all too willing to dismiss the fact that Arne Slot was brought in not as the club’s manager, but instead as the ‘Head Coach’. Richard Hughes was the man behind the scenes tasked with the job of building the squad that Slot would have to work with. When it was confirmed that Florian Wirtz would be lining up for us and that we were putting a deal in place to bring in Alexander Isak from Saudi Arabian-owned Newcastle United, everyone was cock-a-hoop. Sure, Luis Diaz could head to Bayern Munich because he was surely past his best now anyway, right? The signing of Milos Kerkez was proof that we still knew how to sign the best players from other teams, whilst Trent Alexander-Arnold wouldn’t be missed because Jeremie Frimpong was a brilliant talent and Conor Bradley had proven his ability as a young right-back coming through. Everything seemed rosy. In reality, however, we were all burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the ridiculously unbalanced nature of the Liverpool squad, even before Jota’s death.
Expecting slot to be remotely successful this season with the squad as incomplete and unbalanced as it was built is dumb af.
At some point we probably need to look at Hughes being in over his head at a club too big for him to know how to successfully run.
#lfc
— JaySlick (@uninspiredlib.bsky.social) 20 January 2026 at 12:47
The reality was that Hughes hadn’t really put together a team that Slot wanted to play with. Too many of the players weren’t able to play in the manner that the Dutchman was hoping to go with, whilst we looked shorn of any real options in the defence. As the season wore on and it became abundantly clear that the Reds were going to be lucky to finish in the top four, let alone challenge for the title, the celebrations that we’d all enjoyed in the summer began to fade away. For FSG, things have fallen apart not just with Liverpool, but also at the Boston Red Sox. Michael Edwards, who was back in the fold as the Chief Executive of Football, was tasked with finding an additional football club for his bosses to buy, but that has faded away now too. Perhaps John Henry et al are losing interest in football and are ready to cash out their asset whilst it’s worth loads of money. Whatever the situation, it is clear that we no longer have the smartest men in the room anymore, which should worry every Liverpool fan thinking about what comes next for the club.
