Arne Slot knows how good it feels to be standing there in the aftermath of victory talking about how a plan came together. It’s just over a year since he stood pitchside at Old Trafford and explained how he had primed his team to dismantle Erik ten Hag’s predictable build-up patterns.
It’s a while since Slot has had the chance to revel in the success of a well-laid tactical master plan. Instead, Slot has lately mainly found himself complaining about other people’s game plans, lamenting how all Liverpool’s opponents are now sitting deep, playing long, roughing Liverpool up at set pieces – generally refusing to co-operate with what his team are trying to do.
And now he must endure the indignity of opposing players boasting about how they exploited Liverpool’s predictable tactics and known weaknesses.
A few minutes after he set up Estevão for the winner at Stamford Bridge, Marc Cucurella was on Sky revealing that Enzo Maresca had spent the last couple of days telling his players to attack the space behind Mohamed Salah. “They play one style of game where Salah is always ready to attack, so we prepare for that. If we do a good process, maybe we will have a lot of space in there. Today it works, and we won the game in this way.”
That Slot had agreed to liberate Salah from the last traces of defensive responsibility was until quite recently being held up as one of the keys to Liverpool’s success. As Salah explained in August: “I told him, with me, you’re gonna win the Premier League but I have to feel really comfortable with the way we play ... He told me, ‘Okay, I will get the best out of you, I will put you in a situation where you are very comfortable, but I need you to provide numbers.’”
Now Salah has stopped providing numbers – and the drought goes beyond goals and assists. His underlying numbers are the worst he has shown in nine seasons at Liverpool. It’s not just that he is missing chances, it’s that he’s hardly even getting any. He is shooting less than half as often as in his worst previous season. His xG per game is running at half the level of his worst previous season. He has contributed one successful take-on, zero successful tackles and one interception in seven games.
So what happens now? Does Slot dutifully keep picking him in the hope that he plays his way out of the slump? Or does he decide the time has come to do what Liverpool’s summer transfer business always suggested was on the cards, and step into the post-Salah future?
The notion that a recent run of bad results should make Liverpool consider whether one of their greatest-ever players is still worth his place in the team might seem an ugly example of the insanely reactive media culture that surrounds today’s football.
[ Estevao snatches last-gasp win for Chelsea as Liverpool lose againOpens in new window ]
That’s why it’s important to put the results in their proper context. It turns out that losing three games in a row, two of them in the league, really is quite a big deal for a club like Liverpool. It only happened three times to Jürgen Klopp in nearly nine years as manager. Klopp was in the job more than five years before he lost back-to-back Premier League games, and back-to-back league defeats only occurred in two of Klopp’s nine seasons in charge.
On the rare occasions Klopp’s team did lose three in a row, it always happened in the second half of the season when the squad was stretched by injuries and fatigue. But right now, Liverpool’s squad seems to be in pretty good shape – their bench at Chelsea was arguably one of their strongest (it was certainly one of their most expensive) of the Premier League era. There are no obvious excuses. They’ve simply seized up and stopped performing in a manner that never happened under Klopp.
The point is that by the standards Liverpool have set for themselves, this really is a crisis, of the kind that has in the past provoked a serious rethink. The last time they lost three in a row was in February of 2023, and Klopp decided then that his entire midfield – a group that had reached the Champions League final nine months earlier – would have to be replaced in the summer.
Jamie Carragher suggested last week that it was time for Florian Wirtz to “come out of the team”. Let’s leave aside the question of why Wirtz should be dropped when he’s playing better than most of the other attackers, and just acknowledge the new political reality created when Liverpool “won the transfer window” by spending €365 million on Wirtz, Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitike.
The fact is that dropping Wirtz would be a good way for Slot to get himself sacked. Does the sporting director who has just sanctioned a nine-figure transfer fee want to hear his coach explaining that the new star has to be sidelined because he’s disturbing the balance of the team?
Slot’s job is to find a new balance that allows Wirtz, Isak and Ekitike to show why Liverpool paid all that money for them. These players were the three most expensive signings of the European summer transfer window. That makes them too big to fail. If their success must ultimately come at Salah’s expense, it’s a price Liverpool will be prepared to pay.
