Liverpool's start to the Premier League season may partly be explained by their summer transfer window, but it may also be ascribable to something else.
Another Saturday, another crushing defeat. It may well be the case that Sean Dyche is a football genius - it took him a month to lift them out of the Premier League relegation places, which we may reasonably presume to have been the intention of Evangelos Marinakis in hiring him in the first place - and Nottingham Forest’s performance at Anfield on Saturday was if nothing else accomplished, but Liverpool remain a pile of broken, if expensively assembled, spare parts. They’re just nothanging togetheras a football team at the moment.
The obvious place to look, in terms of trying to find an explanation for this, is in their summer transfer window. They spent £194 million on shiny new strikers and a further £100 million on a shiny new Florian Wirtz, but while there have been flashes of brilliance from Hugo Ekitike, on the pitch Liverpool have looked extraordinarily badly-coordinated during matches, as though the players either haven’t been given any instructions of what to do on the pitch, or as though they were and just didn’t really understand them. And that’s exactly the sort of lack of cohesion that allows teams without better players but with a plan to get the better of them, as happened at Anfield on Saturday afternoon.
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The tail-off has been dramatic. They won their first five league games of the season, as might have been expected. They beat Newcastle away and Arsenal at home. They won the Merseyside derby. But that win against Everton turned out to be the sort of turning point for them. They’ve played seven Premier League matches since then, of which they’ve won one and lost six.
And the nature of those defeats has, if anything, only gotten worse as time has passed. Losing 3-0 the Manchester City have might been excusable, were it not for how one-sided that loss was. Losing by the same margin - and at home - to a team who started the weekend one place off the bottom of the table is substantially less so.
Of course, football loves a scapegoat, so a lot of attention is falling upon Alexander Isak this morning. He was withdrawn just after an hour into the Forest match, having had 15 touches of the ball. It was one of those performances where it was easy to forget that he was even on the pitch in the first place and his substitution felt like an act of mercy rather than a necessary tactical tweak.
The crisp winter air has been filled with the cloying scent of schadenfreude over Isak’s struggles since he finally completed his “dream move” to Liverpool. His decision to spend the pre-season conspicuously not training certainly seems to have had ramifications. In a Premier League in which headspace and sheer physical fitness are more important than ever, it seems that his summer antics are leaving a longer trail behind them than he probably imagined.
And the very nature of his departure from Newcastle means that he’ll get very little sympathy from outside Anfield, while sympathy from within might start to run short. He’s managed one goal so far this season, and that came against atrophying Championship opposition in the form of Will Still-era Southampton, a team who started the season among the favourites to go up but who by the latter stages of September were also starting to look like an expensively-assembled assortment of malfunctioning parts themselves.
The risk is that Isak becomes the cause of Liverpool’s problems rather than a symptom. But it wasn’t hasn’t been his fault that their defence was repeatedly cut through like a hot knife through butter on Saturday. He’s only even played in five of their twelve Premier League matches so far, and what happened on the pitch when he wasn’t even playing can hardly be pinned on him. It feels like there are greater structural issues at play at Anfield which can’t be pinned on one player alone, though that won’t stop people from trying.
And there is another matter which gets briefly mentioned in op-ed pieces discussing their collapse in form, but doesn’t really seem to get analysed very much. Liverpool lost a player in the summer to a horrific accident. The death of Diogo Jota was a tragedy on a human level, most importantly, and it does rather feel as though there hasn’t been very discussion of what the effects of this have had on the players and other staff within the club itself.
But grief doesn’t follow a linear pattern. It can be ugly, it can be messy, and it can mess with your brain in ways that are difficult to even interpret, still less express. Liverpool’s players will have felt huge grief over what happened to their former team-mate during the summer. That feeling may have felt as though it was passing, only to slam right back into their faces. There may have been some who didn’t feel anything, and others who are still bottling it up.
We can’t see this from the outside, and in a world as ruthless as professional football, it’s unlikely that it will be talked about publicly. There were public commemorations and minutes of silence, all immaculately observed. But these were mourning, the public face of grief. Dealing with grief is often an internal process, and some people can’t even get through or past it. And when seen through the lens of potentially unresolved grief, their start to the season may make more sense.
It should also go without saying that professional football is one of the worst environments for dealing with grief because*the show must go on.*I suffered my own grief earlier this year, but I was able to shut myself away for weeks and do the processing work that I needed to do. It was horrible, and I’m far from certain that I came out of it a better person. But for professional footballers, even this is simply not an option.
To be absolutely clear, this is absolutely not about the amount of money they earn. Death is the one thing that no amount of money can resolve. But having to go out and perform in front of 50,000 people twice a week in an industry in which marginal gains are everything, in a calendar which simply cannot stand still to allow for the processing of anything, feels like an environment that would be intolerable for the vast, vast majority of us.
But the truth remains. Liverpool Football Club lost a member of their family last summer, and in one of the cruellest ways possible, a sudden, accidental death that came without warning, and without even the slightest opportunity for it to be anything other than what it was. Thereare no satisfactory answers to any of this. And furthermore, there are no accusatory fingers to be pointed anywhere else here, either. We can’t expect other clubs to do anything other than carry on as normal. To a great extent, it’s a mark of respect in its own way that they have.
The game will go on, because the game always goes on. It’s just that when you step back and take in the broader perspective of what has happened at this club over the last twelve months, there is one horror that stands about all others. There’s nothing that can be done about this, but it feels as though this horror has been airbrushed into the background a little because it’s almost too much to take in. The possibility certainly makes sense of an otherwise perplexing start to the new season.
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