Liverpool are in deep trouble - but sacking Arne Slot may not be the answerplaceholder image
Liverpool are in deep trouble - but sacking Arne Slot may not be the answer | Getty Images
Liverpool’s form has fallen off a cliff and the pressure on Arne Slot is growing - but would firing him make any difference?
One defeat after another. One disappointment after another. This was meant to be the season in which Liverpool took their Premier League title and turned it into a dynasty. Instead, we’re left wondering how much longer Arne Slot will last.
This is the Dutchman’s difficult second album, although even Second Coming wasn’t as much of a let down as following a 3-0 home defeat to a struggling Nottingham Forest side with a Champions League loss to PSV. But would sacking Slot actually make a difference? Is the manager to blame when almost everything that can go wrong seems to be doing so?
Is Arne Slot the reason that Liverpool are struggling?
Whenever a team packed with as much talent as Liverpool are starts to hit the skids, it’s inevitable that the manager will be the focus of most of the frustration. After all, how can a team with Mohamed Salah, Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak in attack be struggling to score? How can a team with Virgil van Dijk and Alisson be shipping so many goals?
It may well be that the coaching is one of the primary problems, but that’s hard to reconcile with such a successful first season – and it’s certainly challenging to pick apart the mess and to determine what portion of the blame can fairly be laid at Slot’s feet when there is so much to be apportioned to the players.
Where Slot has certainly struggled is in his ability to work his many (and very expensive) new players into his system. During his first season, he essentially moved forward with the squad and style of play that he inherited from Jürgen Klopp, choosing not to fix that which was not broken. That wasn’t an option this season, however.
Many of Liverpool’s best players were ageing, Luis Díaz, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Darwin Núñez and others left and tragedy claimed the life of Diogo Jota – a tragedy whose psychological impact on the squad is impossible to determine from the outside. It may well be that it is a key factor in Liverpool’s malaise, or it may having absolutely nothing to do with it. The effect of grief and loss is neither predictable nor easily measurable.
All that can be said for certain is that Jota’s loss became a part of a puzzle which Liverpool appear to be struggling to solve. There were, for starters, idiosyncrasies in their recruitment – why sign both Isak and Hugo Ekitiké, fundamentally very similar players, at such great expense when a natural left winger seemed to be more of a necessity? Why was Marc Guéhi their first and last thought at centre-back, and why were negotiations left so late that a deal falling through became a possibility?
Slot is not to blame for any issues in that costly summer of recruitment – he may have some input but it is not his responsibility - nor can he be given much stick for the injury issues which have hampered the integration of Isak and Jeremie Frimpong, nor is it his fault that age seems to have started to catch up with Salah, visibly slower and diminished since the summer. But perhaps he can be blamed for failing to work out how to bring others into the fold more seamlessly.
One has to remember that Wirtz is young and living as part of a new culture for the first time, but Slot still seems to have struggled to work out how to best use one of the most gifted attacking midfielders on the planet – so often left isolated with little support when he gets onto the ball, and unable to influence proceedings as he otherwise might.
Then there’s the case of Milos Kerkez, brilliant at Bournemouth but a disappointment to date at Anfield. Slot seems to have him playing a little deeper and to have asked him to carry the ball downfield – one of his great strengths – far less often than he did at the Vitality Stadium, and one wonders whether buying a young player for £50m and then asking him to adjust his playing style was the best move.
Slot is, in other words, surely not blameless. The tactical makeup of the team, the glue that binds one player to another and ensures that they are all operating to the best of their capabilities, is his responsibility. But has that really been the problem, or are the issues more mental in their nature?
The core statistic which suggests that Slot may not be the real problem at Anfield
The 4-1 defeat to PSV on Wednesday night was, in many ways, a perfect encapsulation of everything that isn’t quite right at Anfield just now – a game that Liverpool should have won, had the opportunities to win, but which they contrived to throw away nonetheless.
What, precisely, could Slot do to about Van Dijk’s extraordinary decision to throw an arm out and give away a clear-cut penalty just a few minutes after the kick-off? Or about Cody Gakpo’s bad miss from a free header – or Ibrahima Konaté inexplicably missing the ball completely to let PSV in for their third goal?
All any manager can do is to set their players up in such a way that they maximise the chances their teams get and minimise those available to their opponents – and it’s worth noting that even including Ivan Perišić’s penalty, Liverpool racked up a higher expected goals total than their opponents. Not by much, but not by -3, either.
Liverpool have already lost nine matches this season (excluding the Community Shield defeat to Crystal Palace on penalties) but have only had a lower xG than their opponents three times – the league defeats to Palace, Brentford and Manchester City. Certainly one can wonder whether a team with Liverpool’s richness of talent should ever be beaten on xG or by the final result by a much less wealthy side like Brentford, but there’s also no doubt that Slot has set his team up to have better overall results than has been the case.
That isn’t to say that they haven’t been less impressive than last season, that the gap in any given game between them and the team they’re up against hasn’t shrunk, only that the results haven’t entirely reflected the on-field reality. Liverpool aren’t losing as a result of the broader tactical scheme, but because of individual moments, and it’s happening time and again.
There are certainly tactical faults which Slot has to correct, especially in the positioning of their attack, which leaves players too isolated, too often, and in their defensive movement – for PSV’s second goal, for instance, there’s a debate to be had as to whether Kerkez letting Guus Til get goalside of him while also playing him onside for the pass is a foul-up which should sit on the shoulders of the player or on his coaching. Ultimately, however, Slot cannot make the tackles or score presentable chances for his players, and he certainly can’t make them keep their arms down when the ball flies over their heads in the penalty area.
Such a high density of mental mistakes and preventable errors could be attributed to a psychological issue within the squad – a case of so many players struggling for form, fitness and confidence at the same time that it can’t help but drag results down with it.
The buck for a squad’s mental state stops with the head coach, of course. That’s well within Slot’s purview, even if it can’t always be within his control. Human nature means that even the best motivators will hit a brick wall sometimes.
So the question as to whether Slot should be sacked or not comes down to two points: Is there an available coach whose tactical acumen is so much greater than Slot’s that he would fix the issues which do exist quickly enough to affect the outcome of the current season, and could appointing the right coach lead to the equivalent of a kick up the squad’s collective emotional backside? Would that be enough to effect a mental reset of the team and the individual players who are clearly so far off the pace?
The answer? Perhaps. It’s in the nature of modern football that most owners see a swift change as the best solution, and few managers are given the opportunity to turn things around. On the other hand, we’ve already seen that Slot is capable of marshalling a title-winning team and of fostering a positive competitive atmosphere at Anfield. There’s no doubt that he can do it – because he has.
How much will change if Slot is simply left to his devices? Will the players who have struggled to integrate gradually get there and start showing us their best form? Will the mental mistakes gradually dissipate and Liverpool start winning games like those against PSV and Nottingham Forest, which they should have done with the opportunities they were given?
Unanswerable, of course. Teams mostly – mostly – snap back to the statistical mean at some stage, and the statistical mean has Liverpool rather further up the table than they are right now. It would be no surprise on overall performance levels if they started winning again soon, and more consistently.
Then there’s the timing question. Any chance of a second consecutive Premier League title is probably gone but they are still only three points off of the top four and remain in Champions League contention despite Wednesday’s result. The notion that their fall has reached an irretrievable point is simply false – a few wins on the bounce and everything will look rather rosier. We are not at the stage where something has to change immediately to ensure that they remain at Europe’s top table next season. Not yet.
All told, it’s almost impossible to know whether sacking Slot would actually help the team. But who is the candidate who is absolutely capable of creating a quick turnaround and snapping the team as a whole out of their waking nightmare? Who is available to Liverpool that is more likely to set things right than Slot, a man who has shown that he can win silverware with the club, if given a little more time? Perhaps the best thing to do – and maybe also the hardest thing to do – is to be patient for a little while longer. One can’t unpull a trigger after the fact, after all.
Continue Reading