Liverpool seem set to stand by Arne Slot after a disappointing season - and letting Xabi Alonso pass them by could prove to be a terrible error.
Ever since Real Madrid sacked Xabi Alonso in January, there was a single widespread assumption made about the next step he would take in his managerial career: That if Liverpool decided to move on from Arne Slot at the end of the season, Alonso would be the first person they called. They may as well now delete his number from their phonebook.
Xabi Alonso during his spell at Real Madrid.placeholder image
Xabi Alonso during his spell at Real Madrid. | Getty Images
Alonso has now agreed a four-year deal to succeed Liam Rosenior as Chelsea’s head coach, taking him off the managerial market and robbing Liverpool of the chance to appoint a former player with an impressive track record as a coach in place of Slot. The fact that he signed up for the job at Stamford Bridge without any apparent intervention from Liverpool is perhaps the strongest signal yet that they plan to stand by Slot – so will that prove to be a sensible call, or a mistake that owners FSG come to regret?
Why standing by Arne Slot could be a major mistake
On the one hand, there’s something rather refreshing about the thought of one of England’s biggest teams giving their manager grace after a single bad season. Patience has become a painfully rare virtue at the top level of football. On the other hand, its application isn’t automatically the right move.
It may feel like rather longer now, but it’s only been a single year since Slot won the Premier League title. It’s an achievement which can be used to justify giving the Dutchman some grace. The trouble is that Liverpool have fallen quite a long way since that fine first season – and there is a sense of a manager who has lost the thread.
Slot’s first-season success was founded on a very simple and sensible idea: That Liverpool weren’t broken, so he didn’t need to fix them. He had much the same squad that Jürgen Klopp had before him, and he used the same system and set-up. Slot inherited a winning template, recognised as much, and was smart enough to keep everything intact. It worked.
Continuation became impossible this summer, however. FSG opened their chequebook and signed a strong of highly expensive new players whose inclusion required a rebuild of sorts – while the continued decline of some of the more experienced players in the squad, most notably Mohamed Salah, left Slot with an uphill battle. His task was to integrate a string of new faces and to find tactical solutions to newfound weaknesses. He failed.
Slot certainly didn’t have luck on his side. Injuries have made it all but impossible for him to figure out the best way to use Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitiké together, while Salah’s decline – although perhaps not completely unforeseeable given his form at the end of the 2024/25 season – robbed Liverpool of a huge slice of their creativity and attacking impetus. But while he may have been unfortunate, Slot also failed to find convincing answers.
He has done a poor job of working players like Florian Wirtz, Miloš Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong into the team, seemingly failing to play any of them to their strengths. Wirtz, so potent working the channels for Bayer Leverkusen, has been pinned into a more traditional number 10 role. Kerkez, so dynamic going forward for Bournemouth, appears to have been asked to dribble downfield and hit the byline less frequently. Slot has asked his players to go against type, with underwhelming results.
None of that inherently means that Slot can’t work it all out and make adjustments and improvements over the summer, but that will be rather more challenging if he doesn’t have the faith of the dressing room – and if Salah’s attitude towards his coach is any guide, that dressing room is not entirely convinced by Slot’s methods.
Salah was briefly dropped from the first team after openly criticising the Liverpool manager in December and this weekend the Egyptian took another parting shot ahead of his final match for the club, telling the press that the team was “crumbling” and demanding a return to the “heavy metal football” of Klopp.
Perhaps that’s just an indication of a single player’s frustration, but it’s hard not to worry that it hints at a deeper malaise amongst the squad – and that becomes a more tangible possibility still given the visible lack of morale on the field and the evident drop-off endured by other players who don’t have an age for excuse for their struggles.
Slot hasn’t just found it difficult to find a system which suits his new recruits and which mitigates the limitations of players like Salah, but has also been on the sidelines as players like Alexis Mac Allister, Cody Gakpo and Ibrahima Konaté get themselves stuck in deeper and deeper ruts as the season has worn on.
Nor can Liverpool’s dire recent form – just three wins in their last 10 matches – be explained solely by the decline of specific players. Their performance against Aston Villa, in particular, was strategically incoherent: The defensive line was almost permanently askew, creating astonishing amounts of space both in behind and out wide, while there was no evident plan for progressing from midfield into the final third. It was a mess, and an Aston Villa side who hadn’t been at their best for weeks routed Liverpool with ease.
Nothing about that performance suggested a manager who was on the verge of turning things around, and nothing in the players’ demeanour suggests that he has their full and unreserved backing. Slot won a league title by changing nothing – and now that he has tried to make changes, none of them appear to have worked. Perhaps FSG will be proven right in standing by their man next season, but it’s hard to see where the necessary upswing will start from.
Why Xabi Alonso might have been just what Liverpool needed to thrive
Given the context, it’s surprising that Liverpool seem to have been so content to let Xabi Alonso pass them by. They may not have wanted to court him, even in private, while Slot was still in place, but it’s likely that could at least have given him a nudge to indicate that he shouldn’t rush into an agreement with Chelsea were he keen on taking the post at Anfield.
It’s not just that Alonso was a former player who would have the fans onside instantaneously, nor that he has worked with both Wirtz and Frimpong and brought the very best out of them – it’s also that he’s a shrewd, proven tactician who worked minor miracles at Leverkusen. Chelsea have landed one of the best available coaches in Europe.
His tenure at Real Madrid was disappointing, admittedly, but there were strong suggestions even at the time that his downfall was an ego-laden squad which refused to give their best because they didn’t like the tactics. Given that Real have since descended into abject chaos, with fist fights breaking out in the dressing room, it doesn’t look like Alonso was really at fault for that particular letdown.
Slot can offer some excuses too, some of them quite plausible involving Salah and the club’s somewhat scattered recruitment strategy. But he hasn’t hit the heights that Alonso has even in winning last season’s title, while his lows this season are rather lower than those endured by Alonso’s Real Madrid.
Alonso’s preferred tactics seem custom-made for Liverpool’s squad, too: The open positional game, the dynamic pivot in midfield, and particularly the exceptionally incisive use of aggressive wing-backs to pull opponents apart in the final third. Alonso at Anfield would not have been a square peg in a round hole. He would probably have ticked just about every conceivable box.
If Slot has indeed lost the dressing room, then it’s very hard to make a coherent argument for keeping him around, especially when a seemingly ideal candidate was on the market. That opportunity has now passed however, and Liverpool are left hoping that this season as an aberration from which Slot can successfully move on. That won’t be easy to do in the slightest.
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