On Monday, [Liverpool](https://liverpooloffside.sbnation.com/) played their penultimate game of the 2024-25 season. Having won the Premier League with a month to spare, the game didn’t really matter—and the players and manager spent much of the previous week on holiday as if to highlight that.
Still, it would have been nice to win it. It’s always nicer to win it. And at times the Reds played well enough to do just that. In the end, though, Brighton played like a side that still had something to play for, and that was the difference in an eventual 3-2 defeat.
“I can’t say we’re very sad, but of course we didn’t come here to lose,” reflected Dominik Szoboszlai as he tried to put the result into perspective. “We wanted to win and I think we showed in the first probably 70 minutes that we wanted to get the three points.
“But at the end we faced a really tough Brighton team. To be honest they deserved to win more because at the end they worked harder than us, they scored more goals than us, and it looks like they wanted more—but as I said before, we didn’t come here to lose.”
Szoboszlai and his fellow title winning Reds have one more game to play before they head off on vacation for real, and it could be an odd one given their opponents are a Crystal Palace side that just won the first major trophy in the 164 year history of the club.
Liverpool’s focus the past month has been on rest and recovery—with a good dose of celebration mixed in—but one might expect Palace to be leaning even harder into the celebration side of the equation over the week and ahead of Sunday’s Anfield finale.
“This week on Sunday we’re going to give everything also because it’s the last home game of the season,” Szoboszlai said of the final game of the 2024-25 season. “I think that the fans and everybody deserves that they see us play like how we really want to play.”