The People Vs. Arne Slot
I won’t mince words, this sucks. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been this miserable supporting Liverpool. The results week after week are bad enough on their own, but the coverage just piles on suffering. The national media have taken a savage glee in celebrating Liverpool’s stumble, as if divine punishment for Liverpool’s hubris. The internal dissent is much harder to take. The internet age has made negativity a currency, and far too many blogs, pages, posters, and even the club’s own journalists are far too willing to spend that currency. Arne Slot has been the target of most of the invective, because of course he has been.
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The Trial Begins
Criticizing the head coach is the low-hanging fruit of a very ripe orchard. News outlets have been treating his sacking as an inevitability, a matter of when rather than if. Fan media have been insistent that Slot’s firing is essential to prevent the team’s further slide. I’m more than willing to call for a manager’s removal if it’s merited. Hell, I’d been doing it at least once a year since Rafa Benitez was fired. Indeed, Slot has to bear some of the blame for Liverpool’s massively inconsistent form, because he’s the guy in charge. But that’s an entirely different claim than to suggest that booting him out will suddenly put things right.
Often, a manager deserves to be pelted with stones. Arne Slot does not. Much of what is wrong with Liverpool is not down to him, much of it is outside of his control, and a lot of it is the result of bad luck. Whether or not Slot can fix this in time to at least be competitive for top honors this season is an open question. But replacing him now will not make things better.
Who Would Be Next?
We can start with the obvious problem: there’s simply no replacing Arne Slot right now. I’m going to harp on this again, because it needs to be said. There are two league-winning managers currently working in the Premier League. One of them is Arne Slot. That might change this season if Mikel Arteta can get over his recurring tendency to choke at the last minute, but that’s reality as it stands today. Winning the Premier League now is tougher than it ever has been in the history of the league. Arne Slot proved himself by taking a team that barely crawled to third place and making them into champions. If you can find a replacement for Slot with a similar accomplishment, maybe we can talk. But the names that are being touted as replacements are, to be frank, very silly.
People have seized upon an idle comment by Jurgen Klopp that he might contemplate a return to Liverpool in a hypothetical future as a sign that he’s going to take the reins again. Never mind the fact that Klopp has made it clear that he has no intention of returning to coaching anytime soon. More to the point, Jurgen Klopp himself doesn’t think he’s the man for the job. That’s why he resigned two years ago. If Klopp wanted to be managing Liverpool, he would still be managing Liverpool.
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Steven Gerrard has emerged as a sort of would-be savior figure as well. Stevie G is a legend, and I’ve honestly hoped he’d come back to Liverpool for some time now. I’d have liked to see him at Liverpool in some capacity after leaving Aston Villa. He was my top choice for a replacement for John Heitinga when he left. That said, he’s not the man for the top job, especially in preference to Arne Slot. Gerrard’s most recent outing is a disastrous run at Al-Ettifaq, in comparison to Slot, who, again, won the Premier League. I want Gerrard back at Liverpool, but in a position where he can actually benefit the club. Recruiting him to “save the club,” as it were, is setting both him and the team up for failure.
Xabi Alonso, who was once in the running for the job, has been suggested. Oliver Glasner of Crystal Palace is a candidate as well. Both are great managers, but neither is a real replacement for Arne Slot. Oliver Glasner has a completely different tactical system, and hopefully the example of Amorim’s United will illustrate why shifting gears like that in the midst of a slump is a terrible idea. The Xabi alternative seems to be predicated on the notion that he’s likely to lose his job at Madrid, which is certainly a funny idea, but not a sensible way to run a football club. The club has backed Slot because he is, now and in the foreseeable future, the best man for the job.
Statement Of Charges
Player selection has been perhaps the most contentious point this season. Slot can’t win for losing in this arena, always seemingly making the wrong choice. No one can agree what our best midfield looks like week-to-week. Sometimes it includes Alexis Mac Allister, sometimes it includes Curtis Jones, sometimes it includes Florian Wirtz. And who should be attacking? Sometimes Ekitike and Isak together, sometimes Isak with Chiesa, sometimes Ekitike and Wirtz. Going by the aggregate data, the only thing that Slot could do to please fans is field a team of 9 Dominik Szobozlais, with Alisson in goal and Chiesa on the left wing. Until such time as cloning technology makes some advancements, Slot has to choose his team the old-fashioned way. And fortune has not been kind to him in this regard.
Injuries have completely wrecked his plans for the season. Any hopes of Jeremie Frimpong acting as a Trent replacement have been scuppered by his lack of availability. Bradley was coming into his own in that position, but then he too was sidelined. We lost Wirtz and Ekitke for a while, both intended to be high-impact signings. The loss of Leoni and the collapse of Guehi’s signing mean we have virtually no squad depth at the position of center back.
Then there’s Alexander Isak, who is struggling to win back the fitness he lost fighting with Newcastle over his transfer. This is an unenviable position to be in when choosing a matchday squad. Anything will look like an error if the deck is stacked against you to this extent. The media narrative makes this worse by interpreting every squad choice as a personal insult.
THE CURIOUS CULT OF CHIESA
Supposedly, Slot’s refusal to start Chiesa despite good performances as a sub is mistreatment. But the reason for that seems to be indicated by Chiesa himself, who has demurred on two opportunities to join Italy’s squad due to a lack of fitness. Slot doesn’t feel that Chiesa is fit to play a full 90 minutes in the league, and neither, it appears, does Chiesa. Chiesa’s reputation for fragility is also likely very spooky for a coach whose season has already been wrecked beyond belief by injuries.
More to the point, starting Chiesa requires dropping someone, likely to be Ekitike or Gakpo, our two top attackers for the season. Chiesa’s had some magnificent moments, but he’s still got stiff competition for a starting position.
Slot is also sticking with Kerkez at left back, despite being outperformed by Andy Robertson almost every game. This is another unavoidable situation. Kerkez needs to get up to speed, and the only way that’s going to happen is if he gets minutes. Running Robbo ragged and leaving Kerkez on the bench is not going to solve our problems on the left. We invested in Kerkez for a reason, and that means we have to tolerate some less-than-stellar performances in the expectation that he’ll come through. We’ve already seen this with Wirtz, despite the endless noise that he’s a flop.
Bedding in the new signings on top of the blown pre-season, lingering grief around the fallen Diogo Jota, a record signing without fitness, and almost completely reconstructing the team’s offense means that the growing pains are probably going to last an entire season, if not more. It sucks, but changing the manager would only make them worse.
The Star Witness
But now we come to Mo Salah. But for the post-Leeds events of Sunday, this section would have been written in an entirely different tone. I’ve been firmly pro-Salah, in defiance of those who feel that he’s aged past his relevance. I still don’t think he’s fallen off a cliff. He’s a player who had a record season and carried us to victory last year, and he’s still in there somewhere. I think that many of his problems on the pitch are psychological, not physical. Like most returning players, he’s struggling with the loss of Jota, Darwin, and Diaz. I think he doesn’t gel with the new signings, and it’s frustrating him and messing up his game.
When you get him back in Egypt, you see that old Salah again. And everyone is underperforming. Even accounting for how much worse he’s doing, Salah’s still a top goal scorer this season. But all that being said, he’s still been poor. And this is what makes his outburst on Sunday all the more outrageous. Slot has started an underperforming Salah well past the point where fans were urging him to drop the Egyptian King, insisting on respect for Salah’s consistency.
LESS IS MO
But Slot finally dropped him against Sunderland and again against Leeds. This was clearly not a magic bullet, considering that we still only came away with two points from those games. But it’s hard to say the team was harmed by Salah’s absence. I can’t say for sure what is going on behind the scenes, and I suspect that Salah is right to feel that he’s being scapegoated by the club hierarchy.
But his prima donna behavior at Elland Road was shocking. I love Mo, I respect what he’s done for the club, and he’s easily one of the best Premier League players who has ever lived. But if he wants to be treated like he’s irreplaceable, he needs to play like he’s irreplaceable. A player setting himself above the club in that way, even one as great as Mohamed Salah, is unacceptable. Inevitably, Salah is being put against Slot in a sort of Supporter Civil War, with the Egyptian being utilized as a symbol that Slot has “lost the dressing room.”
If Slot has lost the dressing room for making sensible squad selection choices, then the dressing room was already lost. You can’t make a team of champions out of players who are only out for themselves. If Salah wants to torch his legacy over not being started when he’s not at his best, he’s free to do so. But that’s not Arne Slot’s fault for not wanting to sacrifice a season to assuage Salah’s ego. If it’s a question of Slot or Mo, then Slot is the obvious answer.
Proper Placement
Beyond the question of who is playing, I keep seeing Slot’s “tactics” come under fire. The words “dull” and “ineffective” get bandied about without much meaning. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people criticizing Slot’s tactics cannot tell you specifically what is wrong with them. Occasionally, you’ll get the faux-intellectual complaints that he’s using the wrong formation or having players “out of position”, the kind you get from playing Football Manager 2024 a little too much. Real coaching is nothing like playing a tactics simulator. Shape and position matter, but they don’t win football games. Positions correspond to a set of skills, not jobs in an ant colony. Team tactics can’t fix the underlying problem, which is that, in aggregate, individual performances have not been up to standard.
Slot has not meaningfully changed his tactics; this is the same system that won the Premier League last season. Execution is key when the whistle blows. And execution is where Liverpool has been sorely lacking this season. The massive disconnect between what Liverpool is theoretically capable of and the actual scorelines is the direct result of players not living up to their potential. Very few players are playing up to the standard set by last season. Mohamed Salah is usually pointed to since his decline has been the steepest, but he’s hardly the only offender.
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Ryan Gravenberch, the success story of last season, has also fallen off. Ibrahima Konate has been atrocious; stupidly blowing a 2-goal lead at Elland Road is only the latest in a string of catastrophic defensive errors. Slot’s tendency to go all out on offense when chasing the game, a key element of his footballing philosophy, would not backfire quite so often if Konate could be trusted to defend properly. Given how stacked our team is, we should be outscoring our defensive weaknesses, but we’re pretty light up front as well. Cody Gakpo has been a leader in taking and creating chances, but his accuracy has failed him at critical moments. Alexis Mac Allister has been remarkably inconsistent, sometimes world-beating, sometimes anonymous. Ekitike has looked like he was sleepwalking for the games leading up to his injury, though he seems to have finally woken up.
Then we finally circle back to Isak. The lanky Swede seems almost afraid of the ball when he’s on the pitch, making it very hard to justify giving him the minutes he needs to get back to full fitness. If improving this was as simple as shifting to a 4-4-2 or playing one vs three strikers, I imagine it would have been done by now. The inconsistency of our players has a domino effect that makes everything look more difficult than it actually is. The team can’t play to its potential unless everyone is doing their best, and that hasn’t happened in months. Slot’s job is to sort this out, but that’s going to take a lot more than moving shapes around on a tactics board.
Friendly Fire
Jamie Carragher correctly pointed out that Slot differs from Jurgen Klopp mainly in not commanding the same level of unconditional support. This, I think, is key to understanding why many fans have turned on him so completely. It’s not down to his tactics or his skills, but his personality. He doesn’t have Klopp’s ability to rally the fans in quite the same way. He can’t sell Liverpool FC in quite the same way. But I think philosophically we have to consider what Slot’s hiring was meant to accomplish.
FSG hired Slot and then shattered spending records in his second season as part of a long-term project. Slot wasn’t just some guy; he was deemed to be the man to build on what Jurgen Klopp started. This is what makes Liverpool different. United will hire a big-name manager with no rhyme or reason, and then wonder why they’re struggling every season. City’s only plan for the future is to hope Pep Guardiola never retires. Arsenal’s only post-Wenger ambition is to copy City and hope it actually works this year. Liverpool is rebuilding a legacy, building for continuity. Abandoning that project midway through its second season would be an indication that it was never actually anything more than a gimmick. It’s not just a rebuke of Arne Slot’s accomplishments, but of Jurgen Klopp’s as well.
THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN KLOPP & SLOT
Klopp was meant to be more than just a successful coach. He was meant to be the start of a new era at Liverpool, a new Shankly. Klopp backed Slot to be his Bob Paisley. Paisley also didn’t have Shankly’s charisma, but he didn’t need it because he was winning all the time. But Slot hasn’t lost yet. No one benefits from acting like he does except click merchants. We’re not so far gone that the season is unsalvageable.
Look at Aston Villa. Their start to the season was atrocious. Week 4, they were in the relegation zone. Last month, they were right where we are now. Today, they’re three points off of an Arsenal that just couldn’t resist the bottle. Fighting back from conceding two goals at Leeds, even if we couldn’t quite keep all three points, shows that a winning team is in there somewhere. Our season isn’t over yet.
Closing Argument
Supporting a team that disappoints you every week is hard. It’s physically painful at times. Supporting a manager who can’t seem to sort out these performances is brutal. Perspective helps in troubled times. The online invective against Slot is not cathartic. This isn’t disappointed fans venting their frustrations; it’s an angry mob. I’ve seen this before. People were saying the same things about Klopp in his second season in charge. When Rafa Benitez was seen to be underperforming, people seized upon anything to insult: his physical appearance, his nationality, his clothing.
I don’t believe supporting a team requires blind faith, but it does require not letting people like this have the final say. If pundits and journos want to make their bread trashing Slot, let them have their blood money. We, as supporters, should be better than that. Arne Slot gave us a magnificent gift last season, and I’m not soon to forget it. Until such time as I’m given a better reason than a bad run of games, I’m supporting Liverpool. I’m supporting Arne Slot.
The defense rests.