Proof Of Concept

Well, I’ve been convinced. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m firmly convinced. With the benefit of several very telling games, I am now of the opinion that Arne Slot can no longer be Liverpool’s head coach. By the end of this season, he needs to be out of that role.

Arne Slot needs to be Liverpool’s manager.

READ MORE: The People Vs. Arne Slot by Jack Champagne
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“Proof of concept” is frequently deployed as a rhetorical shield against criticism in the business and tech world. Any idea that, when implemented, is gimmicky, useless, inefficient, or silly can simply be called a proof of concept. No, it’s not the idea that’s bad; the implementation just needs some tweaks. The idea looks bad because you haven’t envisioned what’s possible. Anything that looks stupid has simply proven what is theoretically possible. Never mind that these projects never get around to the “proof” part. But I think the past couple of months have been a decisive proof of concept for Liverpool. They have effectively proven both that Arne Slot is the right man to lead Liverpool. They’ve also proved that the current structure of the club is a handicap for him.

FSG’s Influence, For Better And Worse

I’ve never been an FSG-outer, but I’ve definitely been on the critical side of positive. The likes of Hicks and Gillett and the Glazers have inculcated me with a hefty prejudice against American owners. My knee-jerk reaction is to regard them as shameless profiteers. It’s simplistic to say they don’t understand or care to understand the game and its culture. Even in spite of their known competence, FSG had a lot to do to earn my trust.

They stumbled on that matter quite a bit out of the gate. Unlike the average #FSGOut man, my critiques have always been specific and, well, sane. My major beefs with FSG come from when they try to commodify the club’s identity or to exert inordinate control over the club’s operations. They did a pretty good job of winning me over during the Klopp era. But their decision to name Arne Slot as Liverpool’s first-ever head coach antagonized me immediately.

Defenders of the decision pointed out that Arsenal had experimented with this structure to some success. But, with all due respect, Liverpool should not aspire to be Arsenal. Or Manchester City. Or Real Madrid. The notion that Liverpool should ever degenerate into becoming a generic, replaceable big-money club is horrifying to me. FSG, to their credit, has seemingly learned its lesson after many missteps. But I always believed that the head coach experiment was a step backwards. Thanks to the lack of transfer business before last season, the model did not have much opportunity to show its flaws. But the cracks were already beginning to show.

Will They, Won’t They?

The way that the contract saga was handled last season was embarrassing. There was no transparency with fans. Slot was constantly in the hot seat despite having little to do with the outcomes. Trent Alexander-Arnold’s contract was prioritized, despite having clearly made his decision to chase glory at Real Madrid before the season even started. Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah were left in the lurch. The latter apparently had no idea what was happening and needed to plead his case with the media. This was an obvious backroom-style decision.

Trent is younger, flashier, and more marketable. By the numbers, it’s a better return on investment. But the notion of losing the team’s captain, an era-defining defender who has had a transformative effect on Liverpool’s solidity from day one, should have been unconscionable, especially for free.

Then there was Mohamed Salah, who was doing his damnedest to prove that he was not finished at Liverpool. For someone who has done so much for the club and was putting up record numbers in that season, to have no clarity on his future is unacceptable. It’s not just disrespectful, it’s bad business. I’ve said before that I believed it was a sign that the ownership had lost perspective. I have only increased in that belief since.

Mo Saga, Mo Saga

Fast forward to the Mohamed Salah saga of today. It’s no longer buzzworthy, so the usual suspects have lost interest. But there was a clear hunger to make the supposed schism between Salah and Slot the story of the season. Slot was pestered about it despite making it clear that he would handle it with Mo and only Mo. Media members convinced Slot was on his way out were eager to take Salah’s “side” in the phantom war. But for his part, Slot navigated his first major crisis at Liverpool with aplomb. He hashed out what he needed to hash out with Salah behind closed doors, refusing to sensationalize. With Salah out of the squad, Gakpo and Frimpong injured, and Chiesa sick, Slot went to Inter with no wingers.

And so, he lines up a formation that doesn’t need them, piloting a 4-4-2 diamond to a classic night of European football. We hoped this would put the kibosh on complaints about his supposed tactical inflexibility. Subsequently, we went to Brighton with a more customary formation, and Slot did not hesitate to sub him in at the first opportunity. Salah was sent off with cheers and his first goal contribution in ages before he went off to Africa. The message was clear as day. Slot is perfectly capable of carrying on without Mohamed Salah, but Slot does not want to carry on without Mohamed Salah if he can help it.

AMERICAN SCOUSER TAKES ANFIELD

Slot has persisted with Salah in his team lineups, even despite fan disappointment, because he is a stubborn believer in Salah’s excellence. I’ve said previously that, despite disappointment with how Mo handled the situation, I believed that he was right to some extent to believe that he was “thrown under the bus”. It’s time to take the pin out of that thought. I believe that the club’s owners resent that they signed Salah at the end of last season. Their ideal situation was signing Trent for an obscene amount of money and giving Salah his walking papers. I believe that Salah’s run of bad form has allowed them the excuse they needed to make their obvious disinterest in Salah a company policy.

Knowing that it was primarily Richard Hughes’ decision to leave Salah behind when the team went to Italy, I believe that it was his intervention that made Slot finally drop Salah from the starting lineup. And clearly, none of this was effectively communicated to Salah, which is why he took to the media like the last time this happened. I still believe this was the wrong decision, in no small part because the timing and choice of words were disruptive, selfish, and inappropriate. But I believe his motivations were understandable. Salah has never been a Ronaldo; he’s not one to throw a tantrum because the world doesn’t revolve around him. His actions were the result of clear frustration, and the situation was entirely avoidable. I do not think Slot is to blame, even though it was left to him to fix the mess.

The Newer Models

Individual performances have finally been improving, and it has paid dividends as our form has stabilized. I can’t say that we’re on the way up, as we still drop too many points for my liking, but things are nowhere near as dire as we were. Ekitike has finally grown into the role of the striker we’ve been craving for years. Wirtz has blossomed into exactly the player that he was expected to be, consistently churning out artful performances. Kerkez has come into his own, still not consistent enough when it counts, but no longer the dead weight he was at the start of the season. Even Isak started to find his stride before horrible, horrible fate intervened. Our midfield has seemingly found its feet as well. But this isn’t enough. It hasn’t been enough.

But at the very least, our problems are specific and identifiable now. We’ve been creating chances, but most of them haven’t been very good. Our attackers aren’t doing enough out of possession, which makes our existing vulnerabilities in defense even worse. We play too negatively when we’re ahead, which has often led to us losing that lead in the final stages of the game. Our defending on set pieces is horrible; there are teams in the Championship that defend corners better than we do. There are two reasons I think these problems are occurring the way they are.

A lightbulb went off in my head when we played Manchester City. The match looked almost exactly like our match last season did, only with the roles reversed. I was trying to think about what has changed at Manchester City, and then I remembered: Pep. Lijnders, not Guardiola. Despite what some might say, Pep was enormously influential on our most successful seasons here.

LESS IS MO

I was extremely antagonized by his move to City, in part because of the implied betrayal, but partly because I knew how much better his presence was going to make City. And boy did it show. Despite the Boot Room being a key piece of Liverpool lore, people often underestimate the power of a good staff. Slot does not have the same team he did last season, and the replacements were not chosen by him.

The same is largely true of the players. I admire all of the players we brought in. The fact that we’re this far into the season and they still can’t play cohesively is concerning. And as their individual performances improve, it increasingly appears to be the case that this season’s transfer policy was somewhat haphazard. Alexis Mac Allister has recently decried the volume of change. While the criticism is simplistic, I see where he’s coming from. Some change was unavoidable. Trent, Lucho, and Darwin wanted out, and there was nothing to be gained by forcing them to stay. Diogo’s death was sudden, unexpected, and deeply tragic. We were faced with the unenviable task of both reconstructing our offense and future-proofing against our aging stars. It’s not clear that we did so effectively.

I don’t think we bought any flops; everyone we brought in is extremely talented. I’m not convinced that they were chosen with their compatibility in mind, either with each other or Slot’s preferred playing style. And it shows anytime we get them to play together. Alexander Isak is the real wild card. Isak would have arguably fit anywhere he moved because he’s simply that good.

All The Charms Exhausted

Having him in Liverpool red is unquestionably an exciting prospect. But, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m dubious about whether it was smart money. Obviously, Isak’s strike is not something anyone could have anticipated, and I doubt we’ll ever have full clarity about what exactly Newcastle did to make Isak force a move the way he did. But the knock-on effect is that we got Isak sooner than we needed, and without full fitness. Slot has, for obvious reasons, been eager to get Isak up to speed, but this task would have been significantly easier if we had waited until this summer to sign him. Now he’s got more than a “knock.”

As it stands, we have a record signing for whom we have to wait an entire season to get the benefit of his astonishing attacking prowess. Meanwhile, we’re dealing with a squad with almost no depth where we need it, that has been further depleted by horrendously bad luck. And, from the sound of things, our January budget is going to be fairly light because of how much we spent, even though we desperately need to refresh our lineup. I blame this on a transfer strategy that over-relied on raw numbers, expecting that you could just identify a really good player, leverage our identity as champions, and slot them into a squad for instant results. The result is a squad that, individually, is world-class, but cannot play effectively as a team.

A CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Isak, despite being one of the greatest strikers in the world, was always going to have more difficulty adjusting to an attack built around Mo Salah than Ekitke would. In a side that relies on positional discipline over attacking intensity is going to be hard on Kerkez. These are problems that a coach could identify, but an analyst will miss if they’re starstruck by the numbers. The result is inevitable: we spent too much money and are worse off for it.

But they haven’t all been horror stories. Wirtz, despite having difficulty adjusting to the physicality of the Premier League, has been transformed under Slot into a player who can effectively fight for the time and space he would be naturally given in the Bundesliga. Ekitike has been sharpened by Slot into a player who has finally earned his moniker of Bobby Firmino 2.0. Despite what the naysayers have said, Slot has done well with straitened circumstances. He’s obviously struggling with his lack of alternatives, but his subs show that he’s still a savvy reader of the game. Klopp didn’t always get it right, but his ability to act as a countervailing force against excessively data and market-driven moves was clearly much needed. That countervailing power is important to the health of any recruitment strategy. Not having it has wreaked a lot of havoc.

SHOP THE AMERICAN SCOUSER COLLECTION TODAY

I’ve always been a fan of Bill Shankly’s dictum of the Holy Trinity: the players, the manager, and the fans. Nowadays, owners can’t be excluded in the same way that Shankly claimed; nowadays, the best owners have to do more than just sign paychecks. But a well-administered club has to strike a balance between owners as absentee landlords and owners as excessive meddlers.

Manchester United and Nottingham Forest, respectively, are fine object lessons in each extreme. FSG are the best owners in the league by a wide margin, even considering how low that bar is. But they need to loosen the reins if they want Liverpool to be champions again. Slot has more than proven himself, both by winning the league and the way he’s handled the problems that FSG have handed him. It’s time to trust him enough to regard him as an equal partner. If he’s going to constantly answer for club decisions, it’s high time he has a bigger role in making those decisions himself.