Liverpool, Actually

Liverpool's decision to jettison Arne Slot marks the return of their search to replace the manager who got away.

If the secret of great comedy is indeed timing, then Liverpool did still manage to be the funniest team in the Premier League on Saturday regardless of goings-on in Budapest later in the evening. They have been connected with Xabi Alonso for years. Why on earth they they make the announcement that they were getting rid of Arne Slot at this time? Couldn’t they have done this a few weeks earlier? Didn’t they know sooner?

*dramatic, swelling music*

If Liverpool have resembled a comedy lately, they’ve most closely resembled a romantic comedy. He was a player from one of their Champions League-winning teams who had demonstrated his potential aptitude at coaching elsewhere. They were the football club who were struggling with the departure of a club-defining manager. He had been out of work since January. Things weren’t working out between them and their club-defining coach’s replacement. Everything was aligning for the manager and the club he was destined to be with.

Except Norah Ephron wasn’t writing the ending to this script. Chelsea, in the manner of Ken Bates in that photograph in which he actually did look like a vampire, swooped in and gobbled Xabi up for the next either eight months or four years (we’ll see how that plays out), only for Liverpool to confirm exactly 14 days later that Arne Slot had been sacked.

Liverpool have been a frayed around the edges for months, and that’s been visible from outer space. It’s been clear for a long time that the supporters had lost their belief in him. It looked more than once as though the players had. This could have been figured out before the last weekend in May.

The early favourite to replace Slot is Andoni Iraola, though nothing’s been confirmed. Iraola could be a good fit. He’s the sort of manager who you can easily see being able to handle the PR side of being a the job - a club like Liverpool needs a strong representative - and his expansive, progressive style of football would go down well with supporters, so long as it works.

This is where the question marks over Iraola comes to a rest. A coach can be a good one at a smaller, more family-like club. They can have a personality which works at one club but not at another. And Iraola has not coached at a level at which the scrutiny has been as intense as it would be at Liverpool.

He played at a high level - more than 500 games for Athletic Bilbao should speak for itself - but managing at such a level is a different matter. This was no small part of the reason why Xabi Alonso was considered such a good fit for the position. He’d spent time at Liverpool, and had even coached - albeit unsuccessfully - in the hothouse that is the Bernabeu. But that ship had already sailed by the time they got round to making their choice..

The biggest question concerning Arne Slot’s two seasons at Anfield is whether he ever really stood a chance. He won the Premier League at a canter in 2024-25, but this was almost universally attributed to the team still running on Jurgen fumes. He had to lead his team through the shockingly painful death of a beloved player in the summer.

Timing also worked against him. One of the decisions made in the transfer market that summer was questionable enough to start with, given what they needed, but the need to then drop Alexander Isak into a team grieving such a terrible loss just put another iron in the works. It has to be said that Slot dealt with the loss of Diogo Jota as well as could have been expected.

But the results from this season speak for themselves. In the league, they were 24 points short of their tally from the season before, by far the biggest of any Premier League club. They were knocked out of the League Cup at home by Crystal Palace. They were demolished in the FA Cup by Manchester City in April, and then casually brushed aside by PSG in the Champions League four days later.

And there may well be a feeling that 2025-26 was something of a wasted opportunity. Arsenal’s winning tally of 85 point’s was one higher than Liverpool’s a year earlier, but these two were the lowest title-winning totals since Leicester City in 2016. Had Liverpool managed a fairly modest two or three point improvement on last season rather than 24 points fewer, they would have retained their Premier League title.

Similarly, Manchester City’s 78 points was higher than they managed a year earlier, but was otherwise their joint-lowest points total since 2016. Manchester United finished third on 71, but only won twenty of their 48 matches. Both of these clubs finished on points totals that a Liverpool with their shit together could have overcome, but they didn’t. Chaos Chelsea reached an FA Cup final. There were opportunities, and Liverpool may not be the only Premier League club feeling that, this summer.

Nobody wants to be the manager to have to follow a legend, as the successors to Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson will attest. It’s the sort of thought most likely to keep Enzo Maresca awake at night, as he plots out how he can possibly follow Pep Guardiola at The Etihad Stadium. The pressure on Arne Slot’s successor will be slightly lower because Arne Slot isn’t Jurgen Klopp, but this won’t alter the expectation levels at Anfield.

Twenty times the champions of England and six times the champions of Europe, Liverpool are a certified Megaclub, and they expect to be either there or thereabouts when it comes to handing out end of season gongs. Arne Slot found to his cost that transitional seasons aren’t going to come at a club like this, and especially not for a manager who wins the league at the end of his first season in charge. Whoever the next manager of Liverpool turns out to be will have to carry this weight upon their shoulders, and that’s as a much a part of the job as team selection or tactical tweaks.

But who knows? Perhaps Xabi will turn up outside Anfield with a bunch of flowers and a pile of cards with creepy messages written on them in marker pen before the start of next season. Maybe he and John Henry will bump into each other at two minutes to midnight at the top of the City Radio Tower, glasses of champagne in hand, and there’ll be a pregnant pause before a Nat King Cole song fades in. Maybe they’ll end up together on a park bench, Xabi’s head in John’s lap while they both read a book, some day.

The problem Liverpool face is that to find that prince, you may have to kiss a lot of frogs. Finding your ideal match isn’t easy. That’s why so many clubs struggle so much with it. It always felt as though Arne Slot was a compromise. There’s no doubting his qualities in terms of coaching, but that really is only part of the job at a club like this.

All they can do is keep kissing them and hope that one of them grows into the candidate they wanted all along. Just like Jurgen, only probably nothing like him. As others have found before them, and they themselves have found over the last couple of years, achieving that sought-after happy ending can be difficult, regardless of everything you’ve got going in your favour. At least, they may choose to reflect, it spares you having to listen to Westlife or Wet Wet Wet as the closing titles roll.