Klopp Is The Best – But Arne Slot Can Take Next Step

Fresh energy, fresh ideas, fresh direction

Published 26th April 2024

To have expected miracles from an exhausted manager, overhauling the team and facing 6-12 injuries per game since late 2023 (with games starting barely after the last one ends), against a financially doping rival not yet tried for past crimes, and with the officials bottling decisions that cost key points, was always asking too much.

Jürgen Klopp realised last autumn that he was done. Maybe he felt cooked six months earlier, but helped the team revive, then drove the rebuild. Since he lost his rag with the officials a year ago, they’ve only hammered his team harder.

And yet he leaves the club all but in the expanded, more lucrative Champions League next season; the average age much lower, the ceiling much higher.

The insane PGMOL (and how few different refs the Reds get, aside from their awfulness), the lack of fairness in the league overall in terms of timely punishments for financial cheats, the constant 12:30 kickoffs that are given to Liverpool and not others, and all the other impediments to fairness, must have played his part.

And nine years is a long time. A very long time.

I started work on my second novel in 2015. I finished and have just released it, in 2024.

I visited Iceland for research in April 2015, albeit was not well enough to carry out all that I planned, spending the middle three days of the week stuck in a hotel room, albeit one overlooking the sea in Vík, listening to Sufjan Stevens singing beautifully about how we’re all going to die.

Also contains Icelandic skies.

In the days before and after, Liverpool fans (some were subscribers on TTT) drove me around part of the island, and then on the Saturday took me to the supporter’s club, to watch a dreadfully dull draw as Brendan Rodgers’ final full season petered out.

(I had an invitation to meet Rodgers at Melwood in May 2015, but it never materialised; not helped by losing 6-1 at Stoke soon after, which made me back out.)

It gets hard to gain perspective when you spend so long on one project, or in one place.

You get too close to see the worth in what you’ve seen over and over; like a joke you think is funny and then, after the 50th time you’ve considered it, you start to hear as a collection of random syllables that don’t even seem like words, let alone funny ones that make you laugh.

A football team is more easily judged (by results) but also, so many games play out in a way that makes no sense at times. Results also make no sense at times.

It must be baffling to prepare things in training, then see the eleven on the pitch do random, unhelpful things. And for all your good work to be undone by Paul Tierney, or Andy Madley, or Stuart Attwell, or Simon Hooper, or Michael Oliver, or Anthony Taylor, or David Coote, or Darren England, or Thomas Bramall, or John Brooks, or any of the other refs and/or VARs to make major, listable game-changing gaffes in Liverpool games (just this season).

Seriously, the terrible officiating undermines any excellent preparation.

(And to have those officials who constantly punish Liverpool with imaginary fouls to stop them effectively playing they way they want, and who, at big moments in big games, go against Liverpool by habit; perhaps due to hating Klopp, who, as I keep saying, is used to excellence, not a series of dim-witted David Brents, only with even less self-awareness. It’s interesting to hear that Freddie Ljungberg, on Swedish TV, questioned why the ref have given nine free-kicks to Everton and just one to Liverpool in the first half, whereas on Sky, Gary Neville blamed Liverpool for being naive for allowing Everton players to fall over at the slightest contact, and praised Everton, a largely English team/management setup, as clever, for what, on other days, he’d call cheating, or saying “we don’t do that over here”. But Sky: Product Over Integrity. We saw that when they refused to show a replay of the Luis Díaz non-offside at Spurs.)

Like all control freaks and perfectionists with reputations on the line, Klopp, along with Pep Lijnders, took more control of transfers after the 2020 title success, when arguably he needed more help, not less.

But they had earned the right to take that path. And while the Reds failing to win the title will be a huge blow, it does make it easier for who comes next.

As I’ve been saying for ages, Man United replaced Alex Ferguson with a middling, dour, low-possession anti-football pragmatist (who then sacked the staff Ferguson gave him); and Arsenal replaced Arsene Wenger with a dour but talented technocrat whose mid-possession football was not special enough for the very biggest of clubs, and who at the time communicated like a Spanish 1970s sitcom character.

Equally, being bald and being Dutch doesn’t make you the same as the joyless Erik ten Hag, and his wonderfully thrilling assistant, Schteve McLaren, whose best days in English football were in 1999. The Dutch football people know that Slot is better than ten Hag.

Not only does Arne Slot have more personality than Moyes, Emery, ten Hag and McLaren – and seems to be speak better English than them all, too – but he’s been picked to follow a template already in place, not rip things up.

Next, he has the cojones to follow Klopp. That’s a huge tick.

Similarly, following Klopp in 2008 or 2015 does not make a manager right to do so in 2024, as the game always evolves to leave the best behind.

When Jamie Carragher says, when making the case for Thomas Tuchel (a talented but disruptive manager who is probably now on the downward slope), “you only have to look at Carlo Ancelotti and Unai Emery to recognise how top coaches recover from setbacks”, you actually see that Ancelotti is a low-maintenance freak (who wins things only with tons of money), and Emery is ideal for a club who expect to be 6th and in the Europa League most seasons, but may get up to 4th with a good tailwind.

The idea that top coaches recover from setbacks ignores the precipitous declines of Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte, Rafa Benítez, Max Allegri and various “guaranteed winners” from 5/10/15 years ago.

And going back further, Arsene Wenger, Brian Clough, Kenny Dalglish and other true greats (Wenger transformed English football, and Clough and Dalglish won titles with different clubs), whose greatness did not go on forever or transfer to new pastures, just as most managers have a shelf-life of 5-10 years at the top, that can only sometimes be extended by refreshed staff (new ideas) or tons of money (Ancelotti, Pep Guardiola).

If you analyse manager data from across history, you’d see this; never think of the outliers as the norm. This is where sometimes ex-players don’t have the analytical skills, even if they have useful insights in other areas.

Ancelotti is an outlier, and Emery has never won a league or a Champions League title, and I’m not sure he’s even got close.

(Carragher was a Gérard Houllier loyalist, and Houllier did very well at Liverpool; but Houllier’s career also nosedived after 2007, with a grim spell at Villa. Almost every manager’s career nosedives, as they age, their ideas grow stale, they grow more distant from the players of a new generation – who start to annoy them – and they just lose energy, as new managers bring fresh ideas and fresh energy. A bit like pundits out of the game for 5-10 years, they lose touch, and start talking about the old reality, not the current reality. These managers carry the stink of more failures, get more paranoid, and weary of the media, and so on. Ancelotti is a rare exception to the rule, but winning things with Real Madrid’s immense money and pulling power within the cash-struck La Liga, when their only rivals Barcelona are falling apart, is not that impressive; nor is beating better teams by luck in the Champions League, even if clearly Ancelotti is still a good manager.)

Slot’s approach is similar enough to Klopp’s for him to identify what works (with the help of Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes, et al, to microanalyse the squad, etc.), but also to gain insights, as an outsider, about what can be improved, and how.

You can stop seeing things, when you’re so close to it all the time; and in football, you can have human bonds that stop you being as ruthless as a new guy can be (before bonds build up for him).

But as another gruelling season grinds to an end, at least this is being sorted now, ahead of summer recruitment. If the manager search dragged on, not only would it mean less time to focus in on recruitment, but just another saga eating away at another month or two, of all our mental bandwidth. I think we all need a break, to decompress. Klopp’s tenure, like his team’s football, has been intense.

Klopp looks worn out. I don’t blame him.

I’m glad, from a personal point of view, as I deal with my never-ending illness and the usual extra late-season exhaustion that multiplies when the big games come every two or three days, that this won’t drag on into the summer.

I’ve found this past month as tough as any I can remember, physically and mentally. Like Klopp, I’m mid-50s now, and feeling my age.

Football is grinding me down, but like an addict, I’ll take the next hit as soon as its going (until suddenly I’m dead).

That the next hit is tomorrow, at midday, however, helps no one. It’s not just the players and the manager, but the fans need time between games, too.

Slot Is Ideal

While Arne Slot is not (yet) in Klopp’s class (who is?), his CV is similar to Klopp’s was in 2015, in having taken two outsiders to big, sustained league highs (and an unlikely European final), and with brilliant man-management and communication skills.

In Slot, Liverpool have tried to find the Klopp before everyone wanted Klopp, albeit by 2015, people were also saying Klopp was a busted flush. Ian Graham and Michael Edwards disproved that, and FSG’s Mike Gordon sold the club to Klopp, in a way that other clubs (like Man United) failed to do.

Liverpool’s key to success in the transfer market was finding lesser-known players others did not value. With Slot, they’ve done the same with a manager, albeit so many clubs could see his quality, even if fans and English pundits could not (myself included, before I read up, in detail, and spent days consuming stuff about him; things the club would have been doing for months).

Klopp won two titles with Dortmund; Slot, but for a couple of goals on goal difference in his first season at AZ, after the season was abandoned with them joint top with Ajax (having just beaten them), could have won titles for AZ as well as doing so for Feyenoord. That’s unheard of.

In two jobs, since 2019, he’s had two unlikely title challenges, with total outsiders.

And he did so by making both better at aggressive possession football; 62% this season, to meet my own criteria, and done with attacking play, not sterile passing at the back. Big clubs that finish 4th-7th in the big leagues tend to average 45%-55% possession. It’s a step down. Slot plays up-scaleable football. He plays 2024 football, not the Mourinho/Conte anti-football of ten years ago, sacrificing the ball. Football has changed a lot just since the pandemic.

None of these clubs had any money, and Feyenoord basically sold the whole team between reaching a European final and then winning a league. Seventeen new players arrived. He seemed to improve them all, and within 10 months had won the title. That’s not just good management; that’s remarkable.

And it’s Dutch football, not Patagonian football.

But in reading about his groundbreaking methods, Slot actually has many advantages over 2024 Klopp (jaded, longing to find a 4th official who will look him in the eye), as I will detail.

It’s not just a fresh start with the manager, but the whole of Liverpool FC will now be using its collective intelligence for a more holistic approach again, and be less reliant on the most inspirational manager of his generation, sadly worn down, and his canny assistant.

Here are several ways Slot can improve things, also based on how the squad Klopp will bequeath has a couple of melters, but others, almost all are yet to reach their peak (or get even close).

**The second half of this article is for paying TTT Main Hub subscribers only.**