Klopp Situation Handled Perfectly, And How Liverpool Could Get Better After Him

FREE READ, deep-dive.

I’ve noted a few times recently that Martin Samuel hits the nail on the head with remarkable precision one week, then, to my eye, misses the nail altogether when swinging a dead chicken the next.

But maybe that’s why I still read him, to be challenged, whereas his colleague Henry Winter essentially writes wallpaper, to which my eyes glaze (albeit that could be my glaucoma).

I try not to do as many response pieces as in the past, as these days you’d be responding to 73 things before lunchtime. I don’t read dumb opinions online much as I avoid social media.

I don’t have the energy. But having criticised Samuel a few times for some illogical conclusions, I think he’s got it spot-on about Jürgen Klopp, both after the League Cup final and again today.

Samuel has stated, as seemed obvious to me but seemingly not to everyone outside (including those in the Times’ comment section), that a unique situation was handled about as well as it could have been, in an article titled “Klopp exit hasn’t been mishandled – he did his best and so did Liverpool.”

Indeed, since writing this piece I’ve found a senior sports writer at another paper saying four days ago that Klopp had already “checked out” at Liverpool and should never have announced his decision to leave. Nice money if you can get it, I guess. Living in altered realities helps no one.

The idea that he’d “checked out” is just utter horseshit. Even if jaded, this is not a man who doesn’t give his all.

To be honest, I’ve checked out a few times in the last few weeks (months, and years), but football being what it is, checked back in. Even in the last week or so, Liverpool have all but sorted their new manager, and Mo Salah went to war (with words) with Klopp. Plus, three games in about three days, including the febrile derby.

(So much for any of us checking out. Here’s to a quieter summer, and some proper mental checking out for us, with Slot sorted now instead of it dragging on.)

The facts as we all know them are that Klopp felt jaded in November, and told the club he was done. My suspicion is that it was probably a decision reached in his heart a year ago; but he would not let the team slide to mid-table in the final part of that season, nor walk away in the summer with a rebuild required.

However, the twin Luis Díaz sagas, in amongst various insane red cards to Liverpool players for minor or in Diogo Jota and Alexis Mac Allister’s cases for no infringements at all (and the escalating gaslighting of him by the PGMOL), can’t have helped.

By then, Paul Tierney had done what VARs never do, and had his inexplicable failure to overturn an incorrect red card overturned afterwards, to prove that VARs just don’t do Liverpool games properly.

(But it just sounds ‘conspiratorial’ if you study reams of data, and point out that people who genuinely seem to loathe a football manager would – shock, horror – give calls against that manger whenever possible, and certainly never favour them on any 50-50 call. Again, I’ve studied years of data, and have massive databases on every ref, VAR, every decisions, etc., and patterns are clear. It doesn’t mean corruption, but it does mean they hate Klopp. You can’t assess Liverpool’s season without the utter shitshow of officiating in so many big games.)

The goal not given when there was no allowance for common sense, for an actual onside goal. Sky didn’t even show a replay, as they panicked in a weird but telling collusion with the PGMOL.

(Except this weekend, the whistle was no longer sacrosanct, and refs can blow or not blow it randomly, and say it’s for “common sense”; we were told play-on was the decision, and if so, you don’t restart with a drop-ball but a free-kick on the line if going back to the original foul, even if it wasn’t actually a foul after all. But, as you say, “common sense”. Ditto when players are pushed offside, as an increasingly frequent shithouse tactic which goes against the entire spirit of the law, or when Endo was bizarrely penalised for standing still – common sense never gets applied then. But to be clear - players pushed offside should not be offside, and I await some common sense on that, maybe by 2037.)

While this piece is not really about officiating (some of it is, but most of it is not), I think it played a huge part in driving Klopp away. As such, a few issues will be discussed, as I keep weighing the reality against what ‘could have been’.

Next, and rather more alarmingly than some guys shouting “good process!”, Díaz’s family was kidnapped. The rebuild had gone well, but the season was getting surreal.

Plans for preseason for 2024/25 were being drawn up in November 2023; and suddenly it’s eight Champions League group games, but with all the usual domestic cup games stuffing the calendar.

Musical interlude

If I’m going to continue on a run of my favourite 1989 songs and their lyrics, the Trashcan Sinatras’ ‘the calendar is cluttered with days that are numbered’ springs to mind, before I thought of their 1993 song that would have been better used in yesterday’s Mo Salah piece.

Out for a spell, I was slated. I'd lost a yard, I was hated

I dug a rug out the dugout, lazing, I joined in the turnout

That's no life at all

Out for a spell, got neglected, lay on the bench unselected

Laughing, I joined in the squabbles, over the hill. I'm immortal

Immortal, immortal, immortal

I'm immortal and that's no life, no life at all

(And later: “I was sub – I thought my number was up”)

Musical interlude ends

While Samuel points out that Liverpool are the third best team and thus will finish third, juggling 6-12 injuries since December when Arsenal and City had no or very few injuries took a toll.

All being equal, there’s far less to put between the three sides, I’d say.

City have mostly had no injuries, and actually, when it’s Erling Haaland, they do better without him. When it was just Kyle Walker out, there was little talk of how much City have spent on full-backs, as well as playing centre-backs at full-back by choice. (“They need bodies back” said the guy on TNT, when they had two players out. That’s barely plural.)

Injuries can be random, and certainly what happened to Ryan Gravenberch, Alexis Mac Allister and others – out for 4-8 weeks due to horror tackles, studs cutting muscle to the bone and through ligaments – cannot be accounted for.

Ditto a huge Brentford player going in recklessly hard, jumping up to avoid making a foul, but forcefully clattering into Diogo Jota’s knee in the process.

None of these injuries was even given as a free-kick, and two should have been red cards. Protection from the PGMOL? No chance.

It’s part of a theme where teams (such as Everton) are allowed to “bully” Liverpool and concede only one free-kick until they were ahead after almost 40 minutes, and yet Liverpool had conceded nine (NINE!), for possibly four fouls at most; as Gary Neville praised Everton’s cleverness at going down when not really a foul, and calling Liverpool naive for allowing it.

(Which seems to mean, don’t try and press or tackle, and don’t play the game you want to play, as it’s naive that a ref will be conned, and allow Everton to kick you up in the air like it’s 1986. Even Freddie Ljungberg, as noted by our Swedish subscribers, not that he said on TV that the ref was not treating the two teams the same, and not allowing Liverpool to compete.)

Again, maybe Klopp going will see the PGMOL reset, as they no longer have to defeat the man I’d say they see as their no.1 enemy; certainly after the contretemps with John Brooks a year ago, when it all seemed to get very personal all round.

The way they look at him, or indeed blank him, says it all. He’s brought some of that on himself, but you still expect fair officiating, for the integrity of the league.

(Integrity! Hahahaha.)

As well as Liverpool being VARred out of the game at Spurs, Man City benefited and Liverpool were smashed by a decision where being kicked in the chest became “they’ve both gone in high”.

Seriously – and I mean deathly seriously – if that was a review of CCTV footage in the court, anyone from the police or prosecution saying on the stand that both have essentially gone in with their feet up (‘high’) would be summarily fired and swiftly prosecuted for perjury.

I watch a lot of crime documentaries, and I’ve never seen anyone unable to comprehend what takes place when one person attacks another, even in grainy football that doesn’t have 23 angles and super slo-mo. When a lone knifeman stabs an old lady in the street, they do not say “they’ve both gone in with knives”, but instead, say what we can all actually see. They’re not using cognitive dissonance or suffering inattentional blindness.

As well as not causing the PGMOL to give every 50-50 and even every 80-20 to the Reds’ opposition, Arne Slot needs to find a way to keep players fit, and that’s one thing Salah, at least until this season, guaranteed.

But even that has gone.

If anything, the return of Mo Salah and others from injury derailed things a bit, as new injuries arose and others recurred. (My analysis of Salah from yesterday can be found here.)

Hamstring issues are up massively in the Premier League this season, so it’s not a Liverpool-only issue. That said, one or two players aside, City and Arsenal have avoided almost all injuries, certainly to key players. Either they’re doing something special or they’ve been luckier.

Everyone at Liverpool seemed to miss two months all at once, then come back together, with two months of rust.

Indeed, had just Diogo Jota stayed fit out of the casualties, none of this debate need be happening, as he has been the club’s best finisher by far the past 12-14 months (after a long dry spell).

He has matured into a lethal finisher, having been hot and cold up to then. That’s what moving into your mid-to-late 20s can do for some players. He came back for a game, scored an important goal, then was out again for the big Everton clash.

A fit Jota (and one or two of the other 6-12), and Liverpool may win the league; yet when Kevin de Bruyne was City’s only injury, it’s all we heard about.

When Liverpool were lacking Trent Alexander-Arnold – Liverpool’s ‘KDB’, Dominik Szoboszlai (great first season but hit a wall like a lot of imports in year one), Mac Allister, Jota, Curtis Jones, Joël Matip, Thiago, Stefan Bajcetic, Salah, Andy Robertson, Alisson, Ben Doak, et al, it was as if none counted.

Maybe Salah would get mentioned, but not the other 11 the list reached at one point.

Conor Bradley was briefly superb, in between months out with a back fracture and an ankle injury, from an awkward fall. Robertson had a bad injury with Scotland; Kostas Tsimikas had a similar injury when recklessly barged off the pitch and into Klopp. Doak took a kick on the knee and Bajcetic had ‘growing pains’, that can affect any teen. I’ve lost count of the other injuries.

A few were hammies too, clearly.

(Salah, meanwhile, was injured as soon as he went off with Egypt, and Wataru Endo, finally showing good form, went off with Japan and came back in less-good form. Maybe it’s time to steer clear of players who go off for up to six weeks midseason, albeit overall Endo has filled a role, and Salah and Sadio Mané were, until recently, worth the lost time every two years.)

If the only thing Slot can do better than Klopp is keep more players fit, instantly he has an advantage.

So how do you judge a season when you’ve had so many big names injured? All these seem far more relevant than Klopp’s decision to quit, and when and how that was announced.

And so many of the injuries were random; impact-related, or with international teams.

Reality

But the overall point is, when Klopp said in November, what could Liverpool and FSG do?

There was no Director of Football; just Jörg Schmadtke, who was essentially doing transfers directly with Klopp.

To announce then that Klopp was leaving in the summer, back in November, would have created pandemonium that much earlier. If announcing it was the wrong thing, then doing the wrong thing earlier would be worse.

Equally, had it not been made public and, as the process to replace him began in terms of reaching out to others, it leaked that Liverpool were looking at new managers behind Klopp’s back (as the fans didn’t know Klopp was leaving), the plot would have been well and truly lost, and understandably so.

It was incredible that it didn’t leak between November and late January. By January, plans were in place at Liverpool to bring back Michael Edwards, to sort it all out.

He initially refused, as he was now working with Ian Graham again, with Graham having also left as the club had moved away from the old model, with Klopp having earned the right to properly ‘manage’ the club after 2020. Edwards also had a bit of time away, to recharge.

But Edwards was talked back in an even more senior role, with FSG (so now we can say #FSGout and #EdwardsGout, as he may have gout – we just don’t know), and he employed the guy he’s known and respected for years, going back to their playing days, Richard Hughes.

The pair had done things like negotiate a reasonable buyback clause for Dominic Solanke at Bournemouth (no idea if this clause has expired, but he’s become a top player in the intervening years; it was denied publicly, but the clause was there). Bournemouth got a great prospect, Solanke got game-time, and Liverpool got the option to take him back.

Even though Hughes remains at Bournemouth for a few more weeks, he has a phone.

So as good as Will Spearman’s data analysis will have been, and as expertly as Mike Gordon talked Klopp (who turned down Man United) into joining Liverpool – a process I was given insight into in October 2015, and why I’m baffled that FSG get no credit for hiring Klopp – it would be asking a lot for those two to sort the entire future of Liverpool FC.

(Indeed, personally I got very hooked on the Xabi Alonso idea … but I had no ideas after that. Rúben Amorim suddenly seemed excellent, but the talk of him wanting control over transfers, and then the weird trip to West Ham, show why that wasn’t going to work, good as he is as a manager.)

Edwards is vital, as I said as soon as Klopp’s decision was announced. Getting Edwards back would have been my first solution, I wrote on here. Do that, and things can be sorted.

This is because Edwards, with his institutional knowledge and the glow of past success, has the authority, but also the distance from the squad, to be ruthless.

Various media outlets call him the best Director of Football in English football history, even if these things are hard to judge. Clearly he knows his onions. It obviously helped that Klopp improved players, but all a DoF can do is give the best ingredients to the chef. (And sell the old block of cheese found in the back of the cupboard for £40m.)

Hughes is excellent at what he does too. Two heads are better than one; especially if they’re aligned, reading from the same hymn sheet, but with the mutual trust to suggest ideas about how to do things a bit differently. To me, that’s vital, just as the relationship between those guys and Arne Slot will be vital.

My sense is that Liverpool will move forward with a bigger kind of brains trust, spreading the knowledge, drawing on various specialists, and filtering that in to Spearman, Hughes and Edwards, while Slot, a head coach (but critically, with the personality of a manager, not just a head coach), utilises his own specialists on the training ground.

In a sense: replacing a superstar manager with a greater backroom operation.

Put it like this: Slot is John Aldridge to Klopp’s Ian Rush.

Basically, he could prove just as good at doing the thing the legend did, but is not a legend. Aldridge, even at his best, was not as good as Rush, but Aldridge was effective in his own right.

But when Rush was sold to Juventus in 1986 to leave in 1987, the proceeds also funded the arrival of John Barnes, Peter Beardsley and Ray Houghton.

Now, with a team, that approach can also go wrong (Gareth Bale*, Luis Suarez**), because sometimes lots of less-good players is far less effective, and you obviously can’t go from fielding 11 players to fielding 20.

(* But even in the mass buying spree, Spurs recruited Erik Lamela and Christian Eriksen, who almost took Spurs to a Champions League crown. Also, Étienne Capoue was perhaps jettisoned too soon, and Paulinho went on to play 56 times for Brazil, and also joined Barcelona. Spurs soon got better in the post-Bale years,)

(** Liverpool’s recruitment was a mixed mess between Brendan Rodgers’ signings and the committee’s, with the committee in 2014, of which Edwards was lead; having already given us Daniel Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho in January 2013, after the terrible buys by Rodgers in 2012. In 2014, the committee messed up with the lazy Lazar Marković, and Rodgers messed up with the lazy and reckless Mario Balotelli. Rickie Lambert, legs gone, somehow ended up at the club too. Emre Can was a smart committee buy. But a main issue was the toxic rot of the ageing superstar; a visibly frustrated Steven Gerrard, melting and unhappy. Liverpool soon got better in the post-Gerrard, post-Suarez years.)

But in terms of off-pitch smartness, you can do that. You’re not constrained by having only 11 berths. You can go for more expertise.

You don’t want 700 data cooks, r-squaring the broth, but this is a chance to get ahead on clever thinking, and use the wisdom of crowds to overcome the absolute brilliance of one individual.

And in fairness, that individual’s Dutch assistant, who helped make Liverpool an ultra-high-possession team way back in 2018, even though people still talk as if it’s all just gegenpressing.

Pep Lijnders developed his ideas years ago, with … Arne Slot. Liverpool wanted a fresh start, and someone who, unlike Lijnders, would not want transfer control. By the end, Lijnders, for all his brilliance, had burnt some bridges. Slot offers the same ideas, but with more leadership experience and less baggage.

Rather than being unsuited, Slot is therefore taking over a very Dutch side, with the potential spine of three Dutchmen, coached by a Dutch peer of the departing Dutch coach, and with another Dutchman coming back from a successful loan in Germany (Sepp van den Berg).

This is the point people miss; this is not Liverpool in 2017. Lijnders always said his next job would be as a manager (I think Ajax should go for him), and his departure will freshen things up, without ripping up the foundations he and Klopp laid.

Slot doesn’t have Klopp’s authority or aura (yet, and maybe never will), but he’ll have Edwards and Hughes easing his load, and I think, a broader range of specialists.

Slot is also bringing the fresh, younger energy that Klopp’s eventual fatigue burnt out, while players can get tired of the same coaches after three years, let alone six.

Refresh

Klopp also made life harder for himself, but earned every right to do so.

The more responsibility a manager takes on – so in Klopp’s case, he and Lijnders having far more say on transfers, to the point where there was less backroom wisdom – the more the onus is on him.

More control means more pressure.

If they chose Darwin Núñez via the old managerial “mistake” of being impressed when a player plays well against their team (if that was the case, we’d all buy Bobby Decordova-Reid and Michail Antonio), it must be exhausting, and extra stressful, watching the player only resemble that Benfica model about a third of the time.

Like most of us, Klopp would have watched the highlight packages, and the two games Núñez played, and thought “this kid is amazing!”.

And he is … some of the time.

[Edit: just to add, Núñez’s potential remains huge, and at his best he’s unplayable, but I worry more about his poor hold-up play, his volatility and his running offside – a lack of football smarts – than missing all the chances, albeit, to paraphrase Eric Morecambe, I think he has all the finishes, just not necessarily in the right order.]

The same was said to be true of the reason for buying Luis Díaz who impressed against the Reds for Porto, but aside from a terrible injury last season (when a player fell on his knee), and a family kidnapping saga this season, Díaz has largely been excellent.

(Even then, his family seem to want him to be in Spain, and they probably want to be in Spain, once Liverpool FC got them out of the terrorists’ clutches in Colombia. I understand the lure of La Liga and the sunshine for Latino players – and England has never been colder and rainier – but it also seems disrespectful.)

I assume scouting was also involved, but if Klopp and Lijnders were driving the process, it just means more pressure if those players flop, or just fall short of being good enough or consistent enough; whereas before, had he wanted to, Klopp could say “why the hell did you buy me Marko Grujić?”

(Not that he would have said that about Grujić, who was 19, didn’t cost much, did okay, earned the club money from loans and then left for twice what was paid. But he may have said that about the feckless Marković, had he been given him, instead of inheriting him. One thing Klopp insisted on was no bad trainers, and Marković, like Balotelli, was amongst the worst.)

One other issue I would point to, and have said in the past, is a massive mid-season emotional drain.

We saw it with Everton: points deduction leads to massive emotional overload and outrage, leads to winning run, leads to burnout, leads to collapse, and their worst run for about 30 years.

They turned it round, just in time.

(Weirdly, the initial 10-point ban should have been applied last season, and even if lowered to six, they’d have been related.)

Various smaller clubs have won the League Cup in March, been euphoric, and never won another Premier League game and been relegated. In sport you want to keep on a nice, steady, even keel, with little doses of positivity; not too high, not too low.

While Liverpool are too big for thinking a League Cup is the best it could ever get, the whole Klopp-is-going emotional push saw kids, squad players and everyone else driven on to win seven of the next nine league games, losing at Arsenal, and if anything, being derailed by the provably incompetent Stuart Attwell (another article in the pipeline) on VAR against Man City.

(Not that Attwell is bad for Liverpool overall, just that if you study his data, he’s just a very bad official – a rank homer, and a bottler as a VAR.)

Then, the setback at Old Trafford in the cup, losing 4-3 when Bruno Fernandes should have been sent off after 60 minutes, for a quite terrible tackle on Dominik Szoboszlai. As with the league game, only one team looked good. But they didn’t win.

The emotional peak was the League Cup final success against Chelsea, because of the context of so many young players; and maybe it felt like a fairytale then.

The biggest kick in the balls was more like the kick in the nipples, as Doku and the words “common sense” were never to meet when the Reds most needed it; Michael Oliver, inexplicably, shouting that he had seen the incident as if he had x-ray vision and could see through players, and Attwell too timid to disagree.

(Weirdly, something similar happened yesterday when Declan Rice booted a Spurs player – in the nuts – right in front of Oliver. It showed that Oliver does not have x-ray vision, nor could he see the boot emerging on the other side, in his line of vision; albeit when it’s an England international they get preferential treatment, as the data shows. Oliver, this time – ah, consistency, wherefore art thou? – was sent to the screen, and took one single look to overturn his error. Had Attwell been VAR, maybe Oliver would never have known that, right in front of his very human eyes, boot met scrotum. But obviously, as we all know from biology classes, testicles are higher on the body than nipples, just as the knee is higher than the ear, and the nose is higher than the eyebrows. Which ball Rice kicked is still not known.)

Still … obviously had Salah, or Núñez, or various others slotted their Big Chances, this could all be moot too.

Just as, had Moussa Sissoko not inexplicably put his arm out in the Champions League final, Liverpool might not have won it; or had Mo Salah not been judo-thrown to the ground the year before, they might have won it then instead; or had the goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois not had the best game ever in 2022, and had Liverpool’s fans been in the stadium and not in ambulances, they might have won it then.

Then, what if the ballboy was too slow for ‘corner taken quickly’? (Oakley Cannonier, prolific youth goalscorer since being ballboy, is obviously injured.)

Finishing is random, and pretty much only Dominic Calvert-Lewin wastes more xG than every player in the whole of Europe than Núñez.

So, clearly Calvert-Lewin wasn’t going to be an issue. Except, ‘DCL’ had ended a 19-game goal drought with a penalty just before the Reds arrived there.

(Still, I’d rather than Liverpool’s future than Everton’s, not to mention the past 30 years. Yes, we lost the league at Everton, but we’re not relying on 777 finding some money down the back of the sofa, or having Sean Dyche as our saviour. Indeed, one thing Martin Samuel recently got wrong was saying that Arsenal have far more derbies than Liverpool, so it’s harder for them, when, to me, Arsenal playing Fulham, which most people in the city of London do not care about, is not even remotely close to the utter rabid, stadium-shaking hostility of Goodison. London derbies, for the most part, are not proper derbies, any more than Liverpool vs Preston, or Blackburn, or Bolton, etc., would be.)

Also, had there not been a protest before the Atalanta game, which bled into an unusually subdued European mood and the worst result of the season, it could have been different again. (If upset about the 2% rise, as I noted at the time, maybe find a less self-defeating way to protest. Object by all means, just think it through a bit more.)

Ultimately, I’d put most if it down to injuries, more than anything else, and the PGMOL.

(So many bad decisions, including this latest one at the weekend from Anthony Taylor, when common sense suddenly meant the whistle no longer really matters; “play to the whistle”, except where exempted due to common sense. The whilst had been blown to restart play at Spurs after the Díaz debacle, so common sense wasn’t allowed then).

But various other things haven’t helped.

And the loss of accountability for these players for this manager may have been a natural splintering, as Samuel points out. So yes, back to the original point of the article.

(And which shows how hard it is to keep a squad unified, and disciplined, and how they’re all so eager to splinter, once the buildup of years of pressure has a release valve.)

“For that is the reality of the departing manager. He loses some clout. Mohamed Salah may have been in the departure lounge since first hearing of interest from Saudi Arabia, but would he have been so openly disrespectful if he felt there was another season under Klopp? There have been rumours that Alisson, too, was unhappy at not being restored to the first team sooner after injury.

“Meanwhile, last month, Luis Díaz’s father talked about his son’s contract, which ends in 2027. ‘We haven’t lost hope yet of a move to La Liga,’ he said. Disagreements had previously been unheard of at Klopp’s Liverpool. One of the great strengths of his time there has been the ability to identify good characters. Yet even Sir Alex Ferguson could not keep Manchester United’s form in check when he announced that 2001-02 would be his final season. By December, shortly before Ferguson shelved that retirement plan, United were ninth.

“So while Klopp’s last lap may seem, on the face of it, a disappointment, it also needs context. Liverpool have a promising squad, Salah’s sale may well fund improvements, the succession is secure with Arne Slot in place — as is a new management structure based, perhaps, on the lessons learnt from Klopp’s burnout — and the third-best team in the country will come, at worst, third. However deflated by recent form, Klopp still leaves with his head held high, in the knowledge he did his very best for Liverpool; just as they did their very best for him.”

I’d conclude by saying that it’s more than a promising squad; due to the emergence of so many elite kids (some of whom can and will become elite pros), and half a dozen excelling on loan, the squad is currently FORTY-ONE players (as I worked out when analysing the squad for a future piece), most of whom have played for the first team, or played pro games out on loan.

That’s also not including five young goalkeepers with squad numbers, and ten fringe first-team squad players who I expect to leave, such as Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams.

Indeed, it’s a lot like Arsenal 12-24 months ago, in terms of emerging talent.

Clearly, the squad is suddenly too big in some terms, but there will be the loss of two brilliant but old and injury-prone players in Thiago and Joël Matip (who didn’t offer anything this season to miss next season), whose contracts are up.

But it gives so many options for the new manager (and while he’s a head coach, I prefer the term ‘manager’, but just meaning managing the team), and Edwards and Hughes and the others to assess.

Cull the too-old, sell the past-their-best, offload a few fringe players, and maybe buy 5-6 rising, hungry players who meet all the criteria. And still have a ton of players to choose from, who suit Slot’s style, respect his authority and buy into his ideas.

I mean, if Philippe Coutinho in his peak could be sold, to outcries of FSG being reckless and unhinged and trying to sink the club, then a wilting Mo Salah could be on his way.

Perhaps even Alisson too, if it’s true that he’s been restless, and given that he’s nearing 32, and Caoimhín Kelleher had, until very recently, played more games for the club this season than the Brazilian, due to the latter’s injuries. (And been almost as good, but better with his feet; and I still prefer keepers who can keep goal, but being good with your feet is a huge bonus.)

Be clear: this is not me saying to sell Alisson, who remains elite, and still better than Kelleher. Just that no one can be sacred, especially if their heart isn’t in it, and their best days could be behind them, or approaching that point soon.

I have no issues with Alisson’s performances, which are still elite, but missing half a season, and then, if true, being unhappy at not coming straight back into the team, would be warning flags. Reaction times, sprint times and save percentages all start to dip around now for keepers. Kelleher, by contrast, is on the rise.

(I still expect Liverpool to sell Kelleher with a definite buyback within two years.)

Arsenal no longer have a really young team, but they have no old players in the best XI.

City and Arsenal have also gone from less physical than Liverpool to more physical; from slower to faster. They use set-piece coaches, and reap the rewards. Arsenal even take better throw-ins.

Even then, Liverpool’s injuries, missed chances and the PGMOL’s interventions at vital times have shaped the season as much as anything else. So all analysis of failings has to be viewed through those lenses.

And the key is not to find prolific strikers who convert their xG if they just muddy the build-up; even Erling Haaland, the best striker in the world, seems to make City play worse, and win fewer points, as they play as a highly-networked team without him, and more stutteringly with him. He’s great against the dross, mind, filling his boots in those games.

Slot, his coaching staff and the analytics team, can find new ways of finding advantages, while Edwards brings back the institutional knowledge that would otherwise go with Klopp, and the ‘power’, too.

The return to finding players like Mo Salah when it was 2017 or Sadio Mané when it was 2016 or Roberto Firmino when it was 2015 will help massively.

And Slot’s methods and tactics seem to be like Klopp’s in terms of improving players, and gelling sides, and finding unity. The tactics, as noted, are Lijnders-like, with a mix of the Klopp pressing and fast attacking.

Slot won the title with Feyenoord immediately after most of his best players were sold, and 17 new players arrived. Even in the Netherlands, that’s a miracle. He nearly won the league in his first season with AZ, before the pandemic curtailed the campaign. Again, incredible.

He is an expert man-manager, but he won’t want to be dealing with really outsized egos, as he doesn’t yet have that on his CV, and now is not the time to be undermined by them (as I noted with Erik ten Hag and Ronaldo).

What Slot probably needs is stick to his ideas with players who, based on random transfer links, might be Lutsharel Geertruida from his current club, or Johan Bakayoko of PSV (as two examples of young internationals excelling in Dutch football), and all those at Liverpool, of the younger and mid-20s players, who will not think they know better than Slot, as Slot builds his authority, over time, with younger players.

(Virgil van Dijk is still suitable to lead the team, but more pace is needed at the back to play a high line.)

Indeed, there’s another parallel.

Mikel Arteta, in his very first job as a manager, got rid of everyone at Arsenal who was older, and/or felt they were bigger than him. Egos? Gone. Superstars? Gone. At the time I thought it made total sense. You really don’t need a Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

Those players moaned, but his team have thrived, and they’ve mostly nosedived.

Arsenal have no rookies in the team, so there are no age-related weak links, but few are older than 25. They’ve had a few years together, to develop cohesion, and they have found undervalued players in the market, even if not cheap; and like Liverpool with van Dijk and Alisson, paid up for Declan Rice.

And with Edwards and Hughes, Slot doesn’t have to be the one who upsets the current players by saying that they are surplus to requirements.

The Reds’ new holistic approach seems perfect for modern football, and the demands ahead. Unless you have a one-off like Klopp, you need another way. And obviously, Klopp is a one-off. Slot just has to be good at a more limited number of things, helped by more people around him.

But there are never any guarantees in football. You can’t control everything.

Even kicking someone in the chest doesn’t have to be a foul, and if you’re relying on that decision, you can wait a long time; even having 115 charges for years and years of alleged financial breaches has no end in sight. The Premier League has become a mess of bad officiating and bad administration.

If City are relegated, life gets easier for Slot. If not, it doesn’t. He has no control over that.

New signings can flop, managers can fail, Directors of Football can make mistakes.

However, all you can do is prepare properly. Make smart decisions.

And hope for the best.

**This is a free article, as the season winds down, and I get a things off my chest in the chaos of un unravelling season, but one of overall overachievement and redevelopment. Please share if you liked it, or just found it interesting. Commenting is for paying TTT Main Hub subscribers only.**