Liverpool will keep faith with Arne Slot until the end of the season and the plan has always been for him to get another summer.
The noises out of Fenway Sports Group have been steadfast this season about his ability as a coach and this has been a season like no other at Anfield.
But the manner of defeats to Man City and PSG, both after a fortnight in which Slot had time on the training ground, feeds into the narrative that Slot does not have the answers to Liverpool’s malaise.
Everton next weekend suddenly looks fraught with danger, and they do not qualify for the Champions League, it’s difficult to see how Slot survives
The availability of Xabi Alonso complicates matters but there is also enthusiasm in some quarters of the Liverpool brains trust about the work of Bournemouth boss Andoni Iraola, who is set to be a free agent in the summer.
by Realistic-Zone3914
28 Comments
It’s clear this is all about money as there is absolutely no evidence or benefit footballing-wise in keeping this guy any longer. Bringing in any sort of interim for rest of the season could hardly make us any worse and it’s clear there is at least 1 viable replacement currently for the summer
I get the impression they’d give him more time if he got champions league and basically protected the golden goose of club revenues.
Suddenly, when the bottom line is so perilously impacted, they’ll be forced to act.
Honestly even from his own body language and pressers, he looks like he has resigned himself to the fate of being let go.
The mistake is not having a defensive/ball retention 6 in midfield. Or at least having too many midfielders all with the same skillsets/offensive tendencies all wondering in to each others spaces.
Iraola is quality but you would really need to get better suited players for his system to work at a top club level. He would get the best out of Kerkez again, but after that you would really need more athletic pressers in the squad than just Wirtz and Dom
We brought in Hughes the guy behind Iraola at Bournemouth, and look where that’s got us. If they replace Slot they better be damn sure it’s the right guy.
Don’t think Slot is a bad person . He just cannot motivate the team . He probably will do good somewhere else but not with us. . Thought to give him a chance but last few months there are too much negativity around the club and players . If the captain himself feel not comfortable, then we know it’s time
Strongly disagree with the “Slot pays price for 450MM in mistakes” framing.
Klopp would have won everything under the sun with this squad IMO.
Lot of these seem just speculation without basis. Hughes and Edwards both have only a year left as well and I doubt any big name manager would come in not knowing about the future of his Sporting director.
Or in other words, I doubt we will replace slot with a big name manager unless Hughes and Edwards future is sorted as well.
While slot is taking the blame here and rightly so for the piss poor football, Edwards and Hughes are on the hook as well. The squad looks weaker inspite of the summer splurge and that stems from lack of consistent strengthening over years. And there has to be questions raised about if we had a game plan behind last summer’s splurge and some of the recruitment (or lack of in case of a defender).
All in all, this has been result of lot of things gone wrong.
Liverpool brains trust about the work of Bournemouth boss Andoni Iraola, who is set to be a free agent in the summer.
Heir Edward’s ? No thanks get him out you need a to get Alonso and a man who only answer to Alonso . If Fsg want to fix this then get Edward’s out to
At this point I do feel bad for him. It feels like he has a real idea of football but doesn’t know how to get these players to produce it. Which begs the question why did we build this squad for him? And if we sack him, the next manager is also gonna have to deal with Hughes building a squad that doesn’t work…
What tier is this?
Hughes has to pay the same price as Slot in my eyes.
FSG can’t say anything other than they’re backing him. If they said anything else, he’d effectively already be fired, and that won’t work if the plan is to have him see out the season.
>£450m of mistakes
God, I hate modern media. There isn’t a single one of those signings that I’d ship out this summer, the only concern has been Frimpong suddenly seemingly quite fragile this year after barely being injured for his career so far. Pure headline bait for the Instagram comment toe-nail eaters.
Wirtz and Isak are the most high-profile and expensive ones, and both of them have been severely hampered by the fact that our buildup play consists of passing at a snail’s pace, with constant “resets” back to the CBs when any of our players are under any pressure. The only people who give Wirtz the ball are our defenders if he drops deep enough or wide enough for one of them to find him; feeding him or giving him any sort of platform doesn’t seem to be in our midfield’s job description.
It seems like Slot is the only coach on the planet who wouldn’t be excited about zipping passes around so Kerkez and Frimpong can bomb forward and Wirtz, Isak and Ekitike can cause havoc. Our attacking philosophy is to pass the ball to Konate.
“Steadfast” same word used by Joyce and Ornstein 2 weeks ago. This is recycled hash and judging by the demeanour and bite Slot gives out pre and post games, for his own health and wellbeing put him out of his misery. Every week he’s asked the same questions and it’s painful.
Also Iraola is naive and isn’t good enough yet – take the Bournemouth game vs City as example, also hasn’t demonstrated he can manage 2x a week and the volume of injuries to his key players just with 1x game a week.
I would prefer Xabi but the data points to Iraola as being the better replacement, so they’re probably going to go with him.
I like Iraola, but nowhere near to the extent I would want him to be our next manager.
If it’s not xabi it will be fabregas
Yeah I’m taking all these articles with a grain of salt going forward. Genuinely over all the noise and speculation.
Dreaded backing from the owners. Means he’s likely gone.
This is just Rodgers all over again
I don’t believe any of our signings were mistakes. They are all fantastic players and can take us into our next era of dominance. Once we replace Mo and have our CBs in, all we need is the right manager to lead them.
I was really happy we got Kerkez and Ekitike, both looked great prospects. Kerkez has never really got going and Ekitike had a decent start but has done nothing recently. Didn’t really understand the Frimpong signing unless we were changing formation to incorporate wing backs. Wirtz is a great player as he’s recently shown on international duty – 2 goals and 2 assists against Switzerland – Isak we massively overpaid and should have looked elsewhere. Leoni looks excellent in the glimpse we got of him. The worst bit of business was not getting Guehi over the line.
> the availability of Xabi Alonso complicates matters
He’s a free agents
If the owners have been watching this season and still think he needs more time, I don’t even know what to say. Like do you people have eyes??
Iraola? No thanks. I would rather stick with Slot.
Don’t trust Iraola at all.
I still think we need a change in coach, (nothing against Slot personally, just don’t think he is the answer for us), but Iraola is not it.
As the flair for this post says, “opinion.” I don’t think we made any bad signings. Even with Isak, the jury is still out. How do we know that he’s not going to come back next year and be close to or better than his former self? How are we calling him a bad signing already, when a lot of people were salivating over us signing him just a couple months ago? Hugo is legit and we saw that early. His just pitching a fit like a teenager right now. And it probably has to do with Slot ball. Neither Kerkez or Jeremy are really being used at their strongest positions, the ones the metrics calculated. One of our biggest mistakes was letting Geuhi get away. He was all but signed, so we knew he wanted to be here. So it made no sense to not sign him in January.
4-4-2 is one of the most boring formations. But it’s what we should have been playing, since our DM situation is shaky at best, Macca is not the same and we no longer have the pace and goal output of Salah on the wing. We would have missed Trent a little less if Wirtz and Szobo had been playing in the middle all season. Both are creative enough to get the ball to Hugo and Salah up top. Macca and Gapko should have been coming off the bench. Jones should been getting more time. Endo can give you 15 minutes of chaos at the end of a close game. He did it last year. There are lot of adjustments that could have been made. But here we are…with Slot “park the bus” ball.
I don’t agree that he should keep his job just for qualifying for CL. We’ll likely do that because the teams around us are mostly as shit as we are.
For me it’s win the CL or else GTFO.
Slot out!
Xabi Alonso in!