There’s a moment early in Frank Miller’s Year One - the definitive telling of how Bruce Wayne became Batman, where the whole myth nearly dies on arrival. He goes out into Gotham underprepared, in a disguise that isn’t a disguise, with no plan beyond the conviction that something has to change. He gets cut. He gets shot. He ends up bleeding out in a chair by an open window, one hand on the bell that will summon help he doesn’t want, entirely out of ideas.

The bat comes through the window. And that’s the point of the story: the icon isn’t born from a triumph. It’s born from a botched first attempt and the refusal to stop iterating on it. Year One is not a book about winning. It’s a book about assembling a method: publicly, expensively, painfully - in a city that has every reason not to believe you.

You can see where I’m going with this right …

Liverpool Football Club walks into 2026/27 having spent the previous twelve months disassembling itself in front of a live audience.

Fifth place. Sixty points. Twenty-five behind Arsenal. Seventeen wins from thirty-eight. No trophy, no identity, and a manager who won the league in his first season sacked eighteen months later.

Add to that the exits: Mohamed Salah gone to Trabzonspor on a free, Andy Robertson gone, Ibrahima Konaté gone, all three walking out of the door at the end of their contracts for precisely nothing. This will be the first Liverpool season since 2016/17 without Salah.

Into that, on a two-year deal, walks Andoni Iraola.

So let me set my stall out early, because everything that follows depends on it:

I do not think this season will be good for a while, and I do not think that’s a problem.

What I want from 26/27 is a visible roadmap. A team that looks like it belongs to somebody. Football I can be emotionally attached to again - which, if we’re honest with each other, is the thing that actually went missing last year, long before the results did.

01. The Journey

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about hiring a coach with a genuine, non-negotiable, physically demanding philosophy: you don’t get to see it in August.

Pre-season gave us fragments, and the fragments were encouraging - but they were fragments. Two-goal leads, surrendered twice, in the same fortnight, in the same manner: legs going, structure loosening, a press that arrives a half-second late and stops being a press at all.

Iraola’s own reading of the Monaco game was blunt - his side, he said, “can’t sustain the level we want, we have work to do.” That is not a man managing expectations. That’s a man describing a training problem he already knows the shape of.

And there’s a wrinkle nobody’s talking about enough. Across pre-season Liverpool averaged 60.6% possession - roughly thirteen percentage points more than his Bournemouth side averaged in the league last season. Iraola has spent his entire managerial career building teams that hurt you in the seconds after you give the ball away. At Liverpool, opponents won’t give it away. They’ll sit in a 5-4-1 on the edge of their own box and dare him to break them down. The system that made him one of the two or three most interesting coaches in England now has to solve the opposite problem to the one it was designed for.

He also, functionally, has not had his team yet. Seven Liverpool players went to the World Cup. Van Dijk and Gakpo weren’t back in a red shirt until Monaco on 9 August. Mac Allister didn’t feature until the behind-closed-doors Como game. Isak arrived via Sweden’s tournament and 1,033 minutes of football across an entire injury-wrecked season. You cannot drill automatisms into players who are in three different time zones and four different states of fitness.

The first months are not the season. They’re the invoice for the season.

So here’s my timeline, and I’d ask you to hold me to it in May. Liverpool will not play consistently good football until late November or early December. Before then you’ll get flashes - a twenty-minute spell against a mid-table side where the press hunts in packs and the ball goes forward in three touches and you’ll feel your chest go tight with it - followed by a fortnight of the same team looking like eleven men doing an impression of a system they’ve read about.

The stride comes in the new year. That’s when the running data catches up with the tactical instruction, when the January arrivals are integrated, when players stop thinking about where to be and simply are there. Iraola’s Bournemouth were a slow burn too, and then they were nobody’s idea of a fun afternoon.

What he deserves in the interim is patience - but not blind patience. Conditional patience. The condition is that we can see it: the shape, the triggers, the intent. If I can watch a Liverpool team in October and describe what they’re trying to do in one sentence, he’s earned the winter. Last season, for long stretches, I genuinely could not.

02. Ruthless Aggression

In 2002, with the Attitude Era dead and the roster full of people waiting for permission, Vince McMahon stood in the middle of a wrestling ring and demanded that somebody, anybody, show some ruthless aggression. It was a call-out dressed as a mission statement. Months later a charmless kid in tights answered an open challenge from Kurt Angle, got asked what on earth qualified him to be there, and gave the phrase back as his answer. That was John Cena. The era was named before the star arrived to fill it.

That’s the correct frame for this Liverpool side. The philosophy is already installed. The question is who steps up to embody it.

What we’ve actually seen from Iraola’s pre-season, in patterns:

The press is man-oriented and it starts high

Not the zonal, trap-based pressing of the last regime, where the block held its shape and waited to spring - this is players picking up bodies and going with them, the striker curving his run to kill the short option, the wingers pressing inside-out to force play down the line, the full-backs jumping their man early. It’s aggressive to the point of rudeness, and it asks enormous physical questions of the front five.

Verticality over circulation

When the ball is won, the first pass goes forward or it’s a failure - and against Leeds you could see it in the goalkeeping too, Mamardashvili going long into space rather than inviting pressure with a short option. Liverpool are going to look, at times, like a team that has forgotten how to keep the ball on purpose, and that’s because they have.

The counter-press is the defence

Against Sunderland, when Liverpool turned it over in midfield, there were three players behind the ball and seven above it - and Sunderland found the space and scored from it. That is not a bug in the system, that is the system: the bet is that you win the ball back within six seconds often enough that the times you don’t are survivable.

Who thrives?

Start with Dominik Szoboszlai, who racked up more pre-season minutes than anyone else in the squad and who has spent three years being asked to be four different players. Iraola’s teams are built around a specific archetype - enormous engine, press-resistant on the turn, genuinely happy in a duel, capable of arriving in the box late. That’s Szoboszlai’s actual profile, not the one he’s been asked to perform. He should be the biggest beneficiary of this appointment of anyone in the building.

Ryan Gravenberch anchoring alone behind him is the other structural bet - his ability to carry out of pressure is what makes the vertical first pass possible in the first place. Miloš Kerkez finally gets a system built for the version of him that Bournemouth developed, rather than one asking him to be a full-back who defends space he was never taught to defend. And on the right, whoever wins the shirt between Jeremie Frimpong and Potential RB Signing is being asked to own an entire flank on their own.

Then the kids. Iraola’s record with young attackers at Bournemouth - Semenyo, Kluivert, Kroupi, Rayan - is not a footnote, it’s a core competency. Rio Ngumoha, and Lewis Koumas banked serious minutes this summer, and in a squad this thin, that isn’t sentiment. That’s the depth chart.

Who struggles? Anyone who needs the game slow. Anyone whose value is in a settled block with the ball at their feet and time to look up. There will be established names in this squad who quietly stop being picked, and it won’t be a scandal - it’ll be a filtering.

03. The Duo Who Will Define The Future

£100m and £125m. British record, then British record again, inside ten weeks. Between them, Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak represent the largest bet Fenway Sports Group have ever made, and last season it returned close to nothing. Everything about how 26/27 is remembered runs through these two.

Let’s be precise about what actually happened, because the discourse has been lazy in both directions.

Wirtz finished with seven goals and eight assists from 49 appearances - five and three of those in the league. He didn’t score in his first 22 outings. Then in January he detonated: five goals in nine games, Player of the Month, a genuine understanding forming with Hugo Ekitike. And then, as the team around him slid, he faded with it - one goal and one assist across his final seventeen appearances.

The underlying numbers offer a sort of defence: 7.58 xG and 5.38 xA in the Premier League against five goals and three assists. He created more, and better, than the return suggests, and some of that was other people missing. He was also shunted between the left, the centre and the bench for the biggest games of the autumn. It is entirely fair to say he played better than his output.

It is also true that no £100m footballer gets to make that argument twice.

What I want back is not statistical. It’s the arrogance. The Leverkusen Wirtz played like the pitch belonged to him - demanding the ball in traffic, taking the ugly touch in the ugly area, going again immediately after losing it. The Anfield Wirtz too often deferred: available, willing, tidy, and somehow peripheral. Timid isn’t a tactical problem you fix with a diagram. Iraola putting him in a genuine number ten role with vertical runners ahead of him removes the excuse; the swagger has to be self-supplied. Encouragingly, he was Liverpool’s top scorer in pre-season, and his own read on last year was that the team needed “to get more intensity into our game” - which suggests he’s diagnosed it correctly.

Isak is a simpler problem with a harder solution. Four goals. 1,033 minutes. Twenty-eight matches missed across a groin injury and then, in December, a broken leg and fractured fibula requiring the first surgery of his career. He’s called it a scary experience, and he’s right. You cannot judge a striker on a season he mostly watched.

But the ledger doesn’t care about mitigation, and here is the brutal arithmetic: Isak scored 23 league goals for Newcastle in 2024/25. That’s the player Liverpool paid for. That’s the player who has to turn up.

The additional pressure, and it’s severe: with Ekitike ruled out until 2027 with a ruptured Achilles, there is no alternative centre-forward of Premier League starting quality at this football club. Isak’s availability isn’t one of the season’s storylines. It might be the season.

They don’t need to justify the fees. They need to make you forget them.

04. Reigniting The Spark

Anfield asked for change and Anfield got it. That transaction is complete, and it came with terms.

The supporters’ side of the bargain is straightforward and it starts on Sunday: back them from the first whistle, and keep backing them through the bad month that is definitely coming. Not because the players have earned it - several of them emphatically have not - but because the alternative is an anxious Anfield in October, and an anxious Anfield makes a young, unsettled, pressing team play like it’s being marked by the crowd as well as the opposition. Whatever grievance you’re carrying from last season, it needs to be left outside. It has nowhere useful to go.

The players’ side of the bargain is the harder one, and it’s the one I’d hold them to more tightly. Too often last season this team was not at 100% - physically, and more damningly, mentally. Lost figures in red shirts, drifting through games that mattered, in a way that simply did not compute against the Liverpool sides of recent memory who left something of themselves on the pitch every week. You can lose a football match. You cannot look like you don’t much mind.

Which is why Van Dijk’s pre-season interview mattered more than the usual captain’s boilerplate. Asked about the campaign just gone, he didn’t reach for excuses: last year, he said, was “unacceptable. But that is last year.” He described a dressing room that he believes is genuinely up for the fight, and made the point that anyone who isn’t up for it is at the wrong club. Coming from a man who played every single minute of last season - more than any other outfield player in Europe’s top five leagues - it carries weight. It’s also, read a certain way, an indictment. If your 35-year-old centre-half never once needed a rest, that’s not a compliment to his conditioning. That’s an accusation aimed at everybody else.

“Last year was unacceptable. But that is last year.” - Virgil van Dijk

He’s set the terms. Now eleven others have to sign them.

05. “A Man Is Only As Good As His Tools”

Let’s be fair before we’re critical: this is not a bad squad. There’s real quality here - a world-class goalkeeper, the best centre-half of his generation still functioning at a high level, a £225m attacking axis, and a youth pipeline producing players who look ready.

What there isn’t, is depth. And in this system depth isn’t a luxury, it’s the precondition. You cannot press the way Iraola wants to press, across four competitions, with fourteen trustworthy senior players. Those two collapsed leads in pre-season weren’t lapses in concentration. They were what happens when the bench can’t hold the standard the starters set.

The window so far: Jérémy Jacquet from Rennes at £55-60m, Víctor Muñoz from Osasuna at £34.5m and Ronald Araújo in on loan from Barcelona with an option to buy. Sensible business. Nowhere near enough. Liverpool have needed a wide attacker since the moment Salah’s exit was confirmed.

Which brings us to Bradley Barcola - and to Richard Hughes. Terms with the player are understood to be agreed, he’s openly willing, he has two years left in Paris and no intention of signing another deal, and PSG have spent the summer buying his replacements.

The fit is what makes the delay maddening. Direct, left-sided, pace in behind, runs at people - the exact profile every Iraola front line at Rayo and Bournemouth was built around. He’d raise this team’s floor the week he walked in. Not in December, when the system clicks. Immediately.

And it’s a legacy question in the most literal sense: Hughes is expected to leave for Al-Hilal the moment this window shuts. It’s his last act as sporting director. The ledger so far reads a £450m window that made the team worse, no renewals for Alexander-Arnold or Konaté, Salah and Robertson gone for nothing, and - with Edwards already out at FSG - nobody above him. He has a fortnight to make the final entry read differently.

You cannot hire a coach whose entire method is relentlessness, then hand him a squad that runs out of players in the seventy-fifth minute.

Get Barcola done. Get Mbaye done. Then find a right-back who can survive the demands of that flank. Everything else on the list is negotiable; those two are not.

06. The Prediction

I’ve said it already, but it bears restating plainly, because the temptation over the next nine months will be to measure this season with the wrong instrument.

Success in 26/27 is not a trophy. A trophy would be lovely - a domestic cup would be an affirmation that something real is being built, and Iraola’s teams have always fancied a cup tie. But the actual metric is whether, in May, you can look back and see a roadmap. A team with a recognisable identity. A style you’d choose to watch on a Wednesday night in February even if the table said it didn’t matter. Football with a pulse.

That’s the standard. Here’s the guess.

Fourth, because the first three months will cost points that the second six can’t fully recover, and because Arsenal and City are further along. Fourth is not a triumph - but fourth with a clear direction of travel is a considerably better place to be standing than fifth with none, which is precisely where we were three months ago.

A cup, because knockout football rewards teams who can raise their intensity for ninety minutes rather than sustain it for thirty-eight games, and that’s exactly the shape of this squad right now.

A Champions League quarter-final, with the enormous caveat that the draw is the draw and nobody has ever successfully predicted it. Get a kind bracket and this team could go further than anyone expects, precisely because it’s awkward - a side nobody wants to face over two legs is a real asset in a competition full of teams who’d rather have the ball.

Miller’s Year One doesn’t end with a victory. It ends with Gordon on a rooftop and a signal that hasn’t been built yet, and the sense that the hard part is only just beginning - but that the method now exists, and it belongs to someone.

That’ll do. Give me a Liverpool side by May that knows exactly what it is, that presses in packs and moves the ball forward like it’s late for something, that leaves the pitch emptied out every week. Give me a reason to feel something on a Tuesday.

The big trophies come in year two. This is year one.

Preseason openers are supposed to be white noise. Fitness levels are all over the shop, the football is disjointed, and you’re squinting for scraps of signal through ninety minutes that will mean precisely nothing come August. Normally I’d tell you not to read too much into it.

Not this one. This was Andoni Iraola’s first match in charge of Liverpool Football Club, and - full-time score to one side - what jumped off the screen wasn’t the scoreline, it was the earmarks of identity. Even at half-speed, in the Tennessee humidity, with a chunk of the first-choice group still working their way back from international duty and beaches further afield, you could already see the shape of what he’s building. There were injury scares, defensive alarm bells, and a Sunderland side who clearly did their homework. But there was also a genuinely thrilling amount to like. Let’s get into it.

01 - The Tactics: Same Sunderland, Completely Different Liverpool

The pressing fundamentals were, in a word, a delight.

Liverpool lined up in a 4-2-3-1, and even with the rust and the heat sapping the intensity out of both sides by the hour mark, the triggers were unmistakably Iraola’s - aggressive, coordinated, front-foot, designed to win the ball high and go again immediately rather than shepherd the game from deep. It’s a world away from what we watched for most of last season, and you could already start pencilling in where the senior players slot into it once the whole squad is back from holiday: a genuine six shielding two aggressive eights, wide forwards told to attack the last line rather than come short and combine, a nine whose first job is to press the first pass rather than drop and link.

You could actually see it in the goals themselves, not just the shape on the whiteboard. The opener was the clearest example - Morrison’s finish after thirteen minutes wasn’t a scrappy preseason bundle-in, it was the product of a genuinely purposeful build-up through McConnell, Ngumoha and Elliott, quick combinations working the ball into space on the right of the box before Morrison found the bottom corner. That’s a team that’s been coached to move the ball with intent rather than just circulate it.

The fourth was even better, and honestly the one that got me the most excited, because of how it started. Sunderland try to play out under pressure, Szoboszlai closes the distance and forces the turnover, and within a few seconds it’s gone Nyoni to Chiesa to Szoboszlai to Koumas, who rounds it off through the middle. Win the ball high, go vertical, finish the move in seconds - that’s not just a nice individual moment, that’s the entire pressing philosophy playing out in real time, start to finish, inside one passage of play. You simply didn’t see that under Slot with any consistency.

And that’s really the takeaway sitting underneath everything else. In ninety minutes of preseason action - low intensity, sweltering heat, a team barely assembled - I saw more intent and purpose behind the formation and the underlying plan than I did across a good 80% of last season under Arne Slot. That’s not a knock thrown out for effect. It’s just what was on the pitch.

You don’t need me to tell you this, though. You need Dan Ballard to tell you this. The Sunderland centre-back was asked post-match about the difference between facing Slot’s Liverpool and Iraola’s, and what he said should be framed …

“The new gaffer sets the team up in the press very differently.” - Dan Ballard, Sunderland centre-back

Ballard went further, and I’m paraphrasing rather than quoting him line for line here, but the gist was this: Sunderland had spent the week specifically studying tape of Iraola’s Bournemouth, because they knew they were about to face a team that goes aggressively man-to-man in the press, plays vertically the moment it wins the ball back, and goes straight for goal rather than resetting through twenty passes. He then made the point that actually stings a bit if you sat through last season - that facing Liverpool under Slot, Sunderland were handed far more time on the ball than they expected, given the club’s pressing pedigree down the years.

That’s the whole diagnosis of last season in two sentences from an opposition defender who has no reason to flatter us. It’s music to every Liverpool fan’s ears, and it’s exactly the deficiency Iraola was hired to fix.

02 - The Youngsters (And the Forgotten Kids)

If the tactical picture was the headline, the personnel was the subplot - and it was a good one. Mor Talla Ndiaye, Ifeanyi Ndukwe, Kieran Morrison and James McConnell all got a proper look, and to a man they looked calm, composed, and technically a level above “just a preseason run-out.” Morrison in particular announced himself with the opening goal after thirteen minutes, cutting inside and finishing precisely - the kind of finish that doesn’t look like a fluke on replay. There’s a future here. Possibly quite a near one.

The Trey Nyoni Question

I want to dwell on one name specifically, because it’s the one that’s been nagging at me all summer. We flagged in a previous piece that Trey Nyoni was strongly considered for a loan move this window. On this evidence, that would be an odd decision to rush into.

Introduced at the break, Nyoni played deeper than we’re used to seeing him - closer to a No. 6 or a deep-lying playmaker than the No. 8/10 hybrid role he’s auditioned in previously - and looked sublime. He read the game extremely well, put his passing range on full display, and looked technically secure in a way that never once suggested a teenager surrounded by senior professionals. Which brings the obvious question: why didn’t Slot trust him more last season? Fourteen senior appearances across a whole campaign for a player this composed on the ball feels light, even accounting for the competition around him.

He’s one to keep a very close eye on for the rest of preseason, and not just as a feel-good academy story. Liverpool need a midfielder this summer. If Nyoni keeps performing like this, the conversation about signing one gets a little more interesting - and the conversation about loaning him out gets a lot less straightforward.

Koumas, Ramsay, and the Fringes

Big shout too for Lewis Koumas, who came on in the second half and finished off a fine team move for Liverpool’s fourth. There’s a Harry Wilson-like quality to him - the versatility to play across the front line, an eye for goal, the kind of squad utility that’s genuinely valuable rather than just a nice academy footnote. I’d love for him to stick around for at least the first half of the season rather than heading out on loan again; that kind of adaptability off the bench is exactly the sort of thing this squad is short of.

Calvin Ramsay also looked good in his cameo at right-back, which - given what’s coming in the next section - is not a throwaway line.

03 - The Centre-Back Dilemma, Rearing Its Head Again

And here’s the bit that’s harder to write with a smile on. It wasn’t even eight minutes into Iraola’s tenure before Joe Gomez - the only senior centre-back in the squad with any Premier League minutes to his name - was forced off with an injury. Which is precisely the nightmare scenario every Liverpool supporter has been quietly dreading all summer.

The centre-back picture right now: Gomez off injured inside eight minutes. Jérémy Jacquet, undoubtedly talented - missing entirely, still working back from a shoulder issue. Giovanni Leoni still recovering from a long-term ACL rupture suffered on his Reds debut. Ibrahima Konaté gone on a free. That’s the entire senior department.

We need an experienced, Premier League-proven centre-back through the door, and we needed it about a month ago. This isn’t a call for panic - it’s a call for basic squad arithmetic. You cannot enter a Premier League season with one fit senior centre-back and a prayer.

Some will point to John Stones as the obvious available option, and look - I love him as a footballer. Genuinely one of the most technically gifted centre-backs of his generation when fit. But his own injury history is exactly that: a history. Stones is a plaster on the problem, not a solution to it. Liverpool need durability as much as they need quality here, and right now they can’t be certain of getting both from the same signing.

It’s also worth saying out loud: we desperately need a starting-calibre right-back this summer too. Jeremie Frimpong has, to put it kindly, failed to convince so far. Between the two positions, this remains the most urgent business of the window - more urgent, arguably, than anything happening in attack.

04 - Szoboszlai: Start As You Mean To Go On

If there was one image from Nashville to bottle and keep, it was Dominik Szoboszlai - fresh off signing a new five-year deal this week - striding off the bench, taking the captain’s armband for the second period, and hammering in an outrageous strike from twenty-five yards to drag Liverpool level. New season, same Szoboszlai. Different manager, same relentless engine.

It matters beyond the highlight reel. Szoboszlai looks built for exactly what Iraola wants — the pressing appetite, the box-to-box running, the willingness to get his shooting boots on from distance rather than wait for the “right” pass. Committing his long-term future to the club in the same week he’s handed the armband and produces that goal is about as good a piece of messaging as Liverpool could have asked for. Start as you mean to go on, indeed.

Encouraging signs, then, for a head coach barely a month into the job, working with a squad that’s missing three of its senior centre-backs and half its attacking options. The pressing identity is already visible. The kids look ready. The problems are the same problems we walked into the summer with. Onwards.

Somewhere in the multiverse there’s a Wednesday evening where none of this needed writing. England go 1-0 up against the world champions in a World Cup semi-final, hold their nerve for thirty-five minutes, and Thomas Tuchel walks into Sunday’s final as the man who could end sixty years of hurt in his first eighteen months.

The sickening thing is … That version existed. We watched it exist, for about ten minutes, somewhere around the hour mark.

Instead it’s Thursday morning. Millions of people across the country have crashed back to reality and in the midsts of the 9-to-5, were the richest prize in international football - the one that would’ve come with a Bank Holiday attached - is a distant memory again. Not because England were second best. Because they had it, and let go.

The identity, the clarity, the rhythm.

Stick a pin in that phrase. We’ll come back to it.

A non-event, until it wasn’t

Let’s deal with the actual football first, because for long spells there wasn’t much to deal with.

Combined first-half xG: 0.08.

Zero point zero eight. To borrow a term from a different kind of theatre entirely, this was never going to be a five-star classic - it was a slobber-knocker, low on quality, referee’d with the conviction of a man who’d rather be back in the hotel, both sides picking up cheap cards without landing a single clean shot between them.

Then, fifty-five minutes in, it changes. Morgan Rogers finds Anthony Gordon wide, Gordon does the rest, and for the first time all night England actually look like the better side - in a World Cup semi-final, with history sat right there waiting to be taken.

That’s the platform. What England built on top of it is the actual story here.

^{Opta’s attacking threat momentum chart for the match - England spend the entire first half and the opening stretch of the second in the ascendancy, then the bottom falls out.}

Look at that graph. That’s not a team that got outplayed. That’s a team that stopped playing.

The numbers that actually damn Tuchel

Forget the eye test. The underlying numbers from the collapse are almost comically brutal, and this is where the phrase “loss of identity” stops being a Tuchel soundbite from March 2025 and starts being a live diagnosis of his own team.

Between 66:04 and 84:50 - eighteen and a half minutes, the entire window in which the game was still England’s to lose - Pickford and Stones combined for two successful passes. Between the two of them. For the best part of twenty minutes.

That’s not a stat. That’s a confession.

Zoom out and it gets worse. From Gordon’s goal in the 55th to Lautaro Martínez’s winner in the 92nd, England had 12% of the ball. In the specific twenty-one minutes after Tuchel switched to a back five, that number reportedly collapsed to single figures - Argentina had somewhere in the region of 93% of possession for the closing act of a World Cup semi-final. You do not sit on a lead against the best player alive by handing him the ball for twenty straight minutes. That isn’t game management. That’s an invitation, hand-delivered, with a bow on it.

The subs made no sense - and I mean none

This is where perplexing stops being a strong enough word.

England are 1-0 up against a side they’ve physically bullied for large stretches of the match - Argentina needed a fortunate ricochet and a genuinely heroic Djed Spence tackle just to stay level before the goal - and Tuchel’s response, in the 72nd minute, is to take off the goalscorer. Gordon, the man who’d just won the game for him, replaced by Ezri Konsa. Back five. Shut up shop, with thirty-five minutes still to play.

Ten minutes later, Reece James and Declan Rice follow him off for Dan Burn and Nico O’Reilly. That’s four attacking or progressive players stripped out of the side inside ten minutes, replaced by bodies whose entire job is to stand still and absorb. By the time Ivan Toney and Marcus Rashford actually appeared, deep into stoppage time, it was already 2-1 and the game was gone. Even Southgate - patron saint of conservative substitutions, a man who once took off a goalscorer against Denmark and got roasted for a decade - never retreated this far, this early, with this much still to protect.

And we need to talk about Harry Kane. This is now a pattern too well-established to keep quietly excusing - the biggest stage, the game that actually matters most, and he disappears. Not injured. Not tactically nullified by some Scaloni masterstroke. Just gone … No movement to drag a tiring centre-back somewhere uncomfortable, no willingness to drop deep and make himself an outlet when the supply dried up, existing on the last touchline of the play as a World Cup semi-final slipped away in front of him. Sixth major tournament as England’s talisman, captain on the night, and when the moment demanded one flash of the ruthlessness that’s made him the country’s record goalscorer, he offered nothing. If the concern is game state, the sub isn’t a third centre-back - it’s Noni Madueke or Rashford on twenty-five minutes earlier, giving England an outlet to run in behind and a body to stretch a back line that had two centre-backs, Cristian Romero and Lisandro Martínez, already on yellow cards and being physically worked over all evening. You don’t invite the greatest player of his generation to slow the game down and pick his spot at his leisure. You make his tired, booked centre-backs run the other way.

Instead England went passive, then weak, and by the 85th minute they’d been comprehensively, there’s genuinely no gentler way to put this - cuckolded on the biggest stage the sport offers, watching a thirty-nine-year-old Messi calmly pull the strings on a winner he barely had to work for.

Compare that to what Spain just did to France

Twenty-four hours earlier, in the other semi-final, Luis de la Fuente’s Spain provided the exact tutorial in how you’re supposed to handle a lead against elite opposition - and it’s worth sitting with the contrast, because it makes England’s collapse look even more avoidable.

Spain went ahead through an Oyarzabal penalty after Lamine Yamal - a day past his nineteenth birthday - won a foul off Lucas Digne. They didn’t retreat. They doubled it through Pedro Porro before half-time, and then they simply refused to let France back into the contest at all. Kylian Mbappé, the tournament’s leading scorer arriving into that game, was suffocated into total anonymity. France didn’t manage a single shot on target until after the eightieth minute. Not down to ten men, not chasing a red card - just strangled, patiently, by a team that never once changed what it was doing because it was winning.

“We have stayed true to an idea,” de la Fuente said afterwards. Four years of it. No panic, no back five, no hauling off the players doing the damage the moment the scoreboard tilted in their favour. Spain didn’t protect a lead by getting smaller. They protected it by staying exactly who they are and daring France to find an answer. France never did. By full time it wasn’t really a contest - it was a demonstration, the psychological equivalent of a team turning to the opposition bench and saying it’s over, and meaning it.

That’s what an identity actually looks like under pressure. Not a switch you flick when you get nervous. A thing you trust enough to not abandon at the exact moment it’s working.

The verdict

Tuchel shouldn’t be sacked. There’s no obvious alternative sat waiting who coaches this group of players better than he does, and he’s already extended his deal through to the home Euros in 2028 - the right call, and everyone involved knows it.

But the scrutiny doesn’t evaporate because “who else” wins the argument. In March 2025, asked a direct yes-or-no question about whether England had a clear playing style at Euro 2024, Tuchel didn’t hesitate. Not last summer, no. He diagnosed it precisely - the identity, the clarity, the rhythm, the repetition of patterns, all missing, replaced by a team playing with the fear of losing rather than the hunger to win.

Sixteen months later, in the one match that mattered more than any other in his tenure, he became the very thing he’d diagnosed. He had the lead. He had the platform. And with thirty-five minutes left to either see it through or find a second goal, he chose fear. Three defensive substitutions before a single attacking one. A back five against a team he’d spent an hour dominating physically. It’s not the first time, either - Bayern did something similar to him in a Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid, protecting a lead by subbing off the threat, and watching it slip away just the same.

Spain showed you don’t have to do that. You can hold a lead by refusing to blink.

England blinked. And the identity Tuchel spent March 2025 telling everyone was missing walked out the Mercedes Benz Stadium after Gordons goal.

There’s a particular sound a sporting director makes when a number lands on his desk that he has no intention of accepting, and this week RB Leipzig made it loudly enough that the whole continent heard. Liverpool went in at €100m - €90m up front, €10m in add-ons, the sort of package that two summers ago would have bought you a finished, peak-years international. Leipzig looked at it, looked at Yan Diomande tormenting one of the best left-backs in Europe on a World Cup stage, and said no. Not “make us think about it.” No.

And here’s the thing that should be tattooed onto the inside of Michael Edwards’ eyelids: that is the correct response from their side, and it changes nothing about what ours should be. Leipzig paid €20m for this kid eleven months ago. They are not in the business of doing Liverpool a favour, and they certainly aren’t doing it in the middle of a tournament that is busy revaluing him by the match. The rejection isn’t a setback. It’s a receipt.

I called this one in the Summer Transfer Primer and I’ll call it again now with more conviction, not less: Diomande is the signing of the window, and the only acceptable outcome is the one where he’s photographed holding a shirt with a Liver bird on it. Whatever it takes. I want to lay out exactly why a €100m teenager with barely a season of top-flight football is not a gamble - he’s probably the safest expensive thing Liverpool can do this summer.

Supply, Demand, and the Lie of “Value”

Let’s start with the bit the title is doing a bad pun about. The market for genuinely elite right-sided attackers is not a market in any healthy sense - it’s a queue, and the queue is long, and the shelf is nearly empty. Liverpool know this better than anyone alive right now, because they are the ones with the Salah-shaped hole to fill and a manager who needs that flank to be a weapon, not a placeholder.

Look at who actually moves the needle on the right at the very top level and is realistically available: the list is embarrassingly short, the asking prices are silly, and the supply isn’t replenishing fast enough to meet the demand from every super-club simultaneously. When the thing you need is scarce and everyone needs it at once, “value” stops meaning “cheap.” Value means securing the asset before the next bidder does. PSG are already circling Diomande. So this is not a negotiation where patience is rewarded — it’s one where hesitation gets punished.

We’ve signed Víctor Muñoz, and I love that deal - an ambidextrous, swashbuckling feeder who’ll thrive under Iraola. But Muñoz is the supporting cast for the front line, not the lead. Diomande is the lead. You don’t replace Mohamed Salah with a committee. You replace him with someone who is going to be talked about in the same breath within three years, and then you build around the certainty of him.

When the supply is this thin, the brave move and the smart move are the same move.

Three Stages, One Verdict

The reason I’m comfortable saying “whatever it takes” about a 19-year-old is that he has now done it in three completely different examination halls, and aced all of them. That matters enormously. Plenty of teenagers light up one league against one set of conditions. Diomande has now proven portability - the single hardest quality to scout - in the space of about six months.

The Bundesliga. Twelve goals and eight assists in his debut Bundesliga campaign, Rookie of the Season, a Player of the Month award in April. A €20m punt that Leipzig now won’t sell for six times the money. He didn’t ease in; he detonated.

AFCON. Thrown into a senior Ivory Coast side at the Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco and asked to perform in a pressure-cooker where reputations are made and unmade in ninety minutes - he scored, he contributed, he looked like he belonged. That’s a very different kind of football to the Bundesliga: more chaos, more physicality, more emotional weight.

And now the World Cup. This is the one that should have any remaining sceptic reaching quietly for the white flag. In Ivory Coast’s opener against Ecuador in Philadelphia, Diomande put on what several outlets called the individual performance of the tournament so far - and he did it against the best possible control group.

Ecuador are not a soft touch. Their back line featured Piero Hincapié - an Arsenal left-back who started a Champions League final last month - alongside Willian Pacho, with Moisés Caicedo shielding in front. This is, on paper, one of the meaner defensive units in the entire competition. Diomande started on the right, switched to the left in the second half, and treated all of it like cones at a youth session.

To put that middle number in context: the entire Ecuador team managed 16 touches in Ivory Coast’s box across ninety minutes. Diomande, on his own, had 12 in theirs. He should have had assists for Pépé and Wahi if they’d been remotely clinical, and he should have scored himself. Amad Diallo got the headline with a late winner off the bench; Diomande got the masterclass. Hincapié spent the night looking like a man being asked to defend a rumour. The burst of pace from a standing start is the kind of thing you can’t coach into a player - you either have it at 19 or you never will.

Three stages. Three different sets of demands. One answer every single time. That’s not a hot streak. That’s a profile.

The Company he Keeps: Elite Isn’t an Opinion Here

This is where the eye test stops being a debate and the data settles it. I’ve pulled three charts, and I’d ask you to sit with each for a second, because individually they’re persuasive and collectively they’re damning - in the best possible way.

Start with the most provocative comparison I could find. Michael Olise is, right now, one of the five best wide attackers on the planet - a €50m-plus Bayern starter, 24 years old, in his pomp. So I put Diomande’s percentile profile directly on top of his, against attacking midfielders and wingers across the Big Five leagues, per ninety.

Read that again. A 19-year-old in his first proper season is sitting level with or above Olise on finishing quality, dribbling, creation via carries, pass accuracy and total value added - and Olise’s profile is itself absurd. The two shapes are nearly twins. The places Diomande “loses” are shooting volume and active defending, and if you’re docking an elite young winger for not tracking back like a wing-back, you’ve never watched one play. Olise scores 13 for active defending. Nobody’s worried about Olise.

Now zoom out from the one-on-one and look at where he lives in the wider population of young attackers.

The names that escape the gravity of the central cluster - Yamal, Doku, Cherki, Williams, Yildiz - are the most coveted young attackers in world football, and Diomande is parked among them on a chart that rewards the two things Iraola’s wide men have to do: beat their man and create from open play. He doesn’t just qualify for that conversation. He’s already in the front row of it.

Here’s what these three charts are telling you in one sentence: the most expensive, most fought-over young wingers on earth are his peer group, not his ceiling. You’re not paying €100m-plus to find out whether he’s good. You’re paying it because he already is, and the only question left is who gets to enjoy the next decade of it.

The Fit - Built for the Iraola Anfield

None of this would matter half as much if the player didn’t fit the football, and this is where I get properly excited. Andoni Iraola wants a Liverpool that plays on the front foot - vertical, transitional, relentless, a team that turns winning the ball back into a goal threat in three passes rather than fifteen. He wants flank players who can carry, who can beat a man without needing an overload to do it, and who can do the unglamorous pressing work that springs the whole machine.

Go back to Fig 2 for a second. Productive dribbles on one axis, open-play creation on the other - that is almost a literal job description for an Iraola wide forward, and Diomande is the dot furthest into the corner that matters. The Ecuador game was the system audition before the system even exists: he carried in transition, he isolated and beat his full-back repeatedly, he switched flanks without losing a beat, and - the bit the ESPNs of the world kept noting - his work rate off the ball was excellent. That’s not a luxury player who needs the team built around him. That’s an engine you can drop into a high-intensity side and watch it go faster.

And here’s the part that should quiet any remaining nerves about backing a teenager: developing exactly this kind of player is the thing Iraola has already proven he can do, repeatedly, with the receipts to show for it. At Bournemouth he took Antoine Semenyo - a raw Championship winger signed for next to nothing - and built him into one of the most feared two-footed forwards in the Premier League, good enough to command a marquee fee when a big club came calling in January. He gambled the best part of £25m on Rayan - a 19-year-old Brazilian with no European football to his name - dropped him straight into his toughest run as a manager, and got goals and assists almost from the off. He gave real minutes in his front line to Eli Junior Kroupi, a 2006-born teenager, precisely because the system rewards youth that can run and press. Justin Kluivert played the best football of his career under him. This is emphatically not a coach who needs the finished article couriered to his door - raising ceilings is the day job. Hand a manager like that a 19-year-old who is already performing at the level Diomande is, and the question stops being whether he grows into the fee. It becomes how frightening he looks once Iraola has had a full pre-season to sharpen him.

Salah gave Liverpool a decade of right-wing certainty. The honest worry about the post-Salah era is that the certainty goes with him. Diomande is the only target on the board who offers a genuine shot at replacing the certainty, not just the position.

The Verdict - Steadfast on the Player. Smart on the Price.

So let’s talk about the number, because the number is the one genuinely awkward part of all this. Leipzig want something closer to €130m - potentially Bundesliga-record money, north of what Liverpool spent on Florian Wirtz last summer. And here’s where I get off the “back up the lorry” bus: I don’t think he’s a €130m player … There’s an argument that they don’t exist, and Liverpool shouldn’t talk themselves into pretending he is. A record fee for a 19-year-old with one elite season on the clock isn’t conviction - it’s letting the selling club set your valuation for you, in the middle of a tournament that’s deliberately inflating it.

But valuing him sensibly and then walking away the moment the gap gets uncomfortable would be its own kind of negligence. I’ve written before about this club mistaking caution for cleverness - and mistaking a record cheque for ambition is the very same trap wearing a smarter coat. Both extremes are a failure of nerve. The deal that should get done here lives in the space between Liverpool’s number and Leipzig’s, and the job of a serious football operation is to build the bridge, not plant a flag at one end and sulk.

“Whatever it takes” was never the same as “whatever they ask.”

The structure is where this is won. A fair headline fee that climbs toward Leipzig’s expectation without touching record territory, loaded with genuinely achievable add-ons - appearances, goals, a Champions League trigger - and a meaningful sell-on percentage that lets Leipzig share in exactly the upside they’re so reluctant to let go of. Stagger the payments. Hand them a figure they can sell to their own supporters without forcing Liverpool to underwrite a teenager at the going rate for a finished superstar. That is a deal all three parties can live with: Leipzig bank a club-defining sum and keep a stake in his future, Liverpool protect their downside, and the player gets the move he’s already made clear he wants. A player who has decided where he’s going is the single biggest lever in any negotiation, and it’s Liverpool who are holding it.

That bridge-building is precisely the thing Edwards and Hughes are supposed to be elite at - the creative structuring, the deal that reads expensive in the headline and shrewd in the small print. It’s the brief they were hired for. The evaluation itself could not be clearer: three stages, elite company, a perfect tactical fit, a manager who’ll weaponise him from day one. The only question left is whether they can close a €20–30m gap with intelligence rather than ego - meeting Leipzig in the middle without either losing their heads or losing their man.

Go back with a second bid - serious, structured, and quick. Not at any price, but at the right one, and before PSG turn this into the kind of auction where everyone overpays and the only winner is the player’s agent. Get the deal that works for all three parties done, and get it done now. Supply this good doesn’t come round twice in a window.

We have done this to Newcastle before. Last summer it was Hugo Ekitike, and before the dust had settled, Alexander Isak too. This summer it is Víctor Muñoz the 22-year-old Osasuna winger who, until roughly twenty-four hours ago, was as good as a Newcastle player. They had a fee agreed. They had personal terms. They had a medical being lined up in the United States, where Muñoz is currently sitting in Spain’s World Cup squad. And then Richard Hughes and Michael Edwards did the thing they have made a habit of doing to Eddie Howe’s recruitment desk: they ignored the negotiation entirely and triggered the €40m release clause.

No haggling. No add-ons to argue over. Just the full clause (in two installments) about £34.5m in real money and a six-year contract that ties Muñoz to Anfield until 2032. He becomes the first signing of the Andoni Iraola era. And if you want a single sentence to explain why I am not remotely surprised, it is this: Iraola has been watching this player in La Liga for two years, and this player is, almost suspiciously, exactly the brief.

In the Summer Transfer Primer I banged on about one thing more than any other - that this squad needed ambidextrous attackers. Not full-backs-who-can-cross or strikers-who-drift, but genuine wide forwards who can occupy either flank, invert or hold width, and hand Iraola the positional flexibility his football lives and dies on. I had a shortlist. Muñoz wasn’t even on it. He should have been.

He is, literally, the brief

Start with where he actually plays.

Across the season Opta logs Muñoz at left wing for 46% of his minutes, right wing for 24%, attacking midfield for 13%, with the rest scattered across centre-forward and the inside-left channel. That is not a winger with a “best side” and a comfort zone. That is a front-three Swiss Army knife.

Here is the wrinkle that makes it interesting. Muñoz is right-footed. A right-footed left winger is the classic inverted type - he comes infield onto his stronger foot to shoot, thread and drift into the half-space. But Osasuna also trusted him on the right, where a right-footer becomes a more orthodox touchline operator who can stand a cross up on the overlap. He isn’t literally two-footed; he is something arguably more useful — positionally ambidextrous. He gives you the inverted threat from the left and the chalk-on-his-boots threat from the right without you changing personnel. That is the precise quality I argued we were short of.

And a separate note there’s a stark, faintly uncanny resemblance to a young Fernando Torres about him. The same slight, baby-faced runner who tore this division apart a generation ago, only this one turns up with the haircut already sorted: a stereotypical Scouse barnet, pre-installed. He’ll blend in on the Kop before he’s kicked a ball.

The dual threat, plotted

Versatility is worthless if you’re mediocre at all of it. He isn’t.

This is every attacking midfielder and winger under 23 across the Big Five leagues with 900+ minutes, plotted on two axes: how much threat their crosses generate against how often they carry forward. Most of the field is huddled in the bottom-left - fine, unremarkable, replaceable. Muñoz is up in the top-right with the names you actually want.

He posts roughly five progressive carries per 90 and a cross-threat figure north of 0.07 - shared territory with Kenan Yildiz, Yankuba Minteh and Nico Williams, and sitting below only the outright freaks of the chart in Jérémy Doku and Lamine Yamal. The point is the combination. Plenty of young wingers carry. Plenty cross. Very few do both at this volume - and the ones who do are not usually available for £34.5m.

The carry, the cross, the chaos

This is what that looks like on the grass.

One hundred and forty-eight progressive carries - five a game - fanning out from the left touchline and the inside-left channel, with the cyan threads marking the most dangerous of them. He is a north-facing player: he gets the ball, turns, and drives. The passing map is deliberately sparser (42 progressive passes, 1.4 a game) because that isn’t yet his primary mode - he’d rather beat you than pass around you. And the crosses panel is where the Isak conversation begins: 21 progressive crosses arrowed into the box from both flanks, several of them high-xT deliveries.

Then the take-ons - the chart that will split a room. Muñoz attempted 178 of them in La Liga last season: 75 completed, 103 not. A 42% success rate isn’t elite; plenty of safer wingers will show you 55%-plus. But look where he’s doing it. He takes people on in the final third, on the touchline, in the corners of the box - the high-value, low-margin zones where a beaten man becomes a chance and a lost duel becomes nothing worse than a throw-in. The blue trails to subsequent xT-positive actions tell you the successful ones are productive. This is a player who accepts a high failure rate as the cost of manufacturing danger.

In a possession-hoarding side that’s a vice. In Iraola’s side it’s close to a job description.

How Iraola will actually use him

Which is the real reason this signing makes sense, beyond the spreadsheet. Iraola’s football - at Rayo, at Bournemouth, and presumably now here - is built on verticality and relentlessness. Win it, go. Wide forwards who carry through the thirds rather than wait for the move to be assembled. Full-backs flying past them on the outside. A front line that presses in a coordinated pack and attacks the instant the ball turns over. It asks its wingers to be ball-carriers and chaos agents first, and finishers a distant second.

Muñoz has spent a full season being exactly that for a mid-table Osasuna that needed him to generate something from very little - he finished as their third-top scorer in a team creating next to nothing. Drop that engine into a Liverpool front line with Isak stretching the channel ahead of him, Wirtz as the connector and the raw materials change entirely. The crosses that found Budimir’s head now find a nine-figure centre-forward’s runs. The carries that ended in a hopeful Osasuna effort now end with options either side. Iraola isn’t buying a finished article - he’s buying a profile he can plug in on day one, because he has spent two years watching it work in his own league.

The hole in the game

So let’s deal with the obvious flaw, because I won’t pretend it isn’t there: Muñoz cannot yet finish to the level of his other tools.

Six goals from 81 shots is a 7.4% conversion rate - and that’s the kind number. His expected goals sat around 5.6, so he isn’t catastrophically wasteful; he’s roughly converting what the model says he should. The problem is upstream of that. His xG-per-shot is low because he shoots from bad places - speculative efforts from distance, half-chances dragged across the face, the byproduct of a carrier who’d rather have a go than recycle. The end product (six and two) flatters neither his territory nor his threat creation.

But here is the line that matters for our specific window. The mandate was never “sign a 20-goal winger.” We have Isak for goals. The mandate was to find dynamic, flexible, chance-manufacturing width to feed him, at a price that doesn’t compromise the rest of the rebuild. Finishing is the most coachable item on this list; he’s 22; and even his modest return came with the shot volume of a player who keeps pulling the trigger. I’d take that profile and coach the conversion every day of the week. The reverse - a clinical finisher who can’t carry, cross or invert - is the thing you genuinely can’t fix.

Two nights that tell the story

Pick two games from his 25/26 and you have the player.

The first is February, against Real Madrid. Against the club that developed him, still owns half his economic rights and holds a buy-back over his head, Muñoz produced the decisive goal in an Osasuna win - and was so good across the month that LaLiga named him its Best Under-23 Player for February. There’s something deeply on-brand about a kid Madrid moved on turning them over, and doing it by running at their full-backs rather than waiting for an invitation. It was the night “promising” became “wanted.”

The second is the bookend: 17 May, the final round, Osasuna at home to Espanyol. They lost 1-2. Muñoz scored, had four attempts, and walked off with comfortably the highest individual rating on the pitch - a 9.2 by one provider’s model - in a beaten side. That’s the Muñoz paradox in ninety minutes: the best player on the grass, on the losing team, dragging a limited group toward something it couldn’t quite reach. He won’t have to do that on his own at Anfield. That, more or less, is the point.

The verdict

Is €40m a steal? Not quite. £34.5m for a 22-year-old with one season of starts and an open finishing question is a fair-to-full price, and the €20m heading straight back to Madrid plus that buy-back clause are caveats worth keeping in the frame. But it’s a sharp price for the profile, and it is emphatically the right profile. It doesn’t close the wide-forward business either - Yan Diomande remains the marquee target, and Muñoz reads as the flexible, ready-now piece rather than the headline one.

We asked for ambidextrous attackers who could play across the front three, carry, cross and create. We got the cleanest possible answer to the question we set ourselves - and we took it out of Newcastle’s hands to do it. I’d call that a good day’s work.

Last summer was the most expensive in Liverpool’s history - the better part of £400m on Isak, Wirtz, Ekitike, Kerkez and Frimpong. It ended in fifth place, with the manager who was handed those players sacked on 30 May.

Sit with that for a second. The most money the club has ever spent in a single window bought a worse team. And the people who spent it - Richard Hughes, the recruitment department, the powers that be sitting above them - start this summer with that on the ledger, and a fanbase that has noticed.

So let me be blunt about what this window actually is. It is not just a squad rebuild. It is a credibility rebuild. This is the summer the sporting hierarchy has to win the dressing room, the dugout and the supporters back - by doing the one thing the last window only half-did: seriously reinforce the squad, and equip Andoni Iraola to succeed rather than hoping he papers over the cracks.

And here is the line I want to kill before it gains traction:

No. Transition or not - new manager, new ideas, bedding-in period and all - that cannot become the alibi it became last year. We already spent a summer being told arrivals were “developmental by design.” We watched what developmental-by-design looked like in March. The brief this time is not patience. It is intent, backed by money, aimed in the right places.

Back in December, I argued January was never about the manager - it was about protecting Liverpool’s competitive floor. Insulation, not ambition. That argument held.

This one is different. This summer isn’t about the floor. It’s about the ceiling - and about whether the men making the decisions are good enough to build it.

The brief has changed from “survive the season” to “rebuild a side capable of competing at the summit of the Premier League again and going deeper into the Champions League - while handing Andoni Iraola a squad that actually fits how he wants to play”. Those aren’t two jobs. They’re the same job, and the people upstairs don’t get to fail it twice in a row.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth that runs underneath everything that follows: before we even get around to outgoings, this squad needs a minimum of five to six signings. Not nice-to-haves. Not depth-for-depth’s-sake. Structural reinforcements with:

• An experienced centre-back

• A right-back

• A midfielder

• Two ambidextrous attackers

Everything below is the why and the who.

The mandate: Iraola’s football is a fitness test, and the current squad keeps failing it

Before a single name, look at the chart.

That’s high-intensity distance, ground covered at 20km/h or more - by position across Iraola’s Bournemouth, measured against the Premier League average since 2023-24. Read it once and the demand is obvious. His defensive midfielders run +16.3% and +12.6% above league average. His attacking midfielder, +14.2%. His left-back, +11.9%. His front line, north of +10%. Only the two centre-backs sit close to the baseline.

This is not a system you survive on talent alone. It is a system you survive on engines - and then on the depth of those engines, because nobody completes that workload twice a week for ten months without bodies behind them.

Now lay that over the season Liverpool just had. Giovanni Leoni’s ACL. Conor Bradley’s knee. Hugo Ekitike’s Achilles. Alexander Isak’s broken leg in December and a stop-start debut campaign. Alisson’s hamstring. Wataru Endo, Joe Gomez and Jeremie Frimpong all losing chunks of the year. The 25-26 squad couldn’t absorb attrition under Slot’s lower physical demands. Hand that same group to a manager who asks his midfield to cover 16% more high-speed ground, and you don’t have a squad - you have a casualty list waiting to happen.

So the number isn’t five or six because it sounds aggressive. It’s five or six because the chart says the floor for competing in Iraola’s football is higher than the one Liverpool are working from.

Let’s go position by position. (Pause)

Defence

The senior centre-back is non-negotiable

With Ibrahima Konaté departure now confirmed — off to Real Madrid as a free agent, exactly the outcome I flagged was more likely than a January resolution - and Joel Matip never properly replaced after his retirement, Liverpool are dangerously thin in the one position the chart says they can afford to be experienced rather than explosive.

The senior pairing behind captain Virgil van Dijk is now Giovanni Leoni and the incoming Jérémy Jacquet. Two enormously promising defenders. Two defenders with, between them, 70 minutes of Carabao Cup football and a major injury already on the books. You cannot run a Champions League campaign on a 34-year-old captain and two kids learning the league in real time. That isn’t a contingency plan. It’s an exposure - the same word I used in December, because nothing about it has been fixed.

The one name with genuine traction is Nico Schlotterbeck.

The appeal is very structural. Schlotterbeck is 26, left-footed, and an aggressive, front-foot defender who is genuinely elite in possession - he’s been Dortmund’s most prolific long passer, the man who turns defence into attack with one ball over the top. That’s a Van Dijk-adjacent supply line, and it’s a profile that complements the kids rather than competing with them. He extended at Dortmund in April, but crucially - he did so while preserving a release clause that, per the German reporting, only a small group of clubs can trigger: Liverpool and Real Madrid among them, for a fee in the €50-60m (£43-52m) region.

There’s even a suggestion Schlotterbeck has told Florian Wirtz in the Germany camp that Anfield appeals. Lovely. But appeal doesn’t activate clauses - decisiveness does, and we’ve seen this club hesitate on a release clause before.

If Schlotterbeck proves complicated, the alternatives split by ambition.

Firstly you have Maxence Lacroix who is a more physical, Premier League-proven option. And then there’s potentially: Illia Zabarnyi, an old Iraola student from Bournemouth who the manager adored — by his own admission he barely ever took him off — and who, having won the lot at PSG in year one, is reportedly unsettled enough that Paris have offered him back to Liverpool, structured as a loan with an obligation to buy. A reunion with the manager, on terms that ease the up-front cost, for a defender Iraola trusts implicitly. On profile and price structure, that one makes a lot of sense.

There will be a new right-back. There has to be.

Let me be unequivocal: a right-back who is not currently at the club will start next season.

Conor Bradley is recovering from major knee surgery and won’t be relied upon to anchor the position from day one. And Jeremie Frimpong - for all his explosiveness - does not, on the evidence, suit what Iraola asks of the role. Go back to the chart and to Álex Jiménez’s profile at Bournemouth: Iraola’s right-back isn’t a converted winger flying up the touchline on instinct. It’s a disciplined, two-way runner with the positional intelligence to invert, hold a line, and sustain output for 90 minutes. Frimpong’s game is overlaps and one-v-one chaos. Brilliant in a different system. A square peg in this one.

So who?

The prominent public links are Marco Palestra and Michael Kayode. Sensible, well-scouted profiles. But I’ve been reliably informed of something less obvious: Nathaniel Brown of Eintracht Frankfurt is a serious Liverpool target this summer if Bayern fail to pay Markus Krösche’s asking price - and the belief inside the game is that his positional versatility is exactly what allows him to be deployed as a right-back.

Now, the honest framing: Brown’s natural home is left-back. He’s left-footed, he made the left flank his own at Frankfurt, and he earned a senior Germany call-up off the back of it - World Cup-bound, no less.

But he is not a one-position footballer. Frankfurt have used him further forward in a more advanced left-sided role when required, and the read on him across the game is of a defender whose positional intelligence and flexibility let him operate wherever the system needs — Nagelsmann himself has talked about Brown being able to play anywhere. That versatility is the whole point: it’s the basis for the belief he can invert and function at right-back, and it’s precisely the kind of bet Iraola’s profile-led recruitment rewards. Brown is 22, ferociously quick, comfortable stepping into midfield, and productive in the final third (four goals and a clutch of assists from full-back this season, 42 of 44 games played - the durability box ticked emphatically). He’s an engine and a footballer first, a “side” second, but as an outside-the-consensus name, it’s the one to watch.

There’s also longer-term thinking at play. Liverpool are interested in Marc Pubill of Atlético Madrid - a versatile 22-year-old who covers right-back and centre-back, essentially a like-for-like Joe Gomez replacement as Gomez moves towards the exit. The complication is Atlético’s stance: he’s now a Simeone favourite, tied down to 2030 and protected by a release clause reported in the absurd €500m range. That’s a “we will not be selling” flag if ever there was one, and any deal would demand a serious premium.

And keep a note of Daniel Banjaqui, the Benfica youngster who starred at the 2025 European Under-17s and is well known to Pedro Marques from his Benfica days. One for the database and the future rather than the first XI - but exactly the kind of low-cost, high-ceiling profile this recruitment regime is built to find.

Midfield

This is where it gets genuinely interesting; because Liverpool’s midfield need isn’t a who, it’s a what.

Run a random poll amongst Liverpool supporters and you’ll get two camps on the profile required:

1. The athletic ball-winner who can progress play - the lung-busting, ground-covering disruptor who wins it back and drives forward.

2. The metronome - the deep-lying conductor who punches passes into the final third and runs first-phase build-up.

Maybe not in those exact words. But you catch my drift. And the fascinating thing is that Liverpool are seriously pursuing one of each.

The metronome is Adam Wharton, and he’d be the crown jewel of this midfield. A 22-year-old left-footed deep playmaker who takes purposeful risks in possession — the rare English midfielder who actively looks to break lines rather than recycle. He’d give Liverpool a controlling fulcrum they simply haven’t had in first-phase build-up. The deal, as I understand it, has been put on ice for now - Crystal Palace are characteristically immovable negotiators and the fee sits in the £70-80m bracket. But there’s an internal expectation that Alexis Mac Allister could move on this summer, and that’s the domino: if Macca goes, the Wharton conversation gets revisited quickly. Worth remembering, too, that Curtis Jones is into the final year of his deal with Inter interested. The midfield is more fluid than it looks.

The ball-winner is Ayyoub Bouaddi of Lille - and the Reds are set to rival PSG for him. He’s the antithesis of Wharton’s profile: 18 years old, all engine and aggression, a defensive midfielder who anticipates danger early, wins his duels and carries the ball through pressure. He’s about to announce himself properly for Morocco at the World Cup this month, which will only inflate his price. But this is the lane Liverpool’s sporting direction has shown it will pay for - premium fees for young, best-in-class players at their position. Bouaddi is exactly that, and he’s the engine the chart practically demands in front of the back four.

Beyond the headline two, there are further links worth logging: Lamine Camara of Monaco (a name I covered in And Could He Play for Liverpool? and still rate as a clean fit), Mamadou Sangaré of Lens, and Alex Scott of Bournemouth - the last of whom Iraola knows intimately from the south coast, and has been tracked by the club from his Bristol City days.

One more, and this one’s a reveal: Trey Nyoni was close to leaving this summer. The youngster was lined up to link with former Liverpool coach Vitor Matos at Swansea on a loan - a deal that, had Arne Slot got his way, could even have been made permanent. Slot’s departure may yet change Nyoni’s calculus. But the interest, and how close it came, was real.

Attack

Anyone with a working internet router knows the headline. Yan Diomande is the primary attacking target - and the expectation, firmly, is that he’ll be a Liverpool player next season.

And you can see exactly why. Diomande is 19, an Ivory Coast international, and he didn’t just have a good debut Bundesliga season at RB Leipzig - he won Rookie of the Season, posting double-digit goals and assists from the right. His father’s dream, by his own telling, was to see him play for Liverpool. The profile - pace, directness, end product, two-footed enough to threaten from either flank - is the post-Salah blueprint the recruitment team has been building toward since Luis Díaz left for Bayern.

There is work to do - the issues with his representation (Max Gradel vs Roc Nation) are real, and they’re the genuine variable here rather than any doubt over Liverpool’s intent. PSG have circled, and Diomande hasn’t hidden a childhood affinity for Paris and a pull towards France through family ties, so this won’t be waved through unopposed. But the mood around the deal is confident: the structure works, the player’s camp and Liverpool are aligned on the direction of travel, and the expectation inside the building is that the paperwork around his representation gets resolved rather than derailing it. Gettable isn’t the word. Expected is.

The other genuine target is Matias Fernández-Pardo of Lille - and this is the one that excites me most on profile. A 21-year-old Belgian who’d be a direct Luis Díaz replacement on the left but can lead the line if needed, he’s been scouted since his Gent days back in 2023, long before Lille. Extremely technical, versatile across the front, and exactly the kind of attacker Iraola loves to develop rather than simply inherit. He’ll cost in the region of €70m - a premium on the raw output, but the bet is on the trajectory, and there’s a queue forming (United, Bayern, Dortmund, Newcastle all watching).

Worth a mention here too: Bradley Barcola. If PSG’s wide logjam pushes him towards regular minutes elsewhere, he’s a ready-made, ambidextrous Premier League-ready profile who’d tick the “two attackers” box on his own. One to keep an eye on if the situation with his contract continues to drag.

Then there’s the short-term problem nobody wants to say out loud. Hugo Ekitike ruptured his Achilles against PSG and, realistically, is not slated to feature at all for much of next season - nine to twelve months out points to a return no earlier than late 2026, possibly 2027. Pair that with Isak’s injury-plagued first year (£125m, a broken leg in December, minutes he never strung together), and Liverpool could start the Iraola era critically short of a fit, reliable centre-forward.

Which raises a question I’ll float rather than assert: could Ivan Toney, on loan, be the short-term fix? A proven Premier League finisher, available out of the Saudi Pro League, on a structure that doesn’t commit Liverpool long-term while Ekitike heals and Isak finds rhythm. It’s not glamorous. But Iraola’s front line runs as hard as any unit on that chart, and you cannot ask Isak … fresh off the season he’s had - to carry that load alone from August.

The bottom line

In December I wrote that Liverpool didn’t need a reset; they needed decisiveness. This summer, they need both - and they need them fast, because the Schlotterbeck clause, the World Cup price inflation on Brown, Bouaddi and Diomande, and the Wharton domino are all clocks ticking at different speeds.

The mandate is simple to state and hard to execute. A senior centre-back to steady the back line. A right-back built for Iraola’s role, not Slot’s. A midfielder - ideally one of each profile, if the budget stretches. Two attackers who can play either side. Five signings, minimum, before you even discuss who leaves.

Get four or five of those right and Liverpool have a squad that can survive Iraola’s football and chase the summit again. Get it wrong - hesitate, blink on a clause, lose a bidding war you should have won - and you’re asking a brilliant, brutal system to run on a squad that already proved, last season, that it breaks.

The data doesn’t lie. Now the recruitment has to match it.

There is no gentle way to frame what landed on Saturday afternoon. Liverpool sacked Arne Slot little more than a year after he was paraded around Anfield as a Premier League-winning manager. A man who, in his debut season in England, delivered the club’s 20th title and was named LMA Manager of the Year.

You can argue the rights and wrongs of it until you’re hoarse, but a sacking is rarely about one thing, and this was a myriad of factors converging at once - a dressing room that had reportedly fractured, a fanbase whose patience had run out, and, underpinning all of it, a style of play.

The football had drifted into something passive and laboured, and at a club built on intensity that was always going to be the fault line. More than any single result, it was the way Liverpool were playing that ultimately cost Slot his job. As Paul Joyce put it:

“Liverpool have decided they need a new manager to give the club the best chance of moving forward with a more front-foot, aggressive and urgent style of football.”

Front-foot. Aggressive. Urgent.

Read that sentence again, then look at who Liverpool have moved for, and tell me this wasn’t a decision made with a very specific replacement already circled in red pen.

Because the man set to walk through the door is Andoni Iraola - and if you wanted to design a manager from scratch to deliver “front-foot, aggressive and urgent,” you’d build something that looks an awful lot like the Basque coach who just took Bournemouth into Europe for the first time in their history.

This is the Ira-era. Let me tell you why I’m so excited about it.

The Philosophy - Respect, But No Fear

Start with the man, because everything else flows from him.

Iraola is, by every account, a fanatic for detail and a zealot for conditioning. This is not a coach who delegates the hard yards. He inherited the Basque obsession with cycling to the point that, during his first Bournemouth pre-season in Marbella, he had the club tune the big screens to the Tour de France while his players ran. Antoine Semenyo, before his January move to Manchester City; admitted that Bournemouth’s players rarely got days off under him. The training is relentless, the standards are forensic, and the demands are physical in a way that the modern game’s more “hands-off” head coaches simply don’t replicate.

If Slot’s reign was eventually criticised for being too light-touch, Iraola is the antidote in human form.

But the conditioning is in service of an idea, and the idea is brave. Iraola wants his teams to attack first and think second. In one of the more revealing interviews he’s given, he explained that he’d often rather see a player carry the ball and force a moment than execute the “correct” positional pass:

“We have to prepare patterns, but we cannot just prioritise them … forget about the pattern, just drive the ball and try to force things to happen. I want him to attack first.”

In a post-Pep era where so much of elite coaching has become about staying in shape - one and two touches, recycle, wait for the structure to crack the opponent open, Iraola has done something close to heretical. He’s handed initiative back to his players and told them to make things happen. He values the dribble. He values the risk. He values verticality over patience.

And it comes packaged with a mentality that should resonate at a club like Liverpool. On facing the giants of the league, his line is one I keep coming back to: you can have respect for the big teams, “but no fear.” Bournemouth, under him, beat Liverpool, beat Arsenal, took points off Manchester City - not by parking up and praying, but by going at them. That’s not naivety. It’s a deliberate refusal to be intimidated, drilled into a group of players who, on paper, had no business going toe-to-toe with the elite.

Pep Guardiola, not a man who hands out praise lightly - has called Iraola’s Bournemouth “completely alive, aggressive, and well organised,” and gone as far as to say that the way Bournemouth play is the direction modern football is heading. When the most influential coach of the era is using your team as the reference point for where the game is going, you are doing something right.

The System - What He Actually Asks Of Players

Philosophy is nice. Let’s talk about the machine.

Iraola’s nominal shape last season was a 4-2-3-1, though the truth is messier and more interesting than any single formation graphic can show. In the press it routinely flexed toward a 4-1-3-2 / midfield diamond that could collapse into a flat 4-4-2 when forced deep. The shape is a starting point, not a cage.

Out of possession - the hybrid press: This is the signature. Bournemouth don’t press like the early-Klopp gegenpress of pure chaos; they press like a trap. They begin in a zonal block designed to choke off central routes, with the striker making a curved run to shepherd the goalkeeper into playing wide to a centre-back. The moment the ball travels to one side, the trigger fires and the whole unit jumps man-to-man, hunting in packs, with the wingers tucking in narrow to protect the centre and the far full-back deliberately left as the “free” man because he’s the hardest pass to reach. Crucially, Iraola instructs his centre-backs to follow dropping forwards aggressively - high-risk, high-reward defending that most managers wouldn’t dare coach.

Get this right and it suffocates teams. Get it wrong: as Bournemouth did in Iraola’s first months, when the players hadn’t yet internalised the triggers - and it leaks badly. The whole system is a coaching project that takes time. Hold that thought; we’ll need it later.

In possession - vertical, direct, fast: The first instinct on winning the ball is to “play to the number nine,” because that’s the moment the opponent is least organised and the spaces are biggest. Bournemouth don’t dominate the ball — they had 50.1% possession last season, almost exactly league average — and they don’t want to. They want to go through you, not around you. Roughly 35.5% of their passes went forward, among the most vertical in the division, and they attacked at an average of 1.88 metres per second - among the quickest upfield movement in the league. Attacks are funnelled down the wings, with full-backs flying forward and wingers drifting inside into the half-spaces.

The transition game. This is where the press and the verticality fuse into one weapon. Win the ball high, hit the nine, get bodies into the box before the opponent can reset. And here’s the underrated part that pundits routinely miss: a high-pressing team should be vulnerable to counters the other way - yet Bournemouth were among the hardest sides in the league to break in transition, because the zonal foundation and the screening midfielder mean they’re rarely as exposed as the risk profile suggests. It’s aggression with a safety net.

The player asks are brutal and specific. Full-backs must defend one-on-one and provide the entire width going forward. Wingers press like auxiliary midfielders and create like forwards. The double pivot - Tyler Adams the relentless screen, Alex Scott the carrier - has to cover acres, win second balls from goal-kicks, and spring the break. And the striker (Evanilson) is the trigger man for the whole press and the first option in transition. Nobody hides. Nobody coasts. That’s the deal.

The Season - A Record-Breaker, By The Numbers

Let’s reaffirm all of the above with the receipts, because Iraola’s final Bournemouth season wasn’t just stylistically pretty - it was historically good.

A sixth-place finish - the highest in the club’s history, breaking the points record he’d already set in each of his three seasons there. Europa League football for the first time ever. And an 18-game unbeaten run to close the campaign: the longest single-season unbeaten streak by any side in the Premier League this year, and the first time a team outside the established “big five” has managed it in the Premier League era. He did all of this after the club sold four of its first-choice back five last summer - Huijsen, Kerkez, Zabarnyi, Kepa - and then cashed in on his top scorer Semenyo in January. They should have fallen apart. They got better.

The underlying numbers tell the story of the identity:

• PPDA of 11.1: proactive without being reckless, backed by 446 pressed sequences and an average recovery 42.5m from their own goal. They won the ball back 298 times high up the pitch, turning 57 of those into shots.

• An attack that generated 61.9 xG from 524 shots: note they actually under-performed their xG slightly (58 goals scored), which hints at a finishing ceiling that better personnel could raise.

• The clearest fingerprint of the lot: direct attacks (83, producing six goals) out-scored slower build-ups of 10+ passes (63, producing four). This is a team that hurts you fast, not a team that strangles you slowly.

• And a defence that over-performed: 48 conceded against 52.0 non-penalty xG, a tidy −4.0, with 70% of the shots they faced coming from inside the box - they don’t give up clean central looks easily.

If you want the trend lines, the reference charts back the narrative up beautifully:

The blend xG-adjusted differential of +0.34 (strength-of-schedule and red-card adjusted) shows a side that finished the season trending upward - that green “for” line climbing and the pink “against” line falling away across the final stretch, exactly mirroring the 18-game unbeaten run. This is not a team that limped over the line; it’s a team that was getting better as the season ended.

The npxG-per-shot picture is the honest counterweight, and it’s the one I’d flag to temper the hype: Bournemouth’s chance quality - both created and conceded - sat right around league-neutral (0.11 each way). Their edge came from volume and transition, not from manufacturing elite-quality chances per shot. That’s a meaningful distinction when you start imagining this at Anfield (more on that below).

And the SkillCorner pressure map is the visual proof of the press. Bournemouth’s zones light up green — above league average pressure — across the middle and attacking thirds, including the wide high areas where the trap springs. It is one of the most aggressive pressing profiles in the entire division, and it is no accident.

At Anfield - How It Looks With This Squad

Here’s where it gets genuinely thrilling, because - and Opta made this point too … Liverpool are already set up to play this way. They had more shots from fast breaks (51) than any team in the league last season, and topped the division for goal-ending high turnovers. The bones of an Iraola team are already in the building.

The more useful exercise is to take everything above - the hybrid press, the vertical build-up, the relentless running - and ask two questions of this squad: who does the system make better, and what does it expose? Here is, roughly, how it could line up.

The players who win from this

Ryan Gravenberch is the keystone. A ball-carrying, ground-covering No. 6 who was arguably Liverpool’s best player across the last two seasons — he is tailor-made to be the screening, springing midfielder at the base of this system, the man who lets everyone in front of him gamble. Florian Wirtz is the other obvious winner: handed a free, vertical No. 10 role with licence to “attack first,” he’s a far more natural fit than he ever was as a cog in a slow possession machine - Iraola hands creators freedom, not a script. And Alexander Isak as the trigger nine - the man the press is built around and the first ball in transition - is a more flattering brief than leading a static attack. Both endured difficult, expensive debut seasons; Iraola’s record of getting more out of misfiring talent is the single biggest reason to believe they bounce back.

Milos Kerkez might be the neatest fit of all. He’s already at Liverpool - and Iraola developed him at Bournemouth. The new manager inherits a flying, system-literate left-back who already speaks the language; the relentless up-and-down output an Iraola full-back has to produce is exactly what Kerkez was built for. Behind him, Dominik Szoboszlai’s engine and pressing appetite map neatly onto the running demands of this midfield.

The build-up - the area that quietly broke last season. This is where I think Iraola can fix something Slot never did. Liverpool’s first-phase build-up was a problem all year: losing Trent Alexander-Arnold — one of the great progressive passers and the man who set the tone of the first phase — left a side that too often struggled to play out cleanly and progress the ball with any control. Iraola’s answer isn’t to turn Liverpool slow and possession-obsessed; it’s structure with purpose. His sides build from a defined shape - a screening pivot dropping in, full-backs giving height and width, centre-backs comfortable being pressed - but the intent is always to get vertical the moment the picture opens. The structure exists to create the forward pass, not replace it. A Gravenberch-anchored first phase, a genuine progressive right-back, and a vertical outlet in the nine hand Liverpool a build-up identity again - one that travels forward instead of sideways.

The four profiles Liverpool must sign

Now the honest part, because that projected XI cannot be filled by the players currently on the books. The system - and a brutal summer of departures - leaves four clear gaps. The encouraging thing is that most were already near the top of Liverpool’s list before the manager even changed.

An experienced centre-back. This is now arguably the most urgent job on the list. With Ibrahima Konate leaving on a free and Joe Gomez’s future uncertain, Liverpool are staring at a back line built around a 34-year-old Virgil van Dijk and two highly-rated but young, currently-injured centre-halves in Giovanni Leoni and Jeremy Jacquet. Iraola’s defence is asked to hold a high line and defend huge spaces one-on-one — that is no place to throw raw youth in cold. Liverpool need a ready-made, senior centre-back who can play on the front foot next to Van Dijk and share the leadership load while the kids develop. Not a project. A starter.

An attacking right-back. Iraola’s full-backs provide the team’s entire width and spend their lives overlapping - and the right side is unresolved. Jeremie Frimpong was bought and then miscast as a winger, and I’m not convinced he’s the answer to what this system actually needs. The brief isn’t a sprinter shoved infield; it’s a genuine, two-way attacking full-back who owns the flank - relentless on the overlap, comfortable arriving in the final third to deliver, and disciplined enough to defend his one-v-one when the press is bypassed. The right-back you’d build for this team looks a lot like the one Iraola had at Bournemouth: chalk on his boots, end product, lungs for days. That’s a genuine recruitment priority, not a problem you tweak your way around.

A ball-winning engine in midfield. I’ve previously said that Liverpool want “greater physicality in midfield,” and it’s not hard to see why - the midfield looked leggy all season, and Alexis Mac Allister’s lack of raw athleticism in particular was flagged as a problem. Mac Allister is a wonderful footballer, but the every-blade-of-grass running an Iraola midfield demands is the exact profile he doesn’t have, and Wataru Endo has been openly discussed as an upgrade target for over a year. Liverpool need a high-energy, ball-winning No. 8 to sit alongside Gravenberch - pressing on a hair-trigger, covering ground both ways, driving the ball forward the instant it’s won. Get that one right and the spine snaps into place.

A wide forward. The attack has been gutted: Mohamed Salah has gone after a long, emotional goodbye, and summer signing Hugo Ekitike is set to miss most of 2026 with an Achilles injury. Wirtz, Isak and Gakpo give Iraola a serious spine through the middle and left, but the right flank Salah owned for the best part of a decade is now a hole. This system runs on wide forwards who press like demons and attack the box at speed - so the profile is specific: a quick, direct, hard-running wide man who contributes at both ends, not a luxury who only turns up with the ball. Find that and the front four genuinely excites.

None of this is small. But it’s also coherent - four targeted profiles, not a scattergun rebuild, and most of them already on the club’s radar. Land them and the gap between “the squad Iraola inherits” and “the squad Iraola wants” closes faster than the table this season would suggest.

The Risks - Let’s Be Honest

I’m excited. I’m also not going to insult you by pretending this is risk-free, because it absolutely is not.

1 - The intensity question: The big one

This is the concern that keeps surfacing, and it’s a fair one. Bournemouth, for the most part, played once a week. Liverpool will be juggling the Champions League, two domestic cups and a title race, often on a Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday rhythm. Can you really sustain football built on maximal physical output - the every-blade-of-grass pressing, the relentless transitions - when you’re playing every three days for ten months? An identity that wins points across 38 fixtures is a different proposition stretched across 55+. The squad has to be deep enough, and conditioned enough, to carry it without the wheels coming off in spring — a genuine open question, not a given. It’s also, in fairness, exactly the kind of physical-preparation problem Iraola’s conditioning obsession is built to attack; the worry is the calendar, not the coach’s appetite for it.

2 -The slow start

Iraola did not win any of his first nine games at Bournemouth. The system takes time to coach because the pressing triggers have to become instinctive. Liverpool fans, an owner group, and a fanbase that just sacked a title-winner for going stale will not have the patience that Bournemouth - a club with nothing to lose - could afford. If September is rocky, the noise will be deafening. The club has to hold its nerve in a way it conspicuously failed to this past year.

3 - Chance quality, not just chance volume

Remember that npxG-per-shot chart sitting at league-average? At Bournemouth, transition volume papered over ordinary chance quality. Against deep blocks - which Liverpool will face far more often than Bournemouth ever did, because teams sit in against the Reds - pure verticality can run into a wall. Iraola will need to prove he can break down packed defences with elite players, not just punish open ones in transition. That’s a different test entirely, and it’s the one Slot’s possession game was at least designed to solve.

4 - Possession retention under pressure

Bournemouth were, by their own data profile, one of the worst sides in the league at keeping the ball under pressure - a deliberate by-product of the risk-it-forward approach. At a club expected to dominate the ball most weeks, that trade-off needs careful recalibration.

None of these are reasons not to do it. They’re the things that have to go right for it to work - and they’re the reasons this is a bold appointment rather than a safe one.

The Verdict: Bring On The Ira-Era

Here’s where I land, and I’ll nail my colours to the mast.

Liverpool had a choice. They could have hired safe, steady pair of hands to stabilise a wobbling ship and manage the decline gracefully. Instead, they’ve gone for the most exciting young coach in the league: a relentless, detail-obsessed, fearless tactician. They’ve hired a man Richard Hughes knows intimately from their Bournemouth days, who plays exactly the “front-foot, aggressive and urgent” football the club has publicly said it wants, and who has a proven, repeated record of making players better and beating the giants without fear.

Yes, there are risks. The intensity across a brutal calendar, the patience required for a slow burn, the rebuild he’s walking into, the question of whether transition football scales against deep blocks with the weight of Anfield on it. I’ve laid them out honestly because they’re real.

But I keep coming back to that mentality - respect, but no fear - and the thought of it being poured into a squad with Gravenberch’s legs, Wirtz’s imagination, Isak’s movement and Kerkez already fluent in the language. Get the midfield engine right this summer and this could be the most fun Liverpool have been to watch since the heavy-metal years.

I didn’t want safe. I wanted alive. And on the evidence of three record-breaking years on the south coast, alive is exactly what Andoni Iraola brings.

Welcome to the Andoni-era. I can’t wait.

There’s a phrase that’s clung to this Liverpool front office for two years now, and it’s curdled from a compliment into something closer to an accusation: smartest men in the room. Best-in-class recruitment. The club that doesn’t get dragged into the market’s emotion, that lets the data do the talking, that quietly out-thinks everyone while the rest of the league flails about. The entire identity was built on a single idea - that there was a plan, and that the plan was smarter and more meticulous than yours.

So here’s a simple question, and it’s the one this whole piece is really about.

I’ve followed this football club for most of my 30 plus years and as the news landed last night that Ibrahima Konaté is the latest to head out of the door on a free transfer, I honestly could not tell you. Not in a sentence. Not in a paragraph. I couldn’t tell you what kind of team Liverpool are trying to build, what system it’s being built for, or what the timeline is to get there. And if I can’t … if the pundits can’t … if other supporters in the stands can’t - then you have to seriously wonder whether the people actually making the decisions can either.

That’s the real story here, and it’s a far more damning one than any individual transfer. A club whose entire reputation rests on having a smarter masterplan than everyone else now appears to be operating without a plan anyone can actually discern.

Champions by ten points twelve months ago. Fifth on sixty points now, trophyless, scrapping for a Champions League place it used to treat as a formality - and busily dismantling the squad from what was supposed to be replenish from a position of strength. You don’t tear a winning team down to the studs by accident. So either there’s a grand design that nobody has bothered to explain to anyone, or there isn’t one at all. I’m not sure which of those is more frightening, and neither is a good look for the smartest men in the room.

Let me be clear about what this piece is and isn’t. It isn’t a tantrum about one bad decision - one bad decision is just football, every club is allowed to make them.

The alarming thing is the pattern, and the silence sitting on top of it. So let’s walk through some decisions one by one, because each is baffling enough on its own. It’s the way they stack up - with no visible thread tying them together … that should really worry you.

Remember when “smart” actually meant something?

It’s worth pausing on what the reputation was built on, because it wasn’t a myth. There was a stretch where this club seemed incapable of getting a transfer wrong. They paid what looked like over the odds for Virgil van Dijk and Alisson, took the eyebrow-raises on the chin, and were proven completely right. They found value the rest of the league couldn’t see and they sold at exactly the right moment. The model worked because everyone was bought in and the decisions were ruthless without being reckless.

That’s the version of Liverpool that earned the swagger. The problem is that the swagger has long outlived the results, and somewhere along the way the people running the club appear to have started believing their own press. Confidence curdled into something closer to arrogance, and arrogance is how you end up here.

And look … I’ve supported this club my entire life. I’m thirty-four (shocking I know). I sat through the nearly-men years and the false dawns, the title droughts that felt like they might never end, and then I got to watch us become champions of England and of Europe. I’ve seen the whole arc, lean years to the ultimate triumphs. So this isn’t the wounded pride of a glory-hunter who only showed up for the parades. It’s the specific, gnawing unease of someone who knows exactly what a clear plan looks like at this football club - because we have lived through one, and it was glorious … and who cannot find a single trace of it right now.

The Trent problem, and the non-answer they gave it

Start with Trent, because everything kinda flows from here.

Whatever you make of how he left - and running a contract down to join Real Madrid was never going to win him a fond farewell, you cannot pretend the club lost a replaceable player. They lost arguably the finest passer in the division and, more importantly, the single most important tone-setter in the first phase of their build-up. This is the part that gets lost in the noise about assists and free-kicks. Trent’s real value was structural. He set the tempo before anyone else had touched the ball. He broke the first line of a press with one disguised pass. Liverpool’s entire method of playing out and progressing the ball up the pitch was, to a huge degree, organised around what he could do from deep on the right.

So how did the cleverest recruitment department in the game replace that? They signed Jeremie Frimpong.

A right wing-back. A player whose entire productive career - and I do mean his entire career … was built inside a back three under Xabi Alonso at Leverkusen. Genuinely electric in that setup: a flying, overlapping outlet in a structure designed specifically to spring him forward. In the two seasons before he arrived at Anfield, he started as an orthodox right-back a handful of times. That isn’t trivia. That’s the entire profile of the footballer.

And then, having signed a back-three wing-back to replace a back-four playmaker, Liverpool spent large chunks of the campaign shoving him even further from his natural habitat - pushing him up as a right winger, where his lack of close control and combination play in tight areas was exposed rather than hidden. The numbers tell the story: a return of around four goal contributions all season, two league assists, a debut year so disjointed by hamstring trouble and positional confusion that Ronald Koeman left him out of the Netherlands’ World Cup squad entirely, while Van Dijk, Gakpo and Gravenberch all packed their bags.

The on-pitch consequence were predictable and it was visible every single week: a Liverpool team that simply could not progress the ball cleanly through the first phase. You don’t replace a metronome with a sprinter and then act baffled when the music stops.

Which is where the question rears its head for the first time, and it will not be the last. What was the plan? Replace your single most important ball-progressor with a player who needs a back three to breathe, then deploy him in a role he has never convincingly played - what, exactly, was the outcome that was being worked towards there?

The “pacey wingers will fix it” fantasy

Which brings us to the comfort blanket the club and a chunk of the support keep clutching: pacey wingers. Get a flyer in on the right, replace Salah’s threat, and Slot’s stuttering system roars back to life. Job done. One summer, problem solved.

It won’t be. Not in one window, and quite possibly not in two, because the rot here is structural, not cosmetic.

There’s a wider misread sitting underneath all of this that smarter people than me have flagged: Liverpool spent the last couple of years assembling a roster of technical, possession-minded footballers at the precise moment the Premier League was lurching towards something more direct, more physical, more transition-heavy. Strip the pace and dynamism out of the wide areas - and the exits of Luis Díaz and Trent did exactly that, and you’re left with a side that’s tidy in front of you and toothless in behind. That isn’t a problem a single quick winger papers over. When your build-up is broken at the source, when you can’t get the ball into your front line with any platform or control, it doesn’t matter how fast the man on the touchline is. You’re just asking him to chase lost causes more quickly than the last guy.

And here’s the cruelty of it: the pressure on whoever does arrive this summer will be higher than it has ever been …

These won’t be signings handed a gentle season to settle. They’ll be expected to sprint straight into a team that’s mislaid its identity, in front of a fanbase that has run clean out of patience. That is the single worst environment in which to ask a new, expensive player to find his feet - and the front office has built that environment with its own hands.

They sold us a squad-maximiser. So why won’t he use the squad?

Here’s a contradiction that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime.

Arne Slot was pitched to us as a coach who develops players and maximises a squad — a manager who could take what was already at the club, rotate intelligently, improve individuals and get more out of the group than the sum of its parts. That was a big part of the sell. So it’s worth asking, honestly: who has he actually improved this season beyond Szoboszlai? And more pointedly — when the midfield was creaking and the attack was misfiring, why were perfectly serviceable senior options left to rot on the bench?

Take Wataru Endo. A player who, under Klopp, was trusted with real minutes, and who in Slot’s first season was at least a reliable “closer” off the bench. This season he was reduced almost to an irrelevance - a few hundred minutes, barely a handful of which came in the league, the bulk of his rare outings arriving in cup ties or in pure emergency. At one point Slot was so short he stuck Endo at right-back against Sunderland, which is where the poor man picked up the serious injury that ended his year. A specialist defensive midfielder, used as an emergency full-back rather than in the position the club pays him to play. If your midfield balance is a problem all season, and you’ve got an experienced number six on the payroll, that is a choice. A baffling one.

Then there’s Federico Chiesa. A European Championship winner, a player who at his peak was one of the most dangerous wide attackers on the continent, signed for a cut-price fee precisely because the smart guys spotted value. Across two seasons at Anfield he has managed a grand total of two Premier League starts. Two. He was left out of the Champions League squad entirely. He was frozen out even during Salah’s absences, with Slot preferring to shuffle Frimpong and Szoboszlai into wide roles rather than turn to an actual, you know, winger. Slot himself eventually conceded the Italian’s quality deserved more game time - which only sharpens the question, because if you agree he deserved minutes and you still didn’t give him any, what exactly was the plan?

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot brief that squad depth is part of the grand design, that you’ve assembled options for a gruelling season, and then refuse to use the options the moment the season gets gruelling. Either the recruitment built a squad the coach didn’t want, or the coach ignored a squad that was perfectly capable of helping. Both readings reflect terribly on a club that prides itself on joined-up thinking, and somebody … anybody … should be made to explain which one it is.

The goalkeeper that simply doesn’t add up

Now to the goalkeepers, because this one might be the purest distillation of the whole muddle.

Giorgi Mamardashvili looked genuinely commanding for a turgid Valencia side that finished 12th in La Liga. He then looked a fraction of that player when he was thrown in to deputise for the injured Alisson, during the exact stretch where the Anfield crowd’s patience with Slot snapped. Three clean sheets in around twenty appearances, and now — barely a season in — reports of him being offered around Serie A on loan because he can’t see a route to regular football. Roughly £29m for a keeper the club may ship out temporarily in his second year.

And the gut-punch underneath it: Caoimhín Kelleher, the man Liverpool effectively moved on to make room for Mamardashvili, is thriving as a genuine number one at a well-run, well-coached Brentford. Klopp once called him the best backup goalkeeper in the world, and he was right. Liverpool waved him off to bankroll a succession plan that has, so far, made the team demonstrably worse between the sticks. You could hear the verdict from the stands the day Brentford visited - they were chanting his name. The fanbase has already marked this one’s homework.

So, once more, with feeling: what is the plan? Move on the best second-choice goalkeeper in the world to install a long-term upgrade who has gone backwards in his first year, seemingly can’t kick the ball (?!?!?) and may now be farmed out on loan himself. I would genuinely love for someone at the club to walk me through the logic of that, start to finish. I suspect they can’t.

“Best in class” - at what, precisely?

This is the part that ought to sting the most, because it goes straight at the self-image.

A recruitment department that loves to tell anyone within earshot that it’s best-in-class, that it marries data and instinct better than anyone alive, that it sees value the dullards in the market miss. Fine. Show me. Because what that vaunted blend of data and emotion actually produced was the single biggest spend in the club’s history - knocking on half a billion pounds in one window, with nine-figure outlays on the marquee names … followed by a season of regression, players deployed out of position, and big-money arrivals either misfiring or never properly platformed. The headline signings carried the kind of price tags that demand immediate impact and delivered a debut campaign most of them will want to forget.

High fees. Low returns. Profiles that didn’t fit the league the club was actually playing in. That isn’t best-in-class. That’s a process that’s mistaken its own confidence for competence, and kept doubling down.

And where, in the middle of all this, is Richard Hughes?

Which leaves the man whose fingerprints are on every one of these decisions: Richard Hughes. The chief decision-maker, his deal ticking down towards its expiry, apparently content to oversee a full tear-down … to the studs … of a squad that was supposed, just twelve months ago, to be reinforcing from a position of absolute strength. Champions. Ten points clear. The plan was to build on a throne. Instead we’re watching a controlled demolition, and not one person in a position of authority has bothered to tell the people who fund the whole thing why.

That’s the real failure here, more than any single transfer. Where is the explanation? Where is the roadmap, set out in plain terms …

Here is what we’re doing, here is why we let Trent and Salah and now Konaté leave for nothing, here is the squad we’re building towards and the timeline we’re building it on?

Look across at the Bundesliga, where the Sportdirektor is expected to front up to the media regularly, to own the strategy out loud, to sit in the chair and take the questions when results sour. That’s just the culture over there. Over here, we get the occasional statement of vague faith that the signings will come good, and precious little else.

Hughes should be front and centre right now. Not sheltering behind his media minions in Alex Crook and Ben Jacobs. Out there, on the record, explaining himself to a nervy fanbase watching its heroes leave for free on what feels like a weekly basis. Instead the silence does the talking - and when the decisions are this baffling, silence starts to sound an awful lot like nobody actually has a plan.

The bottom line

So here we are, right back where we started. Smartest in the room.

Except being utterly convinced you’re the smartest in the room is precisely how you end up somewhere like this. It’s how you talk yourself into letting elite players walk for nothing because you’re sure you’ll find better value elsewhere. It’s how you buy in bulk and tell yourself you can reshape an entire identity in a single summer. It’s how you stay quiet when the fans are screaming for answers, because surely you’re cleverer than the noise.

And what that thinking has actually delivered is a strikingly unhappy fanbase, a squad with far, far too much to do in far too little time, and a football club whose direction nobody can confidently describe - least of all, it seems, the people steering it.

The smartest in the room would never have let it come to this.

I have asked the same question all the way through this piece, in front of every decision, and I have not been able to answer it once: what is the plan? The honest, dispiriting conclusion is that I no longer believe there is a coherent one - and if there is, the people who owe us an explanation have decided we don’t need to hear it.

So I’ll ask the bigger one instead, one final time, since nobody at the club seems remotely willing to: what the fuck is going on at Liverpool Football Club?

There is a type of midfielder who makes a team feel different without ever dominating a match in the conventional sense. No 40-yard switch that sets the crowd off. No moment where the camera lingers. Just a relentless, quietly suffocating presence — winning the ball in places you didn’t expect, playing forward when others would recycle, arriving in the box at the exact moment the gap appears. Lamine Camara is very much that midfielder. And then some.

The 22-year-old AFCON winning international has spent two seasons building a quietly exceptional case at Monaco - 158 ball recoveries in 20.6 ninety-minutes this season, a 95th-percentile assist rate, and a PassSonar that points persistently forward and right with the kind of directional precision that only comes from a player who sees the game ahead of it. The question, as always with this series, is a simple one: could he do it at Anfield?

Liverpool’s 2025–26 season made that question urgent rather than academic. The club that won the title twelve months ago finished fifth on 59 points as Arsenal ran away with the league. The squad that looked settled in the summer unravelled in the central corridor; Mac Allister’s form dropped, Szoboszlai’s contract situation continues to drag, Curtis Jones looks to be off. For long stretches Liverpool looked like a side playing in spite of their midfield rather than through it. The rebuild this summer has one clear priority above all others. This side needs a midfielder who defends with conviction, connects play intelligently, and delivers the progressive ball into the space for attackers.

The Defensive Map: Where He Wins It, and Why the Geography Matters

Look at the defensive action map below and the first thing that registers is the density of activity across the entire vertical channel - not just in Monaco’s defensive half, but pushed well into the middle third and beyond. This is not a midfielder who defends from in front of the back four. Camara defends across the full length of the pitch, adjusting between a screening six and an aggressive presser depending on what the game’s moment demands.

Across 20.6 ninety-minutes in 2025–26: 158 ball recoveries. 55 tackles. 61 combined interceptions and blocked passes. 19 clearances. The framing of those numbers matters enormously. This is not a creative midfielder who does some defensive work on the side. This is a defensive midfielder who also creates at elite percentile levels. That distinction determines the positional role he fills, the tactical gap he plugs, and which Liverpool squad slot he walks into.

What the map also reveals … and this is the analytically interesting part - is the geographic spread of where those actions occur. The darkest red concentration sits in the central corridor around the halfway line and into Monaco’s own half, consistent with a midfielder occupying the double-pivot base. But the actions spill outward: toward the flanks, upfield into the attacking half, and particularly into a dense cluster in the right half of the pitch around the opposition’s central area. This is the pressing zone Hütter deploys: Camara jumps forward as the trigger-presser while Denis Zakaria provides defensive cover behind. The hooking tackle he uses to win the ball from advanced positions - long legs, low centre of gravity, a directional sweep that avoids the body; is what makes this possible without conceding the fouls a less physically articulate midfielder would.

Twenty-eight fouls conceded across 20.6 ninety-minutes is the honest caveat buried in the data. Approximately 1.4 per 90. That rate is directly produced by the aggressiveness that also generates 158 ball recoveries — it is the cost of pressing at high volume across a wide zone. The question is not whether he fouls, but whether the contacts that produce fouls in Ligue 1 are called consistently by Premier League officials, or whether his technique mitigates that risk at higher pace. That is genuinely uncertain — but the pattern is familiar, and it typically refines with exposure.

The PassSonar: What 1,172 Passes Reveal About His Passing DNA

The PassSonar is among the most information-dense individual player visualisations in the analytical toolkit. Wedge length represents relative frequency — how often he passes in a given direction from that zone. Colour represents xPass overperformance: green wedges indicate he is completing passes above what the model expects for that distance and direction combination; red wedges indicate he is below. What you are looking at is effectively a fingerprint of how a player connects the game spatially, adjusted for difficulty.

Before the sonar, a word on what the passing data rests on technically - because this is frequently the overlooked dimension of Camara’s profile. His close control under pressure is a genuine asset. He kills difficult balls with a single touch in tight spaces, receiving between the lines with defenders on his shoulder and immediately creating the half-second he needs to play forward. In the 2024–25 Ligue 1 season he ranked in the top 10 for successful dribbles among midfielders at 1.30 per 90 - not a number you associate with a defensive anchor, and a direct indicator of his ability to beat the press rather than simply recycle around it. That close-control foundation is what allows the passing volume and direction in the sonar to exist: a player who loses the ball easily under pressure has a different-shaped sonar, with fewer forward wedges and more short, safe distribution. Camara’s does not look like that.

Camara’s sonar across three pitch thirds does not tell the story you’d expect from a defensive midfielder. It tells a more interesting one.

The aggregate picture from the sonar is a player with a clear, repeatable directional preference: forward and right - that statistically overperforms model expectation. This is not incidental. In football data terms, consistent xPass overperformance on a directional axis means the player has developed genuine technical skill in delivering those passes; the trajectory, the weight, the timing - beyond what the model anticipates from position and distance alone.

The first-touch dimension reinforces this. Around the box in particular, Camara plays with a speed of thought that suggests the picture is already processed before the ball arrives. First-time flicks around corners, disguised layoffs, the type of instinctive combination play in tight spaces that cannot be coached into a player who doesn’t naturally see the game that way - these are recurring features of his attacking-third work at Monaco. When he receives in the right half-space and immediately plays through the defensive line rather than taking a touch to set, it is because he already knew where the run was. That cognitive quickness is what translates the dribbling and close-control foundation into actual threat creation.

For Liverpool, this maps with unusual precision onto what the system requires from a central midfielder.

The caveat the sonar surfaces is the red on backward-left passes in the middle third. He underperforms model expectation when distributing back and left - indicating some limitation in his left-footed distribution under pressure. This connects to his ball-retention profile more broadly: Camara is at his best when he can face forward and play positively. When he is forced into backward-left recycling under press - the situation Slot’s system occasionally demands when high press is beaten - his technical comfort level visibly drops. It is a manageable limitation, not a structural flaw, but it will require coaching attention, particularly against high-pressing opposition.

Progressive Actions: 81 Passes, 28 Carries, and the Threat Lines Into the Box

The progressive action map is where the tactical argument crystallises. Three panels: carries, passes, crosses. The colour distinction is the most important technical detail in the whole chart - pink/purple lines are progressive actions (moving the ball toward goal), while the cyan/teal lines and dots are the most threatening actions: those generating expected threat (xT) above 0.02, the threshold at which an action meaningfully shifts scoring probability. A player can generate a lot of progressive volume without actually creating danger. The cyan layer is what tells you whether the progression converts into genuine threat.

The carries panel immediately challenges the conventional brief. The lines originate deep, inside Monaco’s own half and regularly terminate in the attacking third. Several end inside the opposition box, with teal dots confirming those arrivals register as genuinely threatening, not just physically progressive. What makes these carries possible at that frequency and end-destination is the close control underpinning them: at 1.30 successful dribbles per 90 in 2024–25, Camara regularly beats the press with the ball rather than playing around it. He does not carry to recycle and retain. When he runs forward, he has already decided the destination - into space, toward the box, toward a teammate pulling defensive shape apart, and the control to execute at pace is what allows the carry to reach the teal-dot threshold rather than being dispossessed en route.

The passes panel is the most analytically important panel for a Liverpool context. Eighty-one progressive passes at 3.9 per ninety is high volume for a midfielder with a defensive primary billing. The directionality of the lines reinforces every insight from the PassSonar: the majority run toward the right side of the opposition’s defensive third, arriving in the right channel and around the penalty area. The large cyan dots in and around the box are the key: these are the passes that directly advance the scoring probability, the passes that are arriving at the feet of forwards or into space behind defences rather than simply moving the ball upfield. These are the passes Florian Wirtz’s movement should be designed to receive.

The crosses panel, though lower volume, is unambiguous in its quality. Four progressive crosses, all into the box, all above xT 0.02. These are deliberate, calibrated deliveries — consistent with his set-piece role at Monaco where he contributed approximately one dead-ball goal creation every four Ligue 1 games in 2024–25, with both inswinging and outswinging delivery available.

The Comparison: Caicedo Light - What That Means and Why It’s a Buy Signal

The Moisés Caicedo comparison requires precision to be useful rather than lazy. By the time Caicedo moved to Chelsea for £115m, he had spent roughly three years hardening his qualities against Premier League physicality - sharpening the reading, tightening the defensive coverage, building the aerial and contact dimensions that eventually made him one of the best central midfielders in England. What Caicedo was at Brighton, in his pre-Chelsea phase, is the reference point for where Camara currently sits.

The shared DNA is specific and goes beyond surface-level profile description. Both hunt the ball rather than covering space 0 their defensive action maps look like full-pitch activity charts rather than central-corridor blobs. Both have underrated technical range that gets obscured by the volume of defensive numbers. Both have the acceleration profile that enables late box arrivals without creating vulnerability in transition. And crucially, both arrived in European football from outside the traditional high-visibility leagues; Caicedo from Ecuador’s club scene via Brighton’s recruitment network, Camara via Génération Foot and a single Ligue 2 season - which is precisely why both were available below their eventual market rate.

The “light” qualifier is a developmental statement, not a talent ceiling. It describes where Camara currently is on a trajectory that, if it follows the logic of the data, leads to the same destination. Caicedo cost £115m once Brighton had proven the concept. Camara is available at £40m before that proof has been gathered. For a club with the scouting infrastructure and the squad depth to carry a player through an adaptation period; which Liverpool unambiguously have - the comparison is an argument for acquisition, not a reason for hesitation.

The meaningful distinction between the two is the creative dimension. Caicedo was never the player whose passes made attackers goalscorers. Camara’s 95th-percentile assist rate, his attacking-third pass volume, and his dead-ball delivery make him a more complete attacking contributor. If the defensive floor is similar and the creative ceiling is higher, the value case is not difficult to build.

The Liverpool Argument: Shielding the Defence, Feeding Forwards, Filling the Macca Role

Three very specific functions. That is what this section is about - not generic system compatibility, but the three concrete midfield requirements Liverpool face heading into 2026–27, and whether Camara addresses them directly.

The defensive shield function is the most immediately impactful of the three. Liverpool’s title-winning defensive record has been built on a midfield that compacts rapidly on losing the ball and presses together through the central corridor. When that compaction breaks - when the press is beaten or a midfielder is caught out of position … the back four are exposed in transition. The Camara defensive data shows a player who provides coverage in the defensive third, the middle third, and the attacking third simultaneously: not through positional diligence alone, but through reading the game well enough to be in the right place before the ball arrives. That is a different and higher cognitive level of defensive contribution.

The Wirtz link is the most tactically exciting dimension to examine. Wirtz’s movement between the lines generates space in the channels by pulling central defenders onto his runs and pulling wide defenders onto his wide options. The space he vacates when he moves - and the pocket he creates when he drops short … requires a midfielder with the passing instinct to identify and exploit it in a single action: receive, assess, deliver. Camara’s PassSonar and progressive pass map confirm he performs that action naturally and above model expectation. These two players are spatially complementary in a way that is not generic but specific and empirically demonstrable.

The genuine challenge is squad management rather than tactical fit. Curtis Jones occupies creative midfield ground that overlaps somewhat with Camara’s profile. Szoboszlai’s future remains uncertain. Liverpool may need two midfielders rather than one, and Camara would represent the more defensively-oriented acquisition. The other available midfield investment - likely a more creative eight (Hi Adam Wharton) would need to complement rather than duplicate his profile. That is a manageable problem for a club with Liverpool’s recruitment resources. The argument for Camara specifically is not weakened by it.

The Honest Caveats: What He Doesn’t Do Yet

Any scouting piece that doesn’t include this section isn’t doing its job.

Aerial presence is structurally limited: At 173cm, Camara is not winning headers in defensive midfield duels. In a league where set-piece exposure is higher than Ligue 1 and physical contact in the air is a weekly requirement - which the Premier League absolutely is, this is a gap that cannot be coached away. Liverpool defend aerially through their centre-backs rather than their midfield, which partially mitigates the risk, but he will need disciplined positional organisation to avoid being isolated in the air by taller midfielders in compact spaces.

Left-foot distribution is the technical ceiling: The red wedges in the middle-third sonar on backward-left passes are not noise. They represent a genuine and repeating underperformance pattern in a specific passing direction. Under high press, when the ball needs to exit quickly backward-left, this becomes a live problem. It is a manageable technical gap; Quality training sessions can solve this - but it will be tested against the elite pressing sides Liverpool face across a full Premier League and European season.

The foul-rate question is unresolved: 28 fouls in 20.6 ninety-minutes at Ligue 1 pace is an honest reporting of the cost of his pressing aggressiveness. Whether Premier League officiating patterns produce a proportional card count, or whether his technique is good enough to get calls in his favour more consistently at higher pace, is genuinely unknown. Caicedo’s early Brighton period showed a similar pattern that normalised over time. There is reasonable basis for optimism, but it is not guaranteed.

The Verdict - And Could He Play For Liverpool?

Yes. And He’s Almost Exactly What Liverpool Need.

The data in this piece builds a case that becomes difficult to argue against at the price. 158 ball recoveries from a midfielder who simultaneously posts 95th-percentile assists and 3.9 progressive passes per ninety is a combination profile that does not exist at £40m anywhere else in European football right now. The defensive action map shows full-pitch coverage. The PassSonar shows a player whose directional passing DNA is specifically aligned with Liverpool’s offensive structure. The progressive action map shows a player whose natural ball trajectory targets the zone Liverpool’s system exploits most aggressively - and who arrives there himself when the pass isn’t available.

The Caicedo comparison is not flattery. It is a developmental trajectory. Caicedo cost £115m after the Premier League validated what the data already showed at Brighton. Camara is available at approximately one-third of that price with an identical pre-adaptation profile and a meaningfully higher creative ceiling. If the adaptation follows the logic of the underlying qualities, and there is no structural reason to assume it won’t - Liverpool will have acquired a future elite Premier League central midfielder at a significant discount to his eventual equilibrium value.

He is not a finished product. The caveats above are real, not cosmetic. But the question in this series has never been whether a player is perfect. It is whether they would make Liverpool better, whether the tactical fit is genuine, and whether the timing of a deal is right. On all three counts, the answer here is straightforward.

He scored that goal against Monaco from 58 metres at age 19 wearing a Metz shirt. The club that conceded it signed him immediately. The logic available to Liverpool this summer is identical - and the window in which £40m buys this player will not stay open long once Newcastle or someone else formalises a bid.

In the final days of his Liverpool career, Mohamed Salah hasn’t gone quietly. After a 4-2 defeat at Aston Villa, Liverpool’s 19th loss of a trophyless season - he posted a statement that cut through every carefully managed press conference of the past twelve months.

It was a farewell note, a love letter and an indictment delivered simultaneously. Steven Gerrard, watching it unfold on TNT Sports, described it plainly: “He’s sending a message to the outside that things in that Liverpool dressing room are not right. The identity’s gone and it’s really hurting him.”

Salah is leaving. Arne Slot, in all likelihood, should be leaving.

Xabi Alonso, a dream appointment amongst many fans (myself included) has gone to Chelsea.

Liverpool’s fanbase is furious, fractured, and asking a question that has no comfortable answer: Who rebuilds this?

The answer being quietly assembled inside Anfield’s recruitment department is a 43-year-old German who took a club from the bottom of the Bundesliga to Champions League football in twelve months, won a DFB-Pokal, and has built one of the most statistically dominant teams in European football this season on a fraction of what FSG spend on their squad.

His name is Sebastian Hoeneß. And this is the case for why he isn’t just a consolation prize … he might be the most tactically coherent appointment Liverpool could make.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Before the tactical analysis, look at what Stuttgart have actually done this season.

Blend xG For: 2.02 | Against: 1.42 | Differential: +0.60 - 20-game smoothed average, Strength of Schedule and Red Card adjusted

That xG differential of +0.60 is the second-best in the Bundesliga, behind only Bayern Munich. The “For” line (that climbing green line) has been ascending almost continuously since Gameweek 5. The “Against” line has barely shifted, oscillating between 1.20 and 1.45 for the entire campaign. When you see those two lines diverging over 33 games, you’re not looking at a purple patch or a soft run of fixtures. You’re looking at a system.

Then there’s this: Stuttgart have conceded one goal from set pieces in the entire Bundesliga season. One. The best record across all five major European leagues. Their xGA from set pieces is 4.93 — the lowest in Germany. Since Matchday 14, only Bayern and Dortmund have scored more goals than Stuttgart’s 27. Nobody has conceded fewer than their 10.

These are the numbers of a team operating with systematic precision, not good fortune.

What Hoeneß Actually Builds

The label “the new Klopp” is simultaneously the most useful and most misleading way to describe Sebastian Hoeneß. Useful, because it captures something true about the intensity, the pressing, the identity. Misleading, because Hoeneß’s system is architecturally quite different - and in some ways, better suited to the squad Liverpool have assembled.

The nominal formation is a 4-2-3-1. But formations in Hoeneß’s system are starting grids, not cages.

In low build-up, the goalkeeper drops between the centre-backs, instantly creating a 3-2-5 shape that gives Stuttgart a numerical advantage in the first line. When an opponent presses with a front three, a pivot drops into the backline - back four against front three, a free defender appears, and the press is manipulated rather than bypassed.

This third-man principle; redirecting play through an untracked runner - runs through everything Stuttgart do.

In the high build-up phase, the shape morphs into a 3-2-5. One centre-back holds deep. The other pushes wide. Both full-backs advance, but deliberately asymmetrically: Assignon on the right inverts into the half-space, Mittelstädt on the left attacks the touchline as a functional third attacker. The double pivot: Karazor screening, Stiller carrying progressively - holds the spine. Three attackers plus the 10 form a front five that overloads the opposition backline.

Five players against four defenders, simultaneously creating two different problems on opposite sides of the pitch. Adjust to one and the other opens.

The Roles That Matter Most

The Double Pivot is the engine room. The holding 6 (Karazor) is positionally fixed - screens the backline, wins second balls, stays when everything else moves. The progressive 8 (Stiller) identifies the moment the opposition press commits and plays the vertical ball into the pocket. Stiller’s progressive passing numbers under Hoeneß were elite. Bayern came calling because of what Hoeneß made him.

The 10 is the most intellectually demanding position. Must read precisely when to drop between the lines — too early and the centre-back follows, closing the space entirely. Must know when to play vertical and when to burst in behind after the one-two. Undav does this brilliantly at Stuttgart. Timing, not just technique.

The wingers are where most analysis gets it wrong. Leweling and Führich are not inverted forwards cutting inside to shoot. They attack around the outside; running beyond the full-back, delivering low crosses and cutbacks from the byline. Width to stretch the backline first. Cut inside only after the full-back has committed. Stuttgart finished top three in the Bundesliga for crosses in three of Hoeneß’s four seasons. Winger-as-stretcher, not winger-as-inverted-10.

The 9 must pin centre-backs high to create the pocket, drop as a third-man relay under press, and make diagonal runs in behind when the 10 drops. Demirović does this well. The static, hold-up target man kills this system stone dead.

Out of Possession

The defensive shape settles into a 4-4-2 mid-high block. Two compact lines of four. The far-side full-back tucks in when the ball goes wide - reducing space from the other side. Everything narrows. Everything stays in front of the ball.

There are two pressing triggers. First: ball played to the opposition full-back. The near winger presses. The striker channels to block the return pass. The pivot squeezes. The defensive line holds high. Second: a backward or sideways pass. The entire first line pushes up simultaneously, man-marking centrally, forcing the ball wide where the winger is already waiting.

In the high press, the 10 drops into the pivot line: making a three-man central pressing unit. One centre-back reads the situation: if the opponent plays short, the CB holds. If the ball goes backward, the CB steps into midfield, side-on, ready to intercept or recover. The CB-as-sweeper-presser is a Hoeneß signature rarely mentioned in analysis.

Then there’s counter-transition: arguably the most important structural decision in the whole system. Stuttgart defend with central compactness, not wide coverage. So when the ball is won, more players are already in position to flood forward (Sound familar?). The striker spins before the turnover completes. The attack launches before the defence resets. This happens before the opposition can reorganise, because the compactness was built into the defensive shape.

Stuttgart averaged 8.79 fouls per 90; the fourth lowest in the Bundesliga. This press is disciplined, not chaotic.

Where He Comes From

The coaching lineage matters. Julian Nagelsmann is the obvious reference point. Both coaches emerged from the same Bundesliga revolution, both ran Hoffenheim, both build teams that press to control rather than simply to win the ball back.

Nagelsmann described his own philosophy as: “Our goal is to always use an interception to have an advantage of pace over an opponent that’s fanned out.” The interception; not the tackle, not the recovery run - as the primary defensive weapon. Because the intercepting player has no direct opposition ahead and can immediately run into space.

Hoeneß operates from the same intellectual foundation. But where Nagelsmann’s systems can occasionally become too complex - players expending cognitive energy on positional instructions rather than reading the game, Hoeneß builds systems that are sophisticated in design and simple in execution. His players understand their roles deeply. They’re not thinking. They’re doing.

Demirović said it better than any analyst could:

There is a Guardiola strand in the positional play, and a Rangnick strand in the pressing philosophy. But Hoeneß is a synthesis, not a disciple. He adapts. Against Leverkusen in January 2026, he played Leweling alongside Undav, two fluid forwards sharing the same space. Leverkusen couldn’t find a defensive structure that handled it. Unpredictability within a coherent identity.

Does It Survive the Premier League?

The honest answer includes real challenges. The mid-high block can be unpicked by teams with quick central combinations - Arsenal and City are designed to do exactly this. The asymmetric full-back deployment demands faster decision-making than the Bundesliga typically requires; Premier League wingers press harder and arrive quicker.

But the argument for is equally honest. A mid-to-high block is actually better suited to Premier League pace in behind than a pure high defensive line. Guardiola’s 4-3-3 with centre-backs at the halfway line is the system that gets destroyed by pace on the counter; Hoeneß’s structure is more conservative and more resilient.

His channel-funnelling press, force wide, trigger - works particularly well against teams that build through full-backs. That describes the majority of Premier League mid-table. And his central compactness counters the PL’s direct, wide-heavy style better than most expect.

Klopp took the Bundesliga’s most intense pressing style and made it dominate English football for years. Arteta’s structured positional system has run the Premier League gauntlet successfully this season. The league is not hostile to intelligent, system-based football. It is hostile to passive football. Hoeneß is not passive.

The Liverpool Fit

Now to the real question. Because this is where the argument moves from interesting to genuinely compelling.

FSG have spent four years building a squad of high-energy midfielders, pressing wide players, a dominant physical striker, and a backline with pace to hold a high line. That is the Stuttgart profile, built with Premier League resources and Premier League players.

The Double Pivot

Alexis Mac Allister’s 2025/26 has been genuinely poor. His On-Ball Value dropped significantly. Injuries disrupted his early rhythm and his influence never fully returned. He is under contract until 2028 and Liverpool believe he can rediscover his best. But Hoeneß would need to assess that honestly, not assume the title-winning version returns automatically.

The holding 6 is the summer’s most important midfield decision. Without a genuine anchor; someone who holds the structure while the 8 and 10 move freely - the entire build-up system becomes reactive rather than proactive.

Adam Wharton is exactly the Stiller profile: positionally dominant, unfussy, reads the game, doesn’t need to be flashy. If Liverpool sign one midfielder, it should be him.

The 10: Florian Wirtz

Drop into the pocket. Receive on the half-turn. Play the killer vertical pass. Burst into the space you just created.

Wirtz is arguably the best player in Europe in exactly that role. He has been excellent at Liverpool this season in a loosely defined brief under Slot. In Hoeneß’s system, he would have explicit responsibility and explicit freedom simultaneously. The structure gives him the space. His intelligence fills it. This is the most exciting tactical fit in European football right now.

The Salah Replacement - and Why It’s Not a Replacement Problem

This is where recruitment clarity matters enormously. Because Hoeneß’s right winger attacks around the outside; pace beyond the full-back, delivery from the byline, cutbacks from deep - the search is not for another left-footed inside forward who cuts and shoots.

The right winger in this system needs to exploit space behind the opposition left-back at pace, deliver from the byline, press hard through the right channel, and recover position when the inverted full-back pushes inside. Yan Diomande (19, Leipzig) and Bradley Barcola (23, PSG) fit this profile considerably better than a pure inside forward.

Maghnes Akliouche - is a 10 profile: drifts into central pockets, links play, orchestrates combinations. In Hoeneß’s right-winger role, he is slightly misaligned. As the 10 if Wirtz rotates or rests, he makes considerably more sense. This distinction in recruitment brief matters.

The Centre-Backs: Ideal

Van Dijk’s passing range into midfield pockets is exactly what the system requires. Konaté’s pace covers the high line. Hoeneß also uses one centre-back to step into midfield as a press-breaker - Van Dijk has the game-reading for this. The defensive foundation is already there.

The 9: Alexander Isak

Everything Demirović does at Stuttgart, Isak does at a categorically higher level. Pace. Technical quality. Clinical finishing. Movement in behind. Stuttgart generate 2.02 xG For with Demirović as the focal point. With Isak, that ceiling moves meaningfully upward.

Set Pieces: The Immediate Free Upgrade

One more area deserves specific attention. Liverpool have been inconsistent at set pieces since Trent Alexander-Arnold left. The delivery quality dropped, the defensive organisation has been exploitable, and the aerial threats in the squad have been underutilised.

Hoeneß’s Stuttgart conceded one set-piece goal all season in a league where Leverkusen, Bayern and Dortmund have world-class delivery from dead balls. Their xGA from set pieces was 4.93 - the lowest in Germany. The hybrid scheme (four zonal defenders, five man-markers, one covering the edge for rebounds) includes a specific assignment for the near-post zonal defender: defend flick-ons, the most dangerous and most undercoached corner movement in European football.

Van Dijk, Konaté and Isak are three elite aerial threats currently being underused from corners. Under Hoeneß’s meticulous dead-ball preparation, those bodies become genuine weapons. This is an upgrade that costs zero in transfer fees and is available from the first week of pre-season.

The Bottom Line

Salah’s parting words were not just about Arne Slot. They were a description of what Liverpool should be: aggressive, feared, physically relentless, tactically intentional. Heavy metal football.

Hoeneß builds exactly that. Not because he is Klopp - he isn’t, and the comparison undersells him; but because his system’s defining characteristics are the same ones Salah was describing: intensity with structure, aggression with intelligence, and a team that attacks before the opposition has time to breathe.

No available coach’s system maps onto this specific Liverpool squad as precisely as his does. Wirtz as the 10. Gravenberch as the progressive 8. Isak as the focal point. Kerkez attacking the by-line. One recruitment position to fill on the right, one holding midfielder to bring in.

The squad is there. The system is proven. The numbers are extraordinary.

This is not the safe hire. But it is - by some margin, the correct one.

There is a certain kind of midfielder who does not make the highlight reel. No audacious no-look passes. No mazy runs threading through five defenders. Just an incessant, suffocating, machine-like ability to win the ball back, keep things simple when they need to be, and complicate everything for whoever has the ball on the other side. Mamadou Sangaré is very much that midfielder - and then some.

The 23-year-old Malian has been quietly exceptional for RC Lens in 2025/26, operating under the radar in a Ligue 1 season that has produced some extraordinary individual performances in midfield. But strip away the noise and the headline names, and the numbers paint a portrait of a player who is doing things nobody else in France’s top flight is doing. The question, as always for this series, is a simple one: could he do it at Anfield?

A Statistical Profile Without Peer in Ligue 1

Context matters with statistics, and it is worth setting the scene before diving into the numbers. Sangaré has played 24.9 90-minute equivalents for Lens this season - a sizeable sample that lends genuine weight to what follows. These are not the numbers of a player catching lightning in a bottle over five games. They are the numbers of a player who has been doing this, relentlessly, all season long.

What makes these numbers remarkable is the breadth of categories in which Sangaré leads or near-leads. First in ground duels won (154). First in possessions won in the final third (1.0 per 90). Second in tackles (82). Second in interceptions (40). That combination — elite defensive output, elite dribbling success, and a meaningful creative contribution of 35 chances created — is exceptionally rare. Most elite defensive midfielders sacrifice something in the attack. Sangaré barely does.

His successful long-ball rate of 3.20 per 90 (10th among midfielders) adds another dimension. This is not a midfielder who hoards the ball in his own half. He wins it, he plays quickly, and he is comfortable switching the field with a pass that actually arrives.

Covering Ground, Winning Duels - Everywhere

The defensive action map below tells the story more viscerally than any number. Sangaré’s defensive footprint is extraordinary in its breadth: his interventions span the width and depth of the pitch in a way that speaks to genuine, elite-level spatial intelligence. He does not sit and screen. He moves, he hunts, and he wins.

The heat of activity on the left channel in the defensive and middle thirds reflects a player who is not afraid to engage on the margins - pressing wide, tracking runners, making his presence felt across the full width of the pitch. His 82 tackles rank second in Ligue 1 and his 30 clearances supplement an already dominant duel-winning output. And critically, the 194 ball recoveries are scattered across every zone: this is a midfielder who competes everywhere, not just in a narrow defensive zone around his own penalty area.

Thirty-four fouls conceded across the season sits comfortably within acceptable limits for a player who engages with this level of frequency. He is not reckless, he is relentlessly competitive, which is a very different thing.

Technically Gifted, Deceptively Dangerous

The narrative around Sangaré as a pure destroyer does him a disservice. His 1.30 successful dribbles per 90 - second among midfielders in the division is the number of a player who can manipulate opponents with the ball, not just muscle past them or recycle possession laterally. He carries with purpose, and he carries into pressure.

In the defensive third, Sangaré predominantly plays forward and wide-left — a confident, direct choice set that avoids the dangerous backward passes into congested areas that ruin teams at the back. In the middle third, where his pass volume peaks at 818 passes, his distribution broadens significantly: forward passes toward goal sit alongside lateral switches, building the progressive, wide-ranging picture of a midfielder who understands spatial variety. Note the predominance of red wedges toward goal in the middle third — areas where his completion underperforms expectation — which tells us he is attempting genuinely ambitious forward balls rather than the safe, short options that inflate completion statistics.

His 35 chances created — 9th among midfielders — and 3.20 successful long balls per 90 further confirm a player who is more than a ball-winner. He can be a genuine creative contributor from deep.

In the Shadow of Blaise Matuidi

Every good scouting piece deserves a comparison, and this one is both flattering and genuinely illuminating. Blaise Matuidi — World Cup winner, PSG and Juventus stalwart, one of the most complete box-to-box midfielders European football has produced in the last two decades — shares so many of Sangaré’s defining characteristics that the comparison earns its place.

Matuidi was never the most technically showy midfielder. He was not the organiser in the way Pirlo was, or the dribbler in the way Pogba was. What he was, however, was relentless in both directions, physically dominant in duels, intelligent in his positioning, and surprisingly dangerous in the final phase. Strip that down to its component parts and you are describing Mamadou Sangaré in 2025.

The key similarity is not purely statistical, it is temperamental. Matuidi was an additive player: he did not diminish what was around him, he elevated it by doing the thankless things with maximum intensity. Sangaré shows exactly the same character. The duel record, the recovery numbers, the ability to be useful with and without the ball at multiple stages of the pitch: these are the hallmarks of a modern, complete midfielder in the Matuidi mould, younger, and still ascending.

The Performances That Tell the Full Story

Numbers describe a player. Performances reveal them. Three games from Sangaré’s 2025/26 season each illuminate a different facet of his game.

Lens 3–0 Metz (March 8th - Ligue 1)

Against a resolute Metz side, Sangaré was the engine that shredded their shape. The opening goal stemmed directly from his press in the opponent’s half. He won duels across every zone, drove forward with purpose, and demonstrated the dribbling quality his stats advertise. A complete two-way display — destructive out of possession, constructive with the ball.

Lens 5–1 Angers (March 20th - Ligue 1)

Five-nil thrashings can flatter. Not here. Sangaré’s final-third press wins were on full display — triggering transitions before Angers could recover shape. His accurate long switches moved the ball from one flank to the other with pace and purpose. He pressed the numbers forward and finished with his most productive duel figures of the spring. He does not coast against weaker opposition.

Lens 0–2 PSG (May 13th | Ligue 1)

The most revealing game. Against Dembélé, Barcola and Kvaratskhelia, Sangaré’s defensive work was relentless — he did not look overawed. Lens outshot PSG 22–8 and had 8 on target to PSG’s 3. He did not deserve to be on the losing side. A 90th-minute second goal inflated a margin the match did not reflect. He passed the elite test.

Where Does He Fit at Anfield?

Liverpool’s midfield under Slot has been built around a specific set of demands: the ability to press aggressively from a high line, to cover huge distances in transition, to carry the ball forward under pressure, and to bring genuine athleticism to both phases of the game. Sangaré meets every single one of those criteria.

In Liverpool’s current setup, the midfield triangle has tended to accommodate one midfielder who shields the defence most directly, and two who carry more creative and box-to-box responsibility. Sangaré has the versatility to fulfil either of the deeper roles with distinction. His ball-winning statistics would immediately raise Liverpool’s defensive ceiling in midfield — there is no midfielder currently in the squad who is winning the ball at anything close to the frequency Sangaré does across a Ligue 1 season.

Crucially, the dribbling profile (1.30 per 90, second in Ligue 1 among midfielders) matters enormously in Liverpool’s system. Slot’s team builds through midfield, asking central players to receive in tight areas and drive forward. Sangaré’s comfort with the ball under pressure is not just a nice-to-have - it is a prerequisite for survival in that system. He has it in abundance.

His ability to win possession in the final third - first among midfielders in Ligue 1 at 1.0 per 90 — is another huge selling point. High possession wins in advanced areas are the fuel of Liverpool’s transition play: rapid, aggressive press-and-recover cycles that can unlock opponents in an instant. Sangaré would slot into that system with frightening naturalness.

There are questions to ask,there always are.

The step up from Ligue 1 to the Premier League is not trivial, even for elite players. The pace of the game increases substantially, and the margins for error in tight spaces shrink. His passing completion in the middle third, where the PassSonar shows ambition occasionally outrunning execution on the forward channels, may need refinement. But these are the questions of a player with the ceiling to justify them, not flaws that define him.

What He Brings to This Liverpool

Liverpool’s midfield has genuine quality, nobody is questioning that (although this season you could). But depth, and a specific kind of physicality at the base of midfield, remain areas where Sangaré’s arrival would represent a measurable upgrade in options. His combination of elite duel-winning, high ball recovery output, and the ability to carry and create from central areas is not currently replicated in the squad.

The Matuidi comparison is instructive here too. Matuidi made PSG and France’s midfields function at a level above what their collective talent suggested they should, simply by doing the difficult, unglamorous things at the highest possible intensity. He was not the player who got the plaudits. He was the player who made it possible for others to earn them. Sangaré carries exactly that energy.

In a Liverpool midfield that includes players who want the ball, who drive forward, who take up the creative licence - Sangaré would be the player who sets the defensive baseline, who wins the ball back quickly, and who then keeps things simple or plays the big switch when the moment requires. That profile is not a luxury at Anfield. It is a necessity.

At 23, he is at the exact age where a move to an elite environment would not be a gamble - it would be an investment in a player who has already demonstrated the resilience, the physique, and the mentality to be elite at this level. He is not raw. He is ready.

The Verdict: And Could He Play for Liverpool?

Mamadou Sangaré is the rarest kind of midfielder: one who is genuinely elite in both directions, who makes the unglamorous things look easy and the ambitious things look natural. His statistical profile in Ligue 1 2025/26 ranks among the most complete in the division, and the way he combines defensive dominance with genuine technical quality and creative contribution places him in rare company.

He would not walk straight into the Liverpool XI and dominate immediately, no honest scouting piece should claim that. The Premier League adjustment is real, the competition for places is intense, and there are questions about his passing efficiency in the most advanced third. But the fundamentals: the duel-winning, the ball-carrying, the defensive intensity, the spatial intelligence - are exactly what this squad needs more of.

This is a player to take a chance on now, before the rest of Europe catches up to what Lens have been benefiting from all season.

Liverpool’s 19th league defeat of the season. A record for a single campaign this century. Surrendered to a United side that spent most of this year in the bottom half of the table.

Let that land for a second.

In 2018/19, Liverpool amassed 97 points and still couldn’t win the title - but you could see it. The blueprint. The hunger. The identity baked into every pressing trigger, Trent switch pass and Van Dijk header. You looked at that side and understood instinctively how the next step would be made. Same again in 2023/24 … Klopp’s farewell, third place, late wobble - but the architecture of something serious was still visible. The following seasons proved both roadmaps real.

There is no roadmap now. And the questions can no longer be deflected - not by injuries, not by schedule, not by FSG’s loyalty to a manager they refuse to move on.

Is Arne Slot the right man to take Liverpool into their next phase?

After Sunday and an abject 2026, the answer is no. And the game itself wasn’t even the most damning part of the week.

There Is No Roadmap

Before we even get to the culture questions, the holiday controversy, or the leadership vacuum - there is something more fundamental gnawing at supporters like myself who want desperately to be won back. Something that sits underneath the results and the statistics and the post-match platitudes.

There is no visible style of play.

I cannot tell you what Arne Slot’s Liverpool looks like when they are performing at their ceiling. I cannot point to a passage of football this season and say: that - that is the identity, that is the system, that is the idea. With Klopp’s Liverpool, even in the hard periods, the shape of the thing was always visible. You knew the press would come. You knew the full-backs would drive forward. You knew the front three would hunt in packs. The intention was always legible, even when the execution stuttered.

Under Slot, the team oscillates between aesthetically pleasing passing sequences that lead nowhere and periods of such disorganised passivity that it becomes genuinely difficult to watch. There is no through line. No consistent shape under pressure. No collective identity that a new signing or a struggling player can reach for when things get difficult.

This matters enormously when we talk about getting back on track. For supporters trying to understand how this improves - there is no roadmap. We cannot visualise the next phase. That absence of identity is not just aesthetically frustrating. It is evidence of a deeper leadership failure. The best managers don’t just win … they build systems of belief that players and supporters can understand and rally around. Slot hasn’t built one. And without it, there is no foundation to rebuild upon.

Not Every Defeat is Equal - but This One Stings Differently

There is a difference, and it needs saying clearly - between losing to a team that simply outclasses you and losing to a side you had no business losing to.

Take the PSG defeats. Across two legs in the Champions League quarter-final, Liverpool were beaten 4-0 on aggregate. In Paris, they couldn’t register a single shot on target across 90 minutes as Vitinha, João Neves and Kvaratskhelia played a grade of football that was simply beyond what this Liverpool side could handle. Kvaratskhelia’s goal … racing onto Neves’ slide-rule pass, jinking past Mamardashvili and slotting home - was from a different universe of familiar quality. Vitinha completed 132 passes in the first leg alone. There was no shame in that defeat. PSG are Champions League holders. They are genuinely elite. The sad realisation is that Liverpool were not equipped to match them, and in some respects, knowing that tells you something useful about the ceiling of the project.

The Manchester United defeat is something else entirely.

United were not the better team for most of that match. They were not dominant. They did not play beautiful football. They scored two goals inside 15 minutes; one a deflection off Alexis Mac Allister, the second involving a Sesko handball that VAR somehow allowed to stand - and then largely invited Liverpool to come at them. And Liverpool did come. Szoboszlai scored a wonderful solo goal, cutting through midfield with genuine purpose. Gakpo levelled after Lammens gifted them possession with a wretched kick.

Individual brilliance. Individual error.

That, in summary, was how Liverpool got back into the game at Old Trafford: not through system or structure or pressing cohesion, but through one player deciding to do something special, and the opposition goalkeeper handing them a gift.

The Kobbie Mainoo winner, a composed first-time finish in the 77th minute after Liverpool’s defensive shape collapsed from a routine cross - was the inevitable conclusion of a team that, when the moment demanded it, had no collective answer.

Against PSG, the class gap was obvious and explicable. Against this Manchester United side, the gap in mentality, fight, and organisation was inexcusable. And that distinction is everything wrong with this season.

Holiday Mode at the Worst Possible Time

In the build-up to arguably Liverpool’s most consequential remaining Premier League fixture, Arne Slot gave his players days off. Not a single rest day after a gruelling spell. A proper mini-break. Dominik Szoboszlai and Alexis Mac Allister were pictured in Italy with their families. Others scattered across Europe. Slot himself, as has become his custom during any gap in the schedule, returned to Zwolle to see his family in the Netherlands.

The Athletic’s James Pearce, one of Liverpool’s most trusted journalists, publicly questioned “the preparations” after noting a “lethargic” response from players who had “enjoyed mini breaks in Europe.” He wasn’t alone. David Lynch and Paul Gorst of the Liverpool Echo raised identical concerns. These are not clickbait-hungry outsiders looking for a headline, these are writers with deep sources inside the AXA who made a deliberate editorial choice to express public disquiet.

Slot’s defence has become rote. He described the breaks as “necessary” for his squad and drew a comparison to Pep Guardiola granting City rest days. Virgil van Dijk, bristling in the post-match press conference, echoed it: “I wish we had a couple more days off at times.”

Here is the problem with that framing. Manchester City have won five of the last seven league titles. Their rest culture, such as it is, exists within an infrastructure of winning habits so deeply embedded that two days by the pool changes nothing. Liverpool in 2025/26 are not that club. They are a team 21 points off the league leaders with no title realistic, already out of every cup competition, with 19 league defeats. The margin for error has long since disappeared.

The optics of your key midfielders trotting around Europe the week before a must-win game - when you’re in the fight of your season and your manager’s credibility, are not just optics. They are a window into the culture. And what they reveal is a team that, somewhere along the way, has stopped treating every game like a defining one.

For supporters, it is maddening. Not because elite footballers don’t deserve rest. With the brutal fucking schedule they play, they absolutely do.

But the timing, the consistency of the approach, and the manager’s breezy defence of it - all of it signals something deeper about the level of collective urgency inside that building. The hunger looks different. It feels different. And those of us who remember what genuine hunger looked like at Liverpool cannot unsee the contrast.

There is also an unspoken agreement that exists between a football club and its supporters - one that doesn’t appear in any contract, but is understood by everyone involved.

Liverpool fans pay some of the highest ticket prices in European football. And that’s before a single penny is spent on travel. Away days at Old Trafford, St. James’ Park, across Europe - the train fares, the hotels, the time taken off work. The very real financial strain of following this club the way so many of us do. It all adds up.

We spend it willingly. Because we believe in what we’re watching. Because we feel the connection. Because there is a reciprocal commitment from the people on that pitch that makes every cost feel worth it.

What supporters ask for in return isn’t trophies every season. It is simply the visible, unmistakable evidence that the players simply care as much as we do. That when we’re sacrificing our Saturday mornings and stretching our monthly budgets to be there, the eleven men on that pitch are giving absolutely everything they have.

When the images circulating before a crucial fixture are of your key midfielders lounging in the Italian sun, that agreement feels broken. And no amount of post-match platitudes about preparation methods can put it back together.

Salah’s Warning Shot and Why It Should Terrify Everyone

When Mohamed Salah speaks publicly about the standards inside this football club, the world listens. The man has 257 goals for Liverpool. He has won every major domestic honour. He has been the standard-bearer for a decade of excellence and, more than any single player since Steven Gerrard, has defined what Liverpool means to a generation of supporters.

So when he sat down this week and said that his single biggest concern about leaving is whether Liverpool can maintain the culture of excellence he helped build - it should have stopped everyone in their tracks.

Salah was precise and deliberate. He spoke about how his best years at Anfield were defined not just by talent, but by standard-setters: James Milner, Jordan Henderson, Gini Wijnaldum, Andy Robertson. The players who arrived before training started, who were in the gym before their teammates had laced their boots, who set an example that filtered down and created a culture of relentless self-improvement. He now finds himself having to tell those around him to follow his lead. He has raised these concerns directly with the club’s hierarchy.

Read that again slowly.

“When I leave, you need an example here. You need people to come early to the gym here and other people say he is in the gym, so they need to go. If that doesn’t happen it will be tricky for the club.”

This is not melodrama. This is not a superstar polishing his own legacy. This is a deeply competitive man — one of the greatest players in the club’s history — looking around the dressing room and not seeing enough of what made Liverpool great. He is issuing a warning, plainly and unambiguously. The culture is at risk. The standards are not being naturally replicated. Without someone to carry the torch, this club will drift.

Do the players want it badly enough? Are they willing to sacrifice … not just on matchdays, but in the unglamorous daily grind that titles are actually won through? Salah’s words suggest that, from the inside, the answer is: not all of them, not consistently, and not enough.

The question this raises about Slot is uncomfortable but essential: If your best player feels compelled to raise these concerns with the hierarchy rather than trust that the manager is already on top of it - what does that tell you about the manager?

Great leaders build cultures that outlast individuals. Klopp’s Liverpool was extraordinary not just because of the players available, but because of the environment he constructed, one where new arrivals felt the weight of expectation within days. Where youngsters were absorbed into a system of belief that felt self-sustaining. Where the culture was transferable because he made it transferable, deliberately, season after season.

Under Slot, that culture has not just stagnated. It appears to be actively dissolving. And Salah, still at the club, can already see it happening from the inside.

Have the Players Stopped Listening?

This is the question that cuts closest to the bone for any manager. Because there comes a point in a toxic season when even the most analytically gifted head coach simply loses the dressing room - not in some dramatic mutiny, but in the slow, grinding way that teams stop responding. The tactical messages are processed but not felt. The team talks land flat. Players go through the motions.

The evidence in Liverpool’s case has been building all season. The most damaging exhibit came from Liverpool’s own captain.

After a 4-0 FA Cup demolition at the hands of Manchester City, a performance of such hapless passivity that thousands of Liverpool supporters left the Etihad with 30 minutes remaining - Virgil van Dijk told reporters: “You shouldn’t give up and that’s maybe, at a certain point, what happened.” Dominik Szoboszlai questioned the squad’s “fighting spirit.” These are not journalists or pundits talking. These are the players themselves.

Slot, when pressed, pushed back gently - saying he “didn’t see players giving up.” The manager’s perception and his captain’s perception were in direct contradiction. That is not a trivial gap. That is a fault line running through the entire season.

Steven Gerrard said what needed to be said: “At Liverpool Football Club that can’t happen on the pitch and it certainly can’t be said off the pitch. They’ve come so far away from the team identity they set in terms of standards.”

Van Dijk, after Sunday’s United loss, delivered perhaps his most telling verdict of the entire campaign. When asked whether a full reset is required this summer, he said: “The leadership boys are falling apart, in terms of players leaving - so players have to step up.”

The men who led are leaving or gone. Nobody has stepped up to replace them organically. Not because the talent isn’t there, but because the culture inside the building isn’t producing leaders. That is a managerial failure. Full stop.

The best managers navigate generational transitions by building leadership from the inside out. They identify the next wave early, put players in situations that develop character, and create the conditions for natural succession. Klopp turned Henderson into a captain who could lift a Champions League trophy. He gave Robertson the language and platform to roar at teammates and be celebrated for it. The culture was transferable because he made it so.

What are the next generation of Liverpool leaders being formed into? Because right now, what we see is a collection of individually talented players who perform in patches and crumble in the moments that define campaigns.

“But Shouldn’t Slot Be Given a Chance?”

I’ll hear it. I’ve heard it all season:

“Dan, he won us the title last year. He’s only in his second season. Give him time. The injuries have been brutal. The squad transition was always going to be painful.”

And I’ll grant some of that …

In a sense, yes - the argument for continuity isn’t completely absurd. A manager who delivered a league title in his debut campaign deserves a degree of credit. The injury list has been genuinely severe. The rebuilding of a squad that lost Alexander-Arnold, Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez and others in the same summer was always going to create friction.

But here’s the counter-argument I will not let go of: Slot has had the majority of this current campaign to demonstrate he is the man to navigate Liverpool’s next phase. And at every significant turn, he has showcased why he isn’t.

When Liverpool needed a response after a run of bad results, the preparation was a set of holidays. When his captain admitted the team gave up on the pitch, the manager said he didn’t see it. When his best player raised cultural concerns with the hierarchy, there was no visible internal reckoning. When the team faced genuine elite opposition in PSG, there was no tactical answer - fine, that can happen. But when they faced a mid-table Manchester United and still couldn’t find an identity or a collective response to adversity, the case for the defence runs out of road.

We’re not talking about one difficult season. We’re talking about a season that has revealed, in high definition, the limitations of this manager in precisely the areas that Liverpool’s next chapter demands most: inspiring, demanding, leading through uncertainty, and building the kind of culture that wins titles not in spite of adversity but because of it.

The title last season was won on the back of a squad and a culture that had been years in the making. That momentum carried Slot through his first year. It has not been renewed. It has been spent.

Why Slot Cannot Navigate What Comes Next — and What Edwards and Hughes Must Reckon With

To be clear: Arne Slot is not a bad football manager. His first season was excellent by almost any measure. He arrived as an unfancied replacement for one of the greatest managers in the club’s history and delivered the title - a title carried on the back of a squad and a culture that had been years in the making. That momentum got him through year one. It has not been renewed. It has been spent.

The challenge now is categorically different. It is rebuilding under pressure.

Replacing irreplaceable figures; Salah leaving, Robertson gone, Alisson’s future uncertain, Van Dijk on borrowed time. Establishing a new identity during the most profound generational transition this club has faced since 2012. Doing all of this while the stands are full of supporters who remember exactly what this club looked like when it was genuinely great - and who can feel, viscerally, how far away that is looking right now.

Those 18/19 and 23/24 sides; the ones where we fell agonisingly short - were still instructive. You could look at them and know: this is what a team that wins leagues looks like, and we will get there. The following seasons proved that roadmap real. This squad, on paper, is among the most expensive assemblies of talent in European football. Wirtz. Isak. Ekitike. The ambition is real. And yet none of it coalesces into the kind of team that wins titles. Identity, collective purpose, the willingness to sacrifice for each other is absent.

That requires more than tactical acumen from a manager. It requires the ability to inspire. To demand. To make players afraid of not meeting the standard. The evidence is not there. The holiday decisions suggest a manager more focused on player welfare than the ruthless edge title-winning teams carry. The reluctance to confront his players’ standards, when his own captain admitted they gave up - suggests a man protecting relationships at the expense of accountability. The fact that his most important player went above his head to raise cultural concerns is, in any serious organisation, a red flag.

And this is where I want to speak directly to Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes, because the data they love so much should be telling them something they appear unwilling to hear: there is no evidence this gets better under Slot. None. Nineteen defeats. No visible style of play. A disintegrating culture. A squad that played 90 minutes at PSG without a shot on target. A captain admitting the team gave up. A departing legend warning about the culture disappearing. Players on a day trip in Italy the week before a must-win fixture.

What does the data model say about a head coach who has presided over all of that in a single campaign? What does it say about trajectory?

The window is open this summer in a way it may not be in twelve months. Xabi Alonso is on the market - available, admired, with a deep emotional connection to this club, and representing exactly the kind of inspirational, identity-building leadership this moment demands. He is not the only candidate, but he is the obvious one. That he is available at all feels like a gift this club cannot afford to squander through institutional inertia.

The messenger has been tuned out. The culture is ebbing. And the window to make the change that actually matters is closing.

FSG need to open their eyes.

The summer is upon us. The decision is now.

The next chapter of this club demands a different voice at the front of it. Whether Fenway are willing to reckon with that reality before it becomes irreversible is the only question that now matters.

Yan Diomandé went from high school soccer in Yulee, Florida to the second-youngest hat-trick scorer in Bundesliga history in roughly a thousand days. Thirteen Bundesliga goals. Four Player of the Month awards. A six-club transfer pursuit north of €80 million. He is nineteen years old, and every significant club in Europe is watching.

This new series on the Substack, asks one question about every player linked with Liverpool: can they genuinely help win league titles and Champions Leagues? Not “is he exciting?” but “is he the right player, at the right moment, for the right club?” With Diomandé, the answer is yes - BUT it requires engaging honestly with both the ceiling and the risks. Let’s get into it.

How He’s Been Used at Leipzig: Role and Responsibility

Understanding what Diomandé does at Leipzig - not just where he plays, but what he is asked to do within the system, is essential context for assessing what Liverpool would actually be buying.

Ole Werner’s Leipzig operate a high-energy 4-2-2-2 / 4-4-2 mid-block that transitions rapidly into a 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3 shape in possession. Diomandé’s role within that structure is demanding and multifaceted. In possession, he is Leipzig’s primary wide ball-carrier - the player trusted to receive under pressure, turn, and drive forward to relieve the block and create space for runners. He is not a static winger waiting for a ball played to feet in a set position. He receives on the half-turn, in channels, in tight pockets, and his job is to make something happen from situations that other players cannot.

Out of possession, the demands are equally high. Werner’s system requires wide players to press from the front immediately on turnover, track back to form a compact mid-block when the press is beaten, and act as the first line of defensive engagement in wide areas. This is why Diomandé’s defensive metrics are not an accident … they are the product of a system with non-negotiable defensive workload expectations, and a player who has consistently met them.

His positional versatility within the system has been deliberate. Werner has deployed him on the right in ten appearances and on the left in six, using him as a tactical variable opponents cannot permanently account for. In transition moments specifically, when Leipzig win the ball high and need someone to carry at pace into space behind a retreating defence - Diomandé is the designated outlet. His top speed of 35.84 km/h and ability to reach full sprint within two strides make him uniquely suited to that role. He is not yet a sophisticated tactical footballer who shapes games through positional intelligence across ninety minutes. He is a physical force and ball-carrier being developed into something more and already contributing far more defensively than his age would suggest.

The 1v1 Weapon: Data and Match Evidence

Among all wingers and attacking midfielders across the Big 5 leagues, Diomandé sits at the 99th percentile for successful take-ons and the 98th for progressive carries, carries into the final third, and carries into the penalty box (all per 90, via Opta). He is tied 11th in the entire Bundesliga for carries that directly created a shot or chance, despite logging significantly fewer minutes than almost everyone above him. These are not good numbers for a teenager. They are elite numbers, full stop.

His mechanism is the half-turn acceleration - receive sideways, one touch to manufacture space, explode into the gap before the defender has processed the threat.

Werner put it precisely: "He often gets past opponents without any tricks, simply because he's so dynamic." No step-overs. No theatre. Physics applied with exceptional timing, and the functional strength to carry through contact rather than wilt under it.

Three Games That Define Him

vs Stuttgart (H), MD 9 - W 3–1: The breakout. 35.84 km/h top speed. 21 duels won. Man of the Match. His goal - under pressure from two defenders, one touch to shift onto his left foot, finished low past Nübel … showed the two-footedness is real and functional under match conditions. A right-footed teenager finishing with his weaker foot, under pressure, in a big game. That is not ordinary.

vs Frankfurt (H), MD 13 - W 6–0: Three goals in eighteen second-half minutes. The second-youngest hat-trick scorer in Bundesliga history. What matters is the variety: right-footed power shot, left-footed curler under pressure, composed round of the goalkeeper. Three goals, three different finishes, four shots. He also escaped 70% of the 23 pressure situations he faced across ninety minutes. He was not a passenger collecting goals.

Key match log · 2025–26 Bundesliga · Red bar = defining performance · Amber bar = honest poor game, included deliberately

One entry deserves particular attention: the away loss at Stuttgart in MD 17, where he was quiet, wasteful in possession, and left defensive gaps when Leipzig were required to hold shape without the ball. It is included deliberately. It is also, in the context of his full season - the exception, not the pattern.

The Left Winger Question: Why Two-Footedness Changes the Ceiling

A few outlets have him noted down a left winger. His primary foot is his right. That combination is the central tactical argument for deploying him on the left at Liverpool rather than as a conventional right-sided replacement - and it is where the Leroy Sané comparison becomes genuinely instructive rather than superficially appealing from a deployment POV.

On the left, his inside cut brings his dominant right foot into the shooting position. His long-distance pace makes the run in behind opposing right-backs a permanent threat. His two-footedness creates an unsolvable problem for defenders: shade inside and the outside run opens; drop off and invite the carry. Sané’s first three City seasons were built on exactly this template - 78 Premier League starts, 25 goals … and bilateral unpredictability was the engine of it. Diomandé creates the same dilemma already, at nineteen, in his debut top-level season.

At Leganés he played almost exclusively from the left. The Frankfurt hat-trick’s second goal: one touch onto his left foot, curled past the keeper under pressure - confirmed the two-footedness holds when the stakes are high. This is not a theoretical deployment option. It is probably the higher-ceiling one.

The Leroy Sané Comparison: Honest and Specific

The comparison is structural, not superficial. Both are wingers who are most dangerous from the left channel, both carry elite long-distance pace as their primary weapon, and both arrived into top-five football with carrying as their dominant asset and off-ball movement as the primary gap. Where Diomandé leads at the same age: goal contributions in a debut top-five season, xG/shot profile, and physical strength -he carries through contact in ways Sané at nineteen did not. Where Sané led: crossing delivery, and considerably more professional minutes behind him on arrival.

Stylistic and statistical comparison: both players at equivalent stage (age 18–20) in debut top-five league seasons

The encouraging parallel: Sané’s specific gaps at the same stage: off-ball movement, crossing delivery - were both addressed through sustained coaching under Guardiola across three seasons. They did not fix themselves; they were coached in. Diomandé needs the same kind of environment and the same patience. The ceiling of the comparison is real and reachable. Getting there is a coaching project, not a guarantee.

Off the Ball: The Full Scouting Picture

The best scouting reports don’t just celebrate what a player can do. They name, specifically, what a player cannot yet do and distinguish between limitations that are structural and those that are developmental. For Diomandé, the off-ball picture divides clearly: defensively, he is already elite; in his attacking movement without the ball, he has real and specific gaps that need addressing.

Start with the defensive surprise. Interceptions at the 99th percentile. Blocks at the 95th. Tackles at the 78th. For a nineteen-year-old in his debut top-five league season, those numbers are anomalous. Werner has called the counter-pressing “a matter of attitude” - the data backs him up completely. His recoveries per 90 sit in approximately the 90th percentile, and his possession won in the final third (around 1.01 per 90) is meaningful for a wide forward. He is emphatically not a luxury player who coasts between attacks.

The attacking movement problem is real, and worth being specific about. Three identifiable gaps, all visible on tape this season:

The important distinction across all three is that none represents a physical ceiling or a character flaw. They are habits - the habits of a player who developed almost entirely by relying on his 1v1 ability and was never systematically asked to diversify his off-ball contribution. The right coaching environment addresses all three. The Sané precedent shows exactly how it is done, and how long it takes.

The Liverpool Fit: Deployment, Partnerships and What He Unlocks

Liverpool’s attack has lacked what Diomandé provides in abundance: a wide forward who creates danger from nothing, wins 1v1 situations at the 99th percentile, and makes organised defences uncomfortable through sheer directness. The gap left by Salah’s departure is not simply about goals … it is about the threat of a player opponents must specifically plan to stop. Diomandé reintroduces that problem.

Deployment

On the right he functions as a conventional inverted winger - cutting inside, driving to goal, combining in transition. On the left the ceiling is higher: pace in behind opposing right-backs, dominant right foot arriving into the box from the left channel, two-footedness making him impossible to commit against. The left is the stronger deployment case, and the one Liverpool’s attack needs to fill more urgently given the current squad shape.

What He Unlocks in Wirtz and Isak

The most compelling argument for signing Diomandé is not what he does individually - it is what he does to Liverpool’s other attacking pieces. Florian Wirtz is at his most dangerous arriving late into shooting positions from half-spaces, off a carrier who has drawn defensive attention wide. Diomandé is precisely that carrier. His progressive drives through the left and right channels pull multiple defenders onto him and create the exact pockets Wirtz exploits. At Bayer Leverkusen, Wirtz thrived when wide players pinned defensive lines and gave him room to ghost in behind. Diomandé resolves that problem directly.

The Isak dimension is equally significant. Now returning from a broken leg sustained in December, Alexander Isak is a forward who lives on service delivered from wide areas at pace - early, low crosses or cutbacks from the byline that meet his movement in behind. Diomandé’s carry-and-deliver pattern, refined with specific coaching on when to cross rather than cut inside, is the service profile that best suits Isak’s movement. The combination of Diomandé driving from wide, Wirtz arriving late, and Isak finishing represents a genuinely dangerous attacking unit — not in Year One, but across the two to three seasons it takes for all three to reach their ceiling at the club simultaneously.

What He Needs

Two priorities above everything else. First: patience with output metrics in Year One while trusting the process metrics. The underlying carry and dribbling output will translate to the Premier League; the goals will take time. A squad with sufficient depth, not relying on him for fifteen league goals or thirty-eight appearances immediately - is the environment that allows proper development. Second: specific, intentional coaching on back-post runs and underlapping movement. These are not yet instinctive for him. They need to be built through deliberate repetition in training and explicit tactical instruction. The Sané precedent shows this can be done. It requires a coaching staff willing to commit to it.

The Verdict: And Could He Play for Liverpool?

Ultimately the answer is yes - with conditions attached, a development plan in place, and patience applied to the output metrics while the process metrics tell you what is being built.

The case for him is straightforward: there is no teenager in European football combining this physical profile, this dribbling output, this early-career production rate, and this specific set of coachable - not structural - weaknesses. The ceiling, given the right coaching environment, is a wide forward at the centre of Liverpool’s attack for years to come the piece that in theory, makes Wirtz and Isak genuinely frightening rather than merely promising. Players with this profile appear occasionally, not every summer.

The case against is equally straightforward: €80 million plus for under 2,500 career minutes is a significant bet. Goal regression in Year One is probable. The Bundesliga-to-Premier League adjustment is the hardest transition in European football for a winger. He cannot yet cross a ball consistently. He does not yet make the runs that elite wide forwards make.

Both things are true. The decision is whether the ceiling justifies the risk. It does … but only if Liverpool sign him for what he can become, deploy him primarily on the left wing, and build a development plan around his specific gaps rather than demanding an immediate impact.

There is a particular cruelty to watching something you love disintegrate not with a bang, but with a shrug.

In a piece written here not so long ago, we invoked the imagery of the Colosseum - the spectacle of gladiatorial decline, where the crowd ultimately turns when the warriors on the sand no longer seem to want the fight. On Saturday afternoon at the Etihad, that metaphor didn’t just hold. It descended the concrete stairwells and filed out of the stadium before the final whistle.

Thousands of Liverpool supporters left long before the game was over. As they made their way down the stairs and out into the Manchester cold, still reeling from what they had witnessed, the words ringing around the concourse were “We have the best midfield in the world.” The name behind those words was left unspoken, but universally understood: Xabi Alonso. A not-so-subtle signal, aimed squarely at those in Boston, that an alternative exists. That there is a version of this club that does not look like this.

It takes an enormous amount to lose the fanbase of Liverpool Football Club. We are not a fickle people. But when supporters are serenading a man who isn’t even in the building, while our own team is still on the pitch, you have crossed into territory this club rarely visits. And it takes a genuinely catastrophic capitulation to bring us here.

How Far We Have Fallen

Twelve months ago, Arne Slot stood on the precipice of history. Liverpool were Premier League champions-elect, the football was good, the future luminous. And this Wednesday, they travel to Paris to face PSG in the first leg of a Champions League quarter-final.

That sentence should pulse with anticipation. Instead, it sits in the chest like a stone.

Cast your mind back to when these two sides last met last year in the same competition … A Liverpool team that went hell for leather in two legs against the holders, that attacked with abandon and without fear, that carried the scent of destiny about them.

Now?

Now we approach the Parc des Princes with genuine dread. A 4-0 dismantling in an FA Cup quarter-final, at the hands of a side that hadn’t even been at its peak this season - has left the squad shattered and confidence in ruins.

The numbers paint the bleakest of pictures. Liverpool are fifth in the Premier League. They have managed just two wins in their last seven matches across all competitions. They have now lost 15 matches this season - their worst return since 2014-15, when they lost 18 under Brendan Rodgers. The Opta supercomputer, in its cold statistical wisdom, has assigned this Liverpool side a 7% chance of lifting the Champions League. Seven per cent.

This is not a blip. This is a collapse.

The Anatomy of a Capitulation

To understand just how damaging Saturday was, you need to understand the context of how it unfolded.

For the first thirty odd minutes, Liverpool were - if we’re being scrupulously fair … actually decent. They pressed with some intent. Mamardashvili, deputising for the perennially absent Alisson, played a brilliant ball to release Salah in behind. The Egyptian, six yards out, screwed his effort well wide. Ekitike dragged a snap-shot wide from ten yards. The atmosphere in the away end carried something resembling hope.

The underlying statistics will, perversely, flatter Liverpool. Both sides ended with 11 attempts each, and Liverpool actually had more touches in the City box - 36 to City’s 21. But here is the number that matters: City produced 2.44 xG against Liverpool’s 1.46, with four big chances to Liverpool’s two. They were clinical. Liverpool were not. And when you are not clinical at one end, you cannot afford to be suicidal at the other.

Because the game did not turn on a moment of City brilliance. It turned on inexcusable sloppiness from the man wearing the armband.

In the 39th minute, O’Reilly turned sharply inside the box, and Van Dijk simply lunged at him. It wasn’t a challenge born of tactical desperation. It was clumsy. It was avoidable. It was the fourth penalty Van Dijk has conceded in all competitions this season - more than any other player in Europe’s top five leagues, and as many as in his previous eight years combined at Anfield. Haaland converted coolly, Mamardashvili diving the wrong way.

Then, right on the stroke of half-time, came the second. Cherki and his partnership with Semenyo was something which Liverpool had no answer for, found Semenyo on the right. His cross was inch-perfect. Haaland ran in front of Konate, timed his movement to perfection, and glanced a header into the far corner. Konate and Van Dijk both flat, neither attacking the ball. Liverpool went in 2-0 down having gifted the game away.

The second half lasted five minutes before the contest was dead. Cherki threaded a ball in behind a static Van Dijk, Semenyo chipped Mamardashvili with total composure. Three-nil. And then came the worst of the four, perhaps the worst goal conceded all season.

O’Reilly received the ball on the edge of the area. He was given time. He was given space. No press, no press trigger, nobody closing. A low cutback to Haaland twelve yards out - unmarked, standing still. One touch. A drive into the underside of the bar. Hat-trick complete.

With this FA Cup win added to two Premier League victories, it was the first time City had beaten Liverpool three times in the same season since 2015-16. The same opponent. The same defensive void. The same catastrophic results. If there is a more damning indictment of a coaching staff’s inability to address a documented vulnerability across an entire season, I would struggle to name it.

The denouement was almost too on-the-nose. Salah … making his first appearance since announcing his departure, a man with 13 goals and eight assists against City across his career - stepped up to take a consolation penalty while four down and had it saved by Trafford. Adding a missed penalty to a missed open goal in the 14th minute, this was Salah reduced to the embodiment of everything that has gone wrong: a shadow of himself, going through the motions on what should have been a meaningful farewell to the fixture.

The City fans celebrated with a Poznan. Cherki, watching from the bench after being substituted, swapped shirts with Ekitike while the game was still alive. It said everything about the contempt with which Liverpool’s resistance had come to be held.

When the Captain Speaks

The most damning indictment of the day did not come from a pundit, a journalist, or an angry fan on X.

It came from Virgil van Dijk.

The captain of Liverpool Football Club stood in front of cameras at full-time and said, without equivocation, that his team had given up. Not a vague allusion to a poor performance. Not the usual diplomatic deflection. The captain of Liverpool used the words “gave up” to describe his own side during an FA Cup quarter-final.

“I can only apologise to the fans for what we have shown, especially the second half. Obviously you come out with the right intentions from the dressing room, to hopefully score for 2-1 as soon as possible to change the game. The opposite happens and to come back from 3-0 is obviously very difficult here — but also you shouldn’t give up and that’s maybe, at a certain point, what happened.”

He did not stop there.

And then, on the broader malaise of the season, on the absence of the togetherness that defined this club through the Klopp years - he was candid to a degree that should concern every single person connected with Liverpool Football Club:

“I’ve been lucky enough to play for Liverpool for so many years. The main thing we always had was togetherness. Now obviously we are in a little bit of a transition, we have to find it. It’s difficult to perform every two days if you don’t have it consistently.”

“We fall back into games where we get beaten on intensity or beaten on how much you really want to go for it. It’s a difficult one to take and everyone has to look at themselves.”

Read those words again. The captain of Liverpool is telling us that his team no longer has togetherness.

That they are mentally fragile. That they give up.

That after nearly three-quarters of a season, they still have not found whatever it is that held this club together through some of the most difficult moments in its recent history.

And then there was Dominik Szoboszlai. The Hungarian has been, by some distance, the most consistently committed player in a deeply uncommitted Liverpool season, a man who fights even when those around him have stopped. At full-time, he walked towards the away end and visibly expressed frustration in the direction of the supporters, seemingly those who had already left during the rout. Having stayed, having worked, his rawness was understandable. But the optics of appearing to confront the fans who had just endured ninety minutes of that - rather than celebrating the few hundred who had remained to the end … were badly misjudged. The reaction from supporters online was immediate and correctly unsparing.

When Szoboszlai spoke to cameras, at least his words were honest. “The mentality wasn’t there enough. None of us were there, to be honest, as much as we could. It’s a hard time but we have to stick together.”

He is right. But he has also been here before. When asked last month after a similar performance why the mentality keeps collapsing, his answer was essentially: if we knew why, we’d fix it. That is not the response of a dressing room with answers. It is the response of one running out of them.

No Press, No Desire, No Philosophy

The tactical failings on display on Saturday were not new. They were simply the most emphatic exhibition yet of everything that has been wrong with this Liverpool side throughout 2025-26.

In all three fixtures against City this season, the blueprint has been identical. City’s runners draw Liverpool’s press higher, create space behind the midfield line, and feed players in behind the defensive line. Liverpool’s shape - operating without a clear, coordinated press, drops reactively rather than closes proactively. Gaps open between the lines. There were times on Saturday when the forwards pushed high while the defence dropped off, creating a no-man’s land in midfield that City’s Cherki and O’Reilly exploited with ease and regularity.

This is not exclusively a Manchester City problem. The same spaces have been there against Brighton — who beat Liverpool in their most recent Premier League outing. Against Wolves, who won at Molineux. Against Bournemouth. Against relegation-threatened sides who had identified exactly the same vulnerabilities and had the nous to exploit them. That City, with Haaland and Cherki and Semenyo, do it with the most devastating efficiency does not change the root cause.

For Haaland’s third — the hat-trick goal, the one that completed the destruction — the execution was almost insultingly simple. O’Reilly received possession on the edge of the box, took his time, and played a cutback to Haaland standing untracked twelve yards from goal. No press. No recovery run. Nobody closing. It was a training-ground finish. It looked like one because Liverpool had effectively stopped defending. Not just in that moment, but as a collective, as a shape, as a philosophy.

Arne Slot’s Liverpool have no philosophy out of possession. That is the brutal, unavoidable conclusion of ten months of evidence.

A Tale of Two Liverpools

While all of this was unfolding in Manchester, something quietly remarkable was happening elsewhere.

Liverpool’s women’s team — on a fraction of the budget, with a fraction of the resources, having spent the better part of this season fighting to remain in the top flight — beat Charlton Athletic in extra-time to reach the Women’s FA Cup semi-finals. An 18-year-old, Zara Shaw, marking her comeback from a year-long ACL injury, came off the bench in the 115th minute and scored the winner.

Consider the backdrop. Liverpool Women lost their first five league matches. They went winless in the WSL for an extended run. They were beaten 9-1 by Chelsea in the League Cup. They navigated all of this without Olivia Smith — their best player, sold to Arsenal in the summer for a world-record £1 million, the first seven-figure transfer in women’s football history. Their squad has been ravaged by injuries. Their operating budget compared to the men is almost comically small.

And still they fight. A teenager back from serious injury, off the bench, 115th minute, match on the line. That is character. That is an identity. That is what it looks like when a group of players are still working for each other when everything has gone wrong.

The contrast is not an indictment of the women’s team. It is a tribute to them. But it is also an uncomfortable mirror held up to the men. Character is not a function of salary. It does not come automatically with Champions League pedigree or a world-record transfer fee. You either want to fight for the badge or you don’t.

On Saturday, Liverpool Women wanted it. On Saturday, the Liverpool men - their captain’s own admission ringing in our ears - did not.

The Endgame: And Why It’s Already Written

We essentially want this season to end. That is a sentence no Liverpool supporter could have imagined forming during last May’s title celebrations. And yet here we are: watching a team that won the Premier League twelve months ago produce performances that would embarrass a mid-table side, captained by a man who publicly admits they gave up, managed by a coach who speaks of “reoccurring themes” while those same themes recur without remedy, week after week after week.

But here is the thing about Liverpool’s run-in: it was doomed before it even began.

Not in the abstract, defeatist sense. In the literal, fixture-list, form-table sense. Look at what lies ahead. PSG in Paris on Wednesday — the defending Champions League holders, playing at the Parc des Princes, against a Liverpool side that has two wins in seven and just conceded four goals in under an hour to a team that wasn’t even at its best this season. Then Fulham in the Premier League, while the bones of the PSG second leg loom. Then PSG again at Anfield. Then Everton, Crystal Palace, Manchester United, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Brentford.

Each of those fixtures arrives carrying its own pressure. And every single one of them will be played against the backdrop of the same question: is Arne Slot still the right man for this job?

The answer, increasingly, feels like it is being written in real time. The Etihad defeat was his heaviest since taking charge. The statistics around him are damning: fifth in the league, 15 defeats, a 7% chance of winning the Champions League according to Opta. But more than the numbers, it is the nature of the performances that should concern those making decisions at Anfield. You can recover from a bad run. You can survive a bad season. What you cannot easily survive is a dressing room that has mentally checked out - and a captain who confirms it, publicly, after a quarter-final defeat.

PSG represent not just a footballing challenge but an existential one for this management tenure. Luis Enrique’s side are organised, ruthless, and playing with the freedom of champions. They press with intent. They have a clearly defined identity. They will, in short, do everything that Arne Slot’s Liverpool cannot. And if Wednesday brings what the trajectory of this season suggests it might - another heavy, shapeless, spiritless defeat, then the question will not be whether Slot survives until the summer.

It will be whether Liverpool can justify letting him see out the final weeks.

The tragedy is that it did not have to be this way. The squad Slot inherited was — is — filled with players of genuine quality. Wirtz, Liverpool’s record signing, has six goals and five assists in all competitions. That is not the return of a player who has been allowed to flourish. Salah, departing in the summer, has spent his final season as a Liverpool player watching from the periphery of a system that cannot accommodate him. Van Dijk, a colossus under Klopp, has regressed so steeply that he is now the most penalty-prone defender on the continent. These are not coincidences. They are symptoms of a coaching environment that has not brought the best from the players it inherited.

And so the run-in arrives - not as opportunity, but as ordeal. Not as a platform for glory, but as a series of uncomfortable public examinations that this team is almost certainly going to fail. The Champions League, the last remaining honour Liverpool could salvage from this wreckage of a season, now feels less like a realistic ambition than a final chance to prove that something … anything of value can still be extracted before the curtain falls.

Something has to give. The captain has said so in the clearest possible terms. The performances have said so loudly and consistently for months. And the fans - the ones who filed down those stairs at the Etihad, voices carrying through the cold Manchester night, singing the name of a man they wish was in the dugout - have made their position unmistakably clear. They weren’t singing for Xabi Alonso out of spite. They were singing out of grief. The grief of watching something they love diminish, quietly and without dignity, over the course of a season that promised everything.

At the Colosseum, the crowd turns when the gladiators stop fighting.

The crowd turned on Saturday.

And the gladiators didn’t even notice.

Less than twelve months ago, Liverpool were champions of England. Arne Slot had walked into one of football’s most demanding jobs and delivered a title in his first season - against most expectations, with a swagger that felt like the beginning of something. The post-Klopp era, it seemed, wasn’t going to be an era of transition at all. Just continuation. We should have known better than to get comfortable.

Because what a difference a year makes.

The title defence has been dead since December. A squad assembled at a cost that makes the eyes water sits fifth in the Premier League, fighting for Champions League qualification that should have been the absolute floor of ambition - not the ceiling.

The football has drained the colour from the terraces. Key figures are approaching the end of their contracts. And Mo Salah, one of the greatest individuals to pull on a Liverpool shirt in a generation - is walking out of the door when the season ends, not quite in the manner any of us would have written it.

This isn’t a club in crisis (in the traditional sense at least). Liverpool are too big, too historically resilient for that word to apply. But it is, unmistakably, a slight fall from grace. And the question sitting at the heart of it … one nobody at the AXA or Boston seems in any rush to answer - is a simple one.

So what actually is the plan?

An Empty Seat and a Silent Ground

But before we get to transfer windows and managerial speculation, we need to talk about something more visceral, because it’s the thing that’s been eating at me most.

Go to Anfield right now and ask yourself honestly:

Are you excited?

Are you on the edge of your seat?

Is your heart in your mouth when Liverpool attack?

Is there that electric, physical sense that something is about to happen?

For most of us, if we’re being truthful - no. There isn’t.

The football under Arne Slot this season has not been getting bums out of seats. That’s not hyperbole - it’s almost literally true. Before the Tottenham game a fortnight ago, returned tickets were visible on Liverpool’s own website the day before kick-off, available to members for around £55. At Anfield. For a Premier League home game. That is not something that happens at this football club. Or at least, it didn’t used to.

And when those who did turn up (a fair few I know personally) watched Liverpool go 1-0 up and immediately retreat into their shell - inviting Spurs, a team that couldn’t name a full 20-man squad, hadn’t won in 11 and literally just dismissed the interim manager - the boos that rang out at full-time were proper boos … Boo’s that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at Goodison.

Not grumbles. Not frustrated sighs. Sustained, unmistakeable disapproval from a fanbase that has been pushed to the edge. Jamie Carragher put it simply on Sky Sports: the crowd have gone, and once you lose them, it is very difficult to win them back.

What’s missing is something you can’t really put into a stat, but every supporter feels it the moment they walk through the turnstile or turn on the TV. There’s no drive to this team. No hunger to win the second ball, no ferocity in the press, no sense that every tackle is a statement of intent. The intensity that once made Anfield a fortress - the heavy metal, the relentlessness, the visceral feeling that Liverpool were going to come and take the game from you whether you liked it or not … has been replaced by something slow and lateral and, frankly, passionless. Side to side. No urgency. No identity. The same turgid performance, week after week, as one supporter put it - and they weren’t wrong.

“Fast starts have been replaced by slow openings... ‘Fortress Anfield’ and ‘heavy metal football’ - both can, for now, be consigned to the past.”

It isn’t just that results have been poor, it’s that the manner of performances has been soul-destroying. Liverpool have become a team that scores and parks the bus, that concedes late because they’ve invited pressure for twenty minutes while sitting on a one-goal lead, that relies almost entirely on individual moments of brilliance - because the system itself generates almost nothing.

Slot himself admitted he has “tried a lot of things” to fix the late-goal problem. The honesty is appreciated. But when a manager is publicly searching for solutions to a structural flaw in front of the press, that tells its own story. A team without a spine, without leaders who demand more from each other on the pitch in the moment.

Wirtz: The Exhibit We Keep Ignoring

Which brings us to what happened in Basel on Friday night, and why it should be troubling every single one of us. Florian Wirtz. Two goals - both truly exceptional, one curled into the far corner with outrageous composure, the other a near-identical piece of brilliance minutes from time. Two assists. Involved in every Germany goal in a 4-3 win over Switzerland. A performance he called probably his best yet in a Germany shirt. The man was electric.

“In the second goal, you can see that’s exactly where I wanted the ball to go.” Florian Wirtz, post-match, Basel

This is the man Liverpool paid a club-record fee for last summer. A player with four goals and two assists across 27 Premier League appearances. The same number of combined goal involvements - in two international games. Let that sit with you for a moment.

Nobody is writing Wirtz off. His debut season in a new league and a new country deserves some patience. But the pattern has become impossible to unsee: give Wirtz freedom, trust him with the keys, build the system around his instincts - as Germany do — and he is genuinely world-class. Slot’s system gives him none of that. It is the same story with others within the squad too - brilliant in patches for their national teams, frustratingly anonymous in the week-to-week grind of the league. You keep waiting for the penny to drop, for the connections to form, for nearly £450 million worth of talent to suddenly click into gear. It hasn’t happened. And that is, at least significantly, a coaching problem.

Florian Wirtz Slow Anfield Start

To be quite frank … I actually don’t trust Arne Slot with more new signings. That’s not an easy thing to write - he won the title in year one with real conviction, and there was genuine quality in what he built. But a second season that has seen a generational transfer outlay yield a fifth-place league position and a Champions League qualification battle that should never have been this precarious - that demands honest scrutiny.

The scrutiny doesn’t flatter him. And the fanbase, whether he likes it or not, has already delivered its verdict.

The Men in the Offices

Beyond the dugout, the instability extends upward. Slot, Richard Hughes and Michael Edwards are all now in the final stretch of their respective deals. Three of the most important people at the football club, simultaneously at a contractual crossroads. That alone would be unsettling. The context around it makes it genuinely alarming.

Edwards came back to FSG with a clear mandate - build a multi-club model, create the structural pipeline that the elite clubs have used to dominate recruitment for a decade. Deals were explored in France and Spain. And then, quietly, the whole project was shelved. FSG cooled on it. For Edwards, who returned specifically because of that ambition, the question of whether his future is here is now genuinely open. The same Saudi clubs that circled last year haven’t gone away. There is no new contract. There is no public clarity.

Hughes has had a complicated tenure. The summer recruitment: Wirtz, Isak, Ekitike, Kerkez, Frimpong, Leoni - was ambitious, and in terms of the raw quality of individual players, largely defensible. But it hasn’t cohered into a team, and the areas that remain glaringly unaddressed - a commanding centre-back, a defensive midfielder, a genuine succession plan on the right flank - speak to a recruitment process that ran out of runway before the job was finished.

And yet, I don’t necessarily want a pivot at this juncture.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to … As much as Hughes hasn’t covered himself in glory, as much as the investment hasn’t landed the way it should have, ripping up the recruitment model and starting from scratch would be the worst possible outcome of a bad season. What Liverpool need is for Hughes to be given the space to finish what he started. To take the squad he’s built, fill the gaps with conviction, and turn a work-in-progress into a legitimate contender. He needs to roll out the plan. Not hinted at in press briefings or defended in vague terms.

The actual plan; transparent, decisive, and followed through. The fanbase has earned that much.

The Case for Alonso

If Slot does go - and the German press, specifically BILD’s Axel Hesse, who broke the Wirtz story and has strong connections to Alonso’s camp, has been consistently reporting that the Dutchman will be gone “no later than the summer” - then the name everyone turns to is obvious. Xabi Alonso. Former Liverpool midfielder. The man who built Bayer Leverkusen into an unbeaten Bundesliga title winner. The man who was FSG’s first choice before he chose Real Madrid, only for that to end badly after eight months. Michael Edwards, reportedly, never lost contact.

The romantic appeal is undeniable a club legend returning to restore an identity that has been lost. And Alonso’s track record of building teams with genuine personality, genuine fight, a real sense of collective purpose, is precisely what this squad is screaming out for.

We also controversially looked at how an LFC side under Alonso could look like in a previous article.

At Leverkusen, he built a side that scrambled for late equalisers because they simply refused to lose - a side driven by spirit as much as system. That’s what’s been missing at Anfield. The reports suggest he’s open to a Liverpool move, but has one firm condition: genuine control over squad planning. The Real Madrid experience, arriving without real transfer or squad authority - left its mark. He won’t walk into that again.

And honestly? I think this is the move. Not because of the romance of it (though that’s real and I won’t pretend otherwise), but because when you look at this squad and then look at what Alonso demands from his teams, the fit is almost startling. Wirtz didn’t just thrive at Leverkusen under Alonso, he became the best young player in Europe. He was given licence, trust, and a system designed to put him in positions where his instincts could take over. That’s the Wirtz we saw in Basel on Friday. That’s the Wirtz Liverpool paid for and have barely seen. Isak; mobile, intelligent, pressing from the front - is exactly the striker Alonso’s systems are built to service. Frimpong was one of the best right-backs on the continent under him. The infrastructure for something genuinely exciting is already here, sitting largely untapped. Because the prospect of Xabi Alonso walking back through those doors, with this group of players and the points to prove they all carry, is one of the most compelling footballing propositions this club has had in front of it in years.

The Number That Changes Everything

Which brings us to the part that keeps me up at night … and it’s not about prestige or ambition, it’s about cold, hard financial reality.

FSG described last summer’s outlay as doing “three windows in one.” That level of spending is not coming again. The budget available this summer will be shaped almost entirely by what happens in the next few weeks.

Make the Champions League: through the Premier League, or by actually beating PSG and then somehow winning the competition makes the financial picture is manageable. Miss out entirely, and the club enters a summer of genuinely painful arithmetic.

Because this isn’t about whether players will want to come to Liverpool. The name still opens doors. The stadium, the fanbase, the history - it still means something, and it always will. The issue is what you can offer them in contractual terms. The difference in commercial revenue between Champions League football and Europa League football is tens of millions of pounds, money that would otherwise go directly into recruitment. Trying to sign a right-winger of genuine Salah-calibre quality, which is just one of many pressing needs this summer - without that budget is not impossible, but it is a completely different negotiation. You’re asking a world-class player to take a financial haircut for a project. Some will. Many won’t. And Liverpool cannot afford to find out the hard way.

The Bones Are Good - If Anyone’s Paying Attention

None of this is irreversible. It genuinely isn’t. The squad that exists: Wirtz, Isak, Gravenberch, Szoboszlai, Ekitike, a Van Dijk who still, when motivated, is one of the best defenders in the world - has the makings of something genuinely special. The Wirtz we saw in Basel on Friday isn’t some distant version of the player we bought. He’s right there, waiting for someone to build a system around him rather than fit him into someone else’s. Isak in the right structure isn’t a frustrating, 6 touch in 60 minutes presence … he’s a 30-goal-a-season striker. These players don’t need replacing. They need liberating.

But that requires the right person in the dugout, with the right support structure behind him, and a clear recruitment strategy for the two or three positions that still desperately need addressing. It requires the club to stop managing this situation through leaks and briefings and start communicating with its supporters like the institution it’s supposed to be. It requires FSG to make decisions: on the manager, on the executives, on the plan - and to make them soon. Because the summer will not wait, the window will not stay open, and every week of drift is a week of advantage handed to the clubs who know exactly where they’re going.

Anfield was built on noise, on passion, on the feeling that the crowd and the team were one organism - feeding each other, demanding more from each other, making the opposition feel it from the first whistle. Right now, there are empty seats where that energy used to live.

We want it back. We deserve it back. And the question of how it comes back starts with the same three words it always did.

So … what’s the plan?

There is a particular kind of grief that football inflicts on you that nothing else quite replicates. Not the grief of a bad result, or even a season gone wrong. This is the grief of a player who became woven into the fabric of who you are, who existed on that pitch every week as proof that something magical was possible - and who now, suddenly, irrevocably, will not be there anymore. The day you always knew was coming has arrived. Mohamed Salah is leaving Liverpool.

How do you quantify what a footballer means to a club? The instinct is to reach for numbers, and with Salah, the numbers are staggering enough to stop you in your tracks. But the truth is that statistics - however extraordinary, have never been able to hold the full weight of what he has meant. You can recite the records until your voice gives out, and you still won’t have captured the feeling of watching him receive the ball on the right flank, cut inside onto his left foot, and know - know - before the shot had even left his boot, that it was going in.

Some players play for a club. Some players become a club. Salah became Liverpool, and Liverpool - for nearly a decade - became Salah. To separate the two now feels like tearing something that was never meant to come apart.

I - The Record

In Numbers, Impossible

Let us try anyway. Let us stand before the numbers and let them land properly, because they deserve that much.

Since the moment he arrived from Roma in the summer of 2017, Salah has topped the Premier League for goals, assists, open-play chances created, shots, shots on target, and touches in the opposition box. Every single one of those categories - first, for nine years, against the greatest league in the world. He is the Premier League’s all-time leading scorer and creator for a single club, a record he shares with no one. He has scored 50 Champions League goals, making him the first African player to reach that landmark, surpassing Didier Drogba’s previous record by a distance.

And yet, here is what the numbers still cannot tell you: they cannot explain the feeling in the Kop when he got the ball in space. They cannot explain the collective held breath, the lean forward in the seat, the electricity that crackled through Anfield every single time that man had the ball and room to run. Those are things you carry in your body, not your head.

II - The Promise

He Promised. He Delivered.

Cast your mind back to the spring of 2024. Liverpool were in transition. Jürgen Klopp had announced he was leaving. The atmosphere was elegiac, uncertain, the kind of mood that descends on a football club when it doesn’t quite know what it’s going to be anymore. And in that moment of doubt, it was Salah - as it so often was … who cut through it all with something clean and true.

His message was simple:

Not a PR line. Not hollow corporate optimism. A promise from a man who had spent eight years making promises on that right flank and keeping every single one of them.

What followed was the greatest individual season the Premier League may have ever witnessed from a player in his 30s. In 2024–25, Salah registered 47 goal involvements; 29 goals and 18 assists - in 38 league games alone. This is a record for a 38-game Premier League season, surpassing Thierry Henry and Erling Haaland. He won the Golden Boot, the Golden Playmaker, and the Player of the Season - the first and only player ever to take all three in a single campaign. He was 32 years old.

And at the end of it, Liverpool were Premier League champions. The title he had promised, delivered. That 5–1 victory over Tottenham that sealed it will live in the memory of every Liverpool supporter for the rest of their lives - and at the heart of it, as ever, was number eleven.

“This is what we wanted to deliver to our fans more than anything. This is a club that should always compete for everything and be right at the top. No excuses. All teams win games but in the end there’s only one champion.”

He didn’t just keep the promise. He made 2024–25 feel like a gift - one last magnificent year where he played as if he had something to prove to every doubter, every critic, every journalist who had spent the previous summer writing his Liverpool obituary. He silenced them all with a season for the ages. In doing so, he also surpassed his own iconic debut in 2017–18, proving that even at 33, he was still finding new ways to evolve.

III - The Evolution

More Than a Goalscorer. A Complete Footballer.

The lazy version of the Mohamed Salah story is purely the goals. The debut season fireworks. The 32 Premier League goals that broke the record in 2017–18. The hat-tricks, the thunderbolts, the penalties dispatched with the cold efficiency of a man utterly at peace with himself in the biggest moments. All of that is real, and all of it is extraordinary.

But the deeper story - the one that elevates him above mere goalscorer into genuinely complete footballer … is the story of his evolution. Because around 2021–22, something shifted. The goals were still there, but increasingly, so was something else. Salah began to see the game differently. He started to create. His assist tallies climbed. His passing range widened. He became a player who could destroy you in multiple dimensions simultaneously, either by scoring himself or by threading a perfectly-timed ball through a defence for someone else to finish.

He drew level with Steven Gerrard’s Premier League assist record for the club — 92 — a fact that still seems almost surreal when you say it out loud. Level with Gerrard. In assists. From a man who arrived as a wide forward and evolved into something approaching a complete attacking midfielder. His 92 Premier League assists for Liverpool equal the most any Red has ever registered in the division’s history.

The phrase we continue to coin to this day … “Only Mohamed Salah” was born.

This evolution was not accidental. It was the hallmark of a player who refused to plateau, refused to become a greatest-hits act, refused to coast. Even as age crept in, even as the questions about his longevity grew louder, he kept rewriting what was possible. The willingness to reinvent himself - repeatedly, genuinely, not as a PR exercise but as a matter of personal pride, is one of the purest expressions of what a professional footballer should be.

IV - The Impact

He Turned Our Dreams … Into Reality

There is a sentence that every Liverpool fan of a certain age carries with them quietly, rarely spoken aloud because speaking it aloud makes it too real, too fragile. It goes something like this: for the majority of my life, Liverpool were not the club I was promised they would be.

The people around my age reading this will know exactly what I mean. You came of age as a Liverpool supporter in the long shadow of the 1990s and 2000s: the countless near-misses, the heartbreaks, the years of watching other clubs lift the trophies that should have been yours. And then Jürgen Klopp arrived, Sadio Mane arrived, and then Mohamed Salah arrived … and something changed so dramatically and so completely that it still feels, some mornings, like it might not quite have been real.

But it was. A Champions League. Two Premier League titles. Cup doubles. Years of football played at a level of intensity and beauty that reminded you why you fell in love with the sport in the first place. Salah was the engine of all of it. He was the player who made the dreams of a generation of Liverpool supporters not merely imaginable, but actual.

We watched him score 16 goals against Manchester United. We watched him score after 55 seconds in Europe. We watched him score the fastest hat-trick in Champions League history. We watched him cut in from the right, as he did a thousand times, curl the ball into the top corner, as he did a hundred times, and we lost our minds with joy, as we did every single time, because even when you knew it was coming, it never got old.

V - The Last One

The Last Footballer … I Truly Felt

I want to say something now that is harder to articulate, but which feels more important than any of the statistics. And it is this: Mohamed Salah is one of the the last footballers I may ever truly, completely, unreservedly feel.

At 34 years of age, I am aware of a shift that has happened gradually, almost imperceptibly, in how I relate to footballers. The younger ones - the teenagers who arrive with their data profiles and their social media brands and their agents on speed dial … I can appreciate them intellectually, I can admire their talent, but I cannot feel them the way I feel with a Virgil … a Firmino … a Salah. The emotional contract is different. The generation gap has finally opened up between me and the players I watch.

Salah was the last one who arrived and stayed long enough to become part of my adult life. Not just my Weekends and CL nights - my life. He was there when I was 26, and now I am 34. He was there through the years when everything felt possible, and through the years when nothing quite came together, and through the year he kept his promise and brought the title home. He was there, every week, number eleven, doing something that made you remember why the whole beautiful, maddening, occasionally heartbreaking exercise of loving a football club was worth it.

For me, in a Liverpool shirt, only one name rivals his. Only Steven Gerrard - our Gerrard, the boy from Huyton who became the soul of everything we were - sits alongside him.

That is the company Salah keeps. That is the conversation he belongs in.

Not as a foreign superstar who passed through. As a Liverpool legend, full stop, whose name will be spoken in the same breath as the greatest this club has ever produced.

“In my lifetime, only Steven Gerrard rivals Mohamed Salah as Liverpool’s greatest footballer. That is the measure of what he has meant. That is the standard to which he has risen. Both of them: irreplaceable, eternal, ours.” - The only honest conclusion

The 2025–26 season has not been a vintage one. There have been public tensions, a difficult relationship with Arne Slot, weeks on the bench, the kind of messy, complicated ending that rarely matches the grandeur of everything that came before. But here is what I know about endings: they do not define legacies. And Mohamed Salah’s legacy at Liverpool is beyond the reach of one difficult season. It is cemented in nine years of brilliance, in two titles, in a Champions League, in a record that may stand for decades, and in the permanent, indelible memory of a man who turned up and delivered - again, and again, and again.

He will play his remaining games. He will bid his farewell at Anfield. And when that day comes, Anfield will give him the send-off he deserves - the kind that shakes the rafters, that spills out onto the streets, that travels across the city and the country and reaches wherever Egyptian ears are tuned in. Because that is what he has earned.

Thanks for all the memories Mo … You’ll Never Walk Alone.

There is a moment in Roman gladiatorial combat - not the killing blow, but the one before it where the crowd turns. Where the collective noise of thousands shifts register, from spectacle to verdict. When a gladiator fell, spectators shouted “Habet, Hoc habet!”, “He’s had it!” - and the crowd would signal their decision through the pollice verso gesture, the turned thumb. Protocol dictated that the emperor would be swayed by the desires of the crowd, and prudent emperors were usually alive to the will of the people. On Sunday afternoon at Anfield, in the dying seconds of a match Liverpool should have won comfortably against a Tottenham Hotspur side stranded one point above the relegation zone, that ancient dynamic arrived again.

Richarlison drilled past Alisson Becker in the 90th minute. The equaliser was scrappy, avoidable, and utterly inevitable. The boos that rang around the ground at full-time were not the hot fury of the impatient. They were something colder: a crowd communicating a considered, near-unanimous judgment. The gladiator had fallen again. The thumb had turned.

This is where Liverpool are, in March 2026. Not catastrophically adrift, not yet mathematically consigned to mediocrity, but - and this is perhaps worse, trapped in a fog of their own making. The Premier League champions of just ten months ago are sitting outside the top four, and playing football that their own player of the season, Dominik Szoboszlai, cannot bring himself to fully explain.

The Numbers That Cannot Lie

Let us start with the cold data from Sunday, because it is where the case against Slot’s Liverpool is most damning.

Liverpool had 64% possession at Anfield. They managed 17 shots. And yet, against a Tottenham side that had lost their last six matches in all competitions, Liverpool dominated possession but managed only 4 shots on target from 17 attempts - while Tottenham, with 37% of the ball, put 7 of their 13 shots on goal. The expected goals told a similarly humbling story. A side of this quality, at home, against that opposition, with that much of the ball, generating an xG of 1.58 from open play against a team in freefall - it is the recurring statistical fingerprint of a team that simply does not know how to break down a low block.

The inclusion of Rio Ngumoha and Jeremie Frimpong, two pace-carrying, wide-threatening players - changed precisely nothing. Ngumoha became Liverpool’s fifth-youngest ever top-flight starter on the day, a genuinely exciting individual milestone, and yet it was washed away entirely by what happened around him.

This is the point that bears dwelling on. The logic of bringing on Frimpong and Ngumoha is self-evident: width, pace, directness, the ability to stretch a low block and create second-phase opportunities. That those qualities made no discernible difference is not an indictment of the individuals. It is an indictment of the framework they were playing within.

We have been watching this team, week after week, session after session, recycle the same slow, possession-heavy approach - high in control, low in penetration, high in territory, devoid of incision - and expect a different result. Einstein, apocryphally, defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes. Slot’s Liverpool have earned that word.

The wingers change. The formations shift slightly. The personnel rotates.

And yet the shape of the problem - that shapeless, toothless dominance against a compact block, remains identical.

It is not a bad run. It is a method. And the method is broken.

An improvement in set-piece attacking has helped Liverpool paper over cracks. The single goal that Liverpool managed came not from any sustained attacking move, not from the intricate interplay of their expensively assembled forward line. It came from dead ball. When a team of this calibre can only unlock opposition defences from set-piece situations, you are not watching a team going through a rough patch. You are watching a system in philosophical crisis.

The Late-Goal Plague: A Calendar Year of Failure

And then came the 90th minute. As it has, again and again and again.

Liverpool have now conceded eight Premier League goals in the 90th minute or later this season, their most during a single campaign. The Reds have also dropped seven points from winning positions at Anfield this term, their most since 2016-17.

The pattern is not new. It has been building, accumulating, compounding for the better part of a calendar year. This is not a team being unlucky in the dying minutes. This is a team that cannot manage game states - emotionally, physically, collectively. The inability to see out a lead against a relegated-in-spirit Tottenham at home is not misfortune. It is evidence. Evidence of a squad that is unfit, in both senses of the word: unfit in body because the physical load of a title win followed by a truncated pre-season and a gruelling European campaign has never truly been addressed; and unfit in mind because, somewhere along the way, this group lost the hardness of will that allowed them to grind wins into certainties rather than certainties into draws.

A team that struggles to create from open play in the first half, that relies on dead-ball moments for its goals, and that then fails to hold leads in the final minutes is not a team that is merely out of form. It is a team that is structurally and mentally failing across all three phases of a football match. Sunday was not an aberration. It was a summary.

Szoboszlai Speaks the Quiet Part Out Loud

After the match, Dominik Szoboszlai stood in front of the Sky Sports cameras and did something rare in modern football: he said what he actually thought.

“I don’t know what happened, I have nothing to say,” Szoboszlai said. “In the last minute, again, I don’t know how many times this season already. We have to wake up because there’s eight, nine games to go, and if we keep going like this, next season we should be happy with the Conference League. I don’t know why it keeps happening. If I would have the answer then I probably tell you guys and we will change it. But, honestly, I don’t know.”

Read that again.

Liverpool’s most consistent performer this season, their captain in all but armband, is saying publicly that he does not understand what is happening to his team. This is not the false modesty of a footballer deflecting media scrutiny. This is a genuinely confused, genuinely frustrated player - one who has clearly tried to lead from the front and found the effort insufficient.

“We had already a couple of weeks ago a talk between each other saying, ‘Guys, we don’t have such a lot of time to do this right so we have to wake up and start to go in a way that we want to play Champions League next season,’” Szoboszlai revealed. A players’ meeting. Weeks ago. And still Sunday happened. That speaks to a dressing room aware of its crisis, vocal about it internally, and apparently unable to translate that awareness into performance. The gap between what they know and what they do is the definition of a group that has lost the thread.

The word flat, which Szoboszlai also used, deserves particular attention. Not angry. Not fired up. Flat. It is the language of a player who has stopped being surprised by the disappointments, who has moved through frustration and arrived somewhere closer to resignation. And when a player of Szoboszlai’s quality, commitment and character uses that word about his own team after a home match against relegation-threatened opposition, the temperature inside Anfield should concern the boardroom, not just the training pitch.

The Boos and What They Mean

In the Roman Colosseum, the crowd would voice their desires loudly - “Mitte!” for release, “Iugula!” for the kill - and the emperor, however powerful, was expected to follow their lead. Popular fighters were often spared even in defeat - after all, the games were thrown in a bid to keep the city’s population happy. Bucking the trend was the emperor Caligula, who was notorious for his unwillingness to show mercy to the vanquished - condemning popular heroes did little for his popularity with the masses. The analogy writes itself. Arne Slot, once the darling of Anfield after delivering the title in his debut season, now stands in the arena aware that the crowd’s patience has a geometry to it - and it is closing around him.

Szoboszlai urged fans to stick with the team: “I understand the frustration, but we need them, we need everybody.” He also addressed those leaving early: “I don’t think it helps us also that after 80 minutes, people start to go home. It doesn’t help us at all. Stick with us.”

It was the right thing to say. It was also, underneath the appeal for unity, an inadvertent acknowledgement of the distance between what Liverpool were and what they are. Last season’s champions are asking their supporters for patience.

Us supporters are providing honest feedback instead.

The fans leaving early are not disloyal. They are rational. They have watched enough to understand, in their bones, what is coming next. And for all of Sunday, that knowledge proved correct.

The Verdict

Liverpool face Galatasaray on Wednesday in the Champions League Round of 16, already a goal down from the first leg. Brighton away follows on Saturday. The season is not over, but the window is narrowing and the light inside it is failing.

The result left Liverpool in fifth place, having missed the chance to close the gap around them — both rivals dropped points the same weekend. If that opportunity - a full house, a compliant opponent, rivals stumbling - cannot be converted, the question of what can convert into three points becomes genuinely difficult to answer.

Szoboszlai’s words on Sunday were the most damaging thing said about this Liverpool team in a long time. Not because they were inflammatory, but because they were honest, and because the man saying them is the best argument the club currently has for its own competence. The Conference League warning was not hyperbole. It was arithmetic. A footballer looking at the table, the fixture list, and the recurring pattern of capitulation, and refusing to dress it up.

The boos at full-time were Anfield communicating the same message in a different register. This is not rage. It is not hysteria. It is a stadium full of people who have watched football for long enough to know when a team is fundamentally broken - in its shape, in its spirit, in its refusal to change an approach that demonstrably, repeatedly, historically does not work.

The pollice verso - the turned thumb - was the crowd’s way of delivering a verdict the emperor was expected to hear. At Anfield on Sunday, the crowd delivered theirs.

Arne Slot should hear it.

There comes a point in every long, ugly, drawn-out season where you stop bargaining with yourself. Where the “it’s early days” turns into “it’s been months.” Where the injury excuses start to feel hollow. Where the desperate search for green shoots in otherwise bleak performances begins to feel like wilful self-delusion. Liverpool fans; at least the honest ones - have arrived at that point. And Tuesday night in Istanbul was the final shove over the edge.

Galatasaray 1, Liverpool 0. Again. In the same stadium. In the same fashion. Against the same opponents.

That’s right, this was the second time Arne Slot’s side lost 1-0 at Rams Park this season. You’d think shit you’d hope - that a team of Liverpool’s calibre, with Liverpool’s budget, might learn something from the experience. Instead, they walked into exactly the same trap. A corner. A flick-on. A header. Seven minutes gone. A deflating evening in Istanbul complete.

This wasn’t a performance that had anything to give hope too. This was a Liverpool side that once again looked exactly like what they are:

A team completely devoid of the identity, sharpness, and collective belief that any serious European contender needs.

For a lot of fans, if they’re being honest, the patience ran out long before Istanbul. It ran out somewhere in the wreckage of back-to-back 3-0 defeats to Nottingham Forest and PSV. Two consecutive hammerings. Two performances so limp and devoid of resistance that the post-match discussions weren’t even angry anymore - they were something closer to bewildered.

When a Liverpool side gets turned over 3-0 twice in a row, conceding six without reply, the mood among the fanbase doesn’t just dip. Something breaks. The goodwill accumulated from last season’s title, already eroding, evaporated almost entirely. Those two results were the moment this season stopped being a disappointment and started being a crisis.

The Night Itself: Familiar, Infuriating, Inevitable

A corner. A flick-on. An unmarked man at the far post. Seven minutes gone. If you’ve watched Liverpool this season, you already knew how the evening was going to go before it had barely begun.

Set-piece vulnerability has been a thread running through this entire campaign, and Galatasaray exploited it with embarrassing ease - Lemina converting unchallenged as Osimhen flicked on at the near post, with the Liverpool defence doing what Liverpool’s defence has done all season: arriving a moment too late and a yard too short.

From there it followed the now-familiar script. Chances created … Wirtz wasteful in the opening minutes with the keeper stranded, Szoboszlai fired straight at Çakır, Gakpo inches wide late on. Moments that, on another night, change the game. But this is not a Liverpool side that takes those moments. And when they finally did put the ball in the net, VAR took it away for a Konaté handball.

Even when Liverpool catch a break, they don’t catch a break.

The Bigger Picture: Sixth Place, Nineteen Points, and a Season Beyond Saving

Set the Galatasaray game aside for a moment and look at the wider picture. Liverpool currently sit sixth in the Premier League, a full 19 points behind leaders Arsenal. The title they won last season, in Slot’s brilliant debut campaign - feels like a lifetime ago. They even stopped being serious title contenders well before Christmas.

That is the landscape.

Not “we’ve had a rough patch.”

Not “the injuries have caught up with us.”

Sixth place, in a league they won 12 months ago, with a squad that cost in the region of £450 million to assemble over the summer. Alexander Isak arrived. Florian Wirtz arrived. Hugo Ekitike arrived. Milos Kerkez arrived. While Trent Alexander-Arnold, Luis Díaz, and Darwin Núñez departed.

The project was supposed to kick on after being retooled with pure, quality. Instead, it has collapsed spectacularly. And the Champions League - the one lifeline this season still offers is now hanging by a thread after what happened in Istanbul.

The fans who still back Slot will point to the injuries - and they are real. The loss of Diogo Jota in particular, whose personal circumstances were devastating, has left its mark. Alisson Becker has been in and out. The squad, for all its expensive additions, has been stretched. These are not insignificant factors.

But there comes a point where context becomes comfort blanket. Where you have to look at what’s actually in front of you, not what the excuses explain away. And what’s in front of Liverpool right now is a team that cannot string wins together, cannot survive being ‘under the cosh’, cannot consistently impose itself on matches, and cannot find an identity that makes them hard to play against.

And that uncomfortable truth leads you to an even more uncomfortable conclusion: this isn’t just a team having a bad season. This is a rebuild. The word nobody at Anfield wants to say out loud, but it’s the only honest description of where Liverpool currently find themselves. Pull back the curtain on the league position, the performances, the fractured dressing room atmosphere that has been whispered about - and what you are looking at is a squad that needs to be substantially dismantled and reconstructed from scratch.

That is an unmitigated disaster. Not a setback. Not a blip. A disaster …

You simply do not spend £450 million on new players and find yourself in rebuild territory the following March. You do not win the league and spend the next season staring down the barrel of missing the top four. That this is where Liverpool are - genuinely, honestly, in rebuild territory … represents one of the most spectacular single-season collapses English football has seen in years.

Slot: Under Siege, Or Just Under Scrutiny?

Arne Slot arrived at Liverpool with enormous goodwill and delivered it handsomely — a Premier League title in his first season, winning the league at a canter. That buys you credit. But even credit has a spending limit, and this season has maxed the card.

After the Galatasaray defeat, Slot acknowledged his players could have performed better — insisting he was “100% sure” of that — while still holding hope for the second leg at Anfield. “Next week we play at Anfield, and our fans will be so supportive of us,” he said.

The words were measured. The performance they tried to paper over was not.

Jamie Carragher put it bluntly: Slot “won’t have a leg to stand on” if Liverpool fail to secure Champions League football for next season. And that failure is looking increasingly plausible. They are level on points with Chelsea in fifth, three behind fourth-placed Aston Villa, with a gruelling gauntlet of fixtures still to come.

The Liverpool hierarchy, according to David Ornstein at The Athletic, are standing by their man. Slot is under contract until 2027, and the club’s leadership reportedly wants him to remain as coach. An end-of-season review has been reported by Fabrizio Romano - but there is no indication the sack is imminent.

Still, the fanbase is anything but unified. The question of whether Slot is the right man to arrest this decline is dividing supporters down the middle. Some see a coach hamstrung by a botched transfer window and an avalanche of injuries. Others (Including myself) see a manager who cannot find solutions, who is too stubborn with his selections - the continued exclusion of energetic youngster Rio Ngumoha being a particular source of frustration, and who has presided over a humiliating title defence.

The Second Leg: On Paper, They Should Win. But Has This Group Earned That Confidence?

Liverpool must now host Galatasaray at Anfield next Wednesday needing to win to progress. And here’s the thing - logically, rationally, on the basis of squad quality and home advantage and the weight of European history at said ground … You’d back them to do it right? A one-goal deficit at Anfield, under the lights, with the crowd fully behind them. On paper, Liverpool should progress.

But ask yourself this question …

Think about it honestly.

When was the last time Liverpool delivered a performance, in a big moment, that made you feel something other than dread? When did this squad last walk onto a pitch and impose itself with the kind of authority that makes opponents scramble? The answer is uncomfortable because it takes you back to last season - a different team, a different energy, a different version of this club entirely.

What’s actually happened this season is that Liverpool have repeatedly failed to back up the promise of a big occasion with the performance it demands. Too many nights where the atmosphere was right, the occasion was right, and the football was flatly wrong.

Neither the players nor the manager have done a single thing to inspire even the smallest flicker of hope in the fanbase. Not one performance this season that has left you thinking “there it is - that’s the team we know!” Not one result that has quietened the doubts. Not one showing, home or away, that has suggested this group is capable of rising to a moment when it truly matters. They have been inert. Passive. Devoid of fight when fight was needed most.

There is enough quality in this squad - on its very best day (Even on it’s WORST day) - to beat Galatasaray. Wirtz, Salah, Szoboszlai, Mac Allister: these are not ordinary footballers. But this has not been a team that consistently plays like a cohesive unit. It has been a collection of talent that too often fails to add up to its sum of parts.

If they go out to Galatasaray - a side that has never won a Champions League knockout home match since 1973, who eliminated Juventus 7-5 on aggregate in the playoffs - it will be an exit that defines this season in the most brutal terms possible.

Knocked out in the last 16 by a Turkish side, having also surrendered the Premier League, and potentially missing out on a top-four finish.

That is the cliff edge Liverpool are walking toward.

Stage 5: Acceptance

No one wants to write this. Liverpool are one of the greatest clubs in world football, and watching them stumble through a season this disjointed and directionless is genuinely disheartening.

But the facts are what they are. Sixth in the league. Nineteen points off the pace. 1-0 down to Galatasaray. Three-nil hammerings to Forest and PSV still fresh in the memory. A fanbase fractured over its manager’s future. A squad that cost half a billion pounds failing to function as one. A club that won the title twelve months ago and finds itself in rebuild territory in real time.

A season that, however many caveats you stack up, has fallen profoundly - almost historically - short of what was expected. And what was invested in.

Sometimes things just aren’t working. Sometimes the honest answer is also the uncomfortable one.

It’s time to accept it.

There was a period in my life when Monday evenings had a rhythm.

Long day at the office. Commute home in that strange post-work haze. Dinner half-prepared, half-forgotten. Laptop finally closed with a quiet sense of relief. The weekend’s football still lingering in the mind … unresolved debates, tactical questions, storylines left hanging.

And then - something to genuinely look forward to.

A table. Four people. No shouting. No synthetic drama. No flashing “BREAKING” graphics.

On European Football Show, broadcast by BT Sport, football felt expansive.

It felt continental.
It felt intelligent.
It felt adult.

Fronted by James Richardson, and featuring Raphael Honigstein, Julien Laurens, and James Horncastle, the show offered something that, at the time, didn’t feel radical - but in retrospect absolutely was.

It trusted the audience.

Football as Culture, Not Just Content

What set European Football Show apart was not simply that it covered leagues beyond England, it was how it covered them.

This wasn’t a highlights round-up padded with surface-level commentary. It was an hour of considered conversation that treated football as culture. Politics, economics, supporter structures, regional identities, youth development systems … Even Panini stickers, all of it was fair game.

When Honigstein spoke about Borussia Dortmund, he wasn’t just analysing a 4-2-3-1. He was situating it within German football’s broader philosophical and structural framework. When Laurens discussed Paris Saint-Germain, you understood the tension between Qatari ownership, French football identity and domestic competitiveness. When Horncastle dissected Serie A, it came with historical depth - Calciopoli, tactical evolution, the financial tightrope Italian clubs were walking.

And Richardson knitted it together with a presenter’s rarest quality: restraint.

He didn’t dominate. He facilitated. He nudged conversations into clarity without flattening them. His humour dry, occasionally mischievous - gave the show warmth without ever tipping into parody.

The programme felt like a masterclass in how to moderate expertise and educate an audience without it feeling elitest.

The Luxury of Nuance

What I remember most from those Monday nights wasn’t a single segment or a viral moment. It was the rhythm.

There was space.

Space to unpack why a coach’s tactical tweak mattered.
Space to explore why a club’s ownership model shaped its recruitment.
Space to disagree without performing outrage.

The luxury of nuance is something we’ve quietly lost in mainstream football broadcasting.

European Football Show understood that complexity wasn’t a barrier to engagement - it was the point of engagement. It assumed that audiences, regardless of age or depth of knowledge, wanted to understand why things were happening, not just what had happened.

It educated without ever feeling like a lecture.

There was no condescension. No “let me simplify this for you.” Instead, there was an implicit respect: if you’re here, you care. And if you care, you’ll appreciate depth.

As a viewer who was already tired from work, half-distracted by the start of the week - that respect mattered. It made the hour feel restorative rather than draining.

Chemistry Without Performance

It’s easy to underestimate how rare that panel dynamic was.

Four journalists, all specialists, all comfortable in their own lanes - and none of them trying to “win” the conversation.

The banter felt organic because it was rooted in familiarity and mutual regard. The humour worked because it was informed. When disagreements emerged, they were analytical rather than theatrical.

Compare that to much of today’s studio culture, where conflict is often manufactured as a feature rather than a by-product of genuine difference.

Back then, the tension … when it appeared - was intellectual. Competing interpretations of pressing systems. Divergent views on recruitment strategy. Different readings of a coach’s philosophy.

You learned from those disagreements.

You rarely learn from shouting.

The Afterlife: Same Spirit, Different Platform

The physical set may be gone, but its spirit remains audible.

You can still hear it in The Totally Football Show, presented by Richardson and now produced in partnership with The Athletic.

The medium has shifted. Television studio to podcast studio. Scheduled broadcast to on-demand download. But the intellectual architecture is the same.

A presenter who understands rhythm and restraint.
Journalists who bring embedded expertise rather than reactive opinion.
European football treated as interconnected and culturally rich.

In some ways, the podcast format allows even greater depth. Conversations breathe. Tangents are explored rather than cut for time. The listener opts in deliberately -headphones on, attention focused.

But there is something telling about the migration.

Thoughtful, pan-European football discussion didn’t disappear. It simply left mainstream television.

The Mainstream Turn - And the Shrinking of Space

The contrast with the current landscape is stark.

In the 2025/26 season, Sky Sports has leaned decisively into fan-centric panels and personality-led programming. The aesthetic is louder. The pacing quicker. The framing more reactive.

Energy has replaced exposition.
Opinion has replaced analysis.
Relatability has replaced expertise.

Again, fan media is not the villain here. It has injected passion and authenticity into football discourse. It has given voice to supporters who were historically marginalised in broadcast spaces … Which is everything we have tried to achieve with Kop End Fracas, the Liverpool podcast I host on an almost weekly basis.

But when that mode becomes the dominant editorial philosophy of mainstream coverage, the ecosystem narrows.

Where is the hour-long cross-continental discussion?
Where is the space for structural analysis?
Where is the sense that audiences deserve to be expanded rather than affirmed?

The pivot feels less like evolution and more like contraction.

It suggests that complexity must be diluted to be accessible. That depth is niche. That education is optional.

European Football Show quietly disproved all of that.

It proved that intelligent conversation could exist in the mainstream and find an audience. It proved that you didn’t need outrage to hold attention. It proved that viewers would show up … even on a Monday night - for nuance.

What It Gave Us

When I think back to those evenings, what lingers isn’t nostalgia for a specific set or era.

It’s gratitude for a standard.

The show expanded horizons. It normalised European breadth. It raised the level of mainstream football conversation without making a fuss about doing so.

It made football feel bigger.

Not louder. Bigger.

And that difference matters.

Because when coverage shrinks to tribal reaction and personality-driven discourse, the game itself can start to feel smaller - reduced to arguments rather than ideas.

The studio table may be gone. The lighting rigs dismantled. But the blueprint remains - alive in podcasts, long-form journalism and in the expectations of those of us who remember what was possible.

On those Monday nights, after long days and longer commutes, I didn’t just unwind.

I was reminded that football is a vast, interconnected, cultural force stretching far beyond our immediate horizons.

And for an hour each week, television reflected that truth.

That’s a legacy worth celebrating and a standard worth demanding again.

There are players who perform.

There are players who promise.

And then there are players who stand up.

This season, for Liverpool, Dominik Szoboszlai has done something rarer than simply produce numbers. He has taken responsibility.

In a campaign of underperformance under the guise of '“transition” under Arne Slot, Liverpool have needed more than structure and systems. They have needed personality. They have needed someone willing, in moments of uncertainty, to grab games by the scruff of the neck and impose meaning upon them.

Szoboszlai has become that player.

Not the loudest.
Not the most decorated.
But increasingly, the one who looks around when the temperature rises and decides: this is mine.

The Summer That Now Looks Absurd

Rewind to the summer of 2025.

There was a murmur - growing in volume in certain corners of the fanbase … that Szoboszlai might not be “decisive enough”. That perhaps Liverpool required a more clinical final-third midfielder. That maybe he was more aesthetic than essential.

Some even suggested he was not guaranteed a place in the strongest starting XI.

It felt misguided at the time and the latter looks utterly obscene now.

Because what those critiques misunderstood was not his output, but his trajectory.

Szoboszlai was never just a highlights player. He was evolving into something far more valuable: a midfielder capable of dictating tempo, absorbing responsibility, and shaping games emotionally as well as tactically.

This season has simply accelerated what was already forming.

More Than Output - Influence With Weight

Yes, the production is there.

Across competitions, his goal contributions are spread rather than inflated in bursts. He has delivered in the Premier League, in Europe, and in domestic cups. That spread tells you something about reliability.

His shot profile reveals evolution. He remains a long-range specialist — still capable of striking from 25 yards with whip and venom - yet he is arriving in the box more frequently. Roughly two-thirds of his attempts now come from inside the area. That is not aesthetic indulgence. That is growth. That is a midfielder learning where matches are decided.

But what separates this season from previous ones is not just where he shoots from - it is when.

When Liverpool stall, he accelerates tempo.
When Anfield tightens with anxiety, he demands the ball.
When opponents sit deep, he risks the strike others hesitate to take.

Those are leadership moments. They rarely appear in data tables.

The Grown Man in the Midfield

There have been fixtures this season where Liverpool’s attacking quality has flickered but their composure has wavered. Games where the tempo has drifted. Where the crowd has grown anxious.

In those moments, Szoboszlai has increasingly looked like one of the only true adults on the pitch.

Nearly 200 ball recoveries this season.
37 tackles won.
24 interceptions.

These are not decorative defensive numbers. They signal engagement — emotional and physical.

He presses when others jog.
He demands the ball when others recycle cautiously.
He shoots again after missing.

Under Arne Slot, Liverpool’s structure is calmer than during the high-octane peak years of Jürgen Klopp. The pressing is more selective. The build-up more measured.

Szoboszlai has adapted without diluting his personality.

He bridges eras.

The fire remains. The decisions are sharper.

Structural Versatility: The Ultimate Chess Piece

One of the clearest indicators of trust is deployment.

This season, Szoboszlai has not simply been a right-sided No.8.

He has:

• Started matches at right-back when injuries demanded composure and technical security.

• Operated within a double pivot, offering progressive passing from deeper zones.

• Played as the advanced transitional runner beyond the striker.

• Functioned as the tempo-setter in controlled possession phases.

At right-back, he did not merely survive. He inverted intelligently, stepping into midfield to create overloads, protecting central areas while maintaining passing rhythm. His technical security reduced transitional vulnerability.

In the double pivot, he has showcased a different dimension - scanning earlier, distributing with restraint, choosing moments to accelerate rather than forcing them. His passing volume becomes even more significant here. Over 60 passes per match is not cosmetic; it is orchestration.

From his developmental years at RB Salzburg to his refinement at RB Leipzig, the tools were visible.

At Liverpool, the adaptability has become elite.

Slot has not gained one midfielder.

He has gained three profiles in one body.

Taking Games by the Scruff of the Neck

Statistics measure actions.

They do not measure nerve.

When Liverpool travelled to the San Siro to face Inter Milan in the UEFA Champions League, and a late penalty presented itself in a hostile arena, Szoboszlai’s composure was almost casual. Not to mention crucial freekicks against Arsenal and Manchester City where the fixture needed to be turned on it’s head.

No theatre. No delay.

Just conviction.

In the Premier League, he has repeatedly been the player to attempt the disruptive action when matches grow stagnant. The long-range strike remains a weapon, one defenders must actively fear - but increasingly he is arriving inside the box, timing late runs rather than settling for spectacle.

He has evolved from highlight-maker to match-manager.

Emotional Accountability

This is where the transformation feels most profound.

Liverpool supporters do not demand perfection. They demand courage.

They want to see someone willing to grab a drifting match and impose order upon it.

When momentum swings, Szoboszlai does not retreat into safe possession. He demands the ball. He accelerates play. He accepts risk.

Teammates - including figures like Mohamed Salah, have publicly praised his standards and professionalism. But what resonates most is behavioural consistency.

He does not hide after mistakes.
He does not defer responsibility.
He does not shrink in difficult stadiums.

There have been matches this season where he has looked like the only midfielder emotionally aligned with the gravity of the moment.

That matters at Anfield.

Because this club is fuelled by belief — and belief requires someone to carry it.

Why This Season Feels Foundational

Liverpool’s midfield evolution is still in progress.

Less chaos.
More calibration.
Still intense - but intelligent.

For that system to function, it requires a player capable of:

• Creating at elite percentile levels

• Recovering possession relentlessly

• Passing with structural authority

• Operating in multiple tactical roles

• Accepting emotional responsibility

Szoboszlai now ticks every box.

The notion that he was “not good enough” for the strongest XI now feels almost satirical. Not because he has suddenly transformed - but because his growth has reached its logical destination, that of a world class footballer.

He has stood up.

And at a club where emotional accountability matters as much as technical brilliance, that may be his most valuable contribution of all.