That’s the thing, though - knowing how protective FSG are of their investment, not doing the only thing that makes sense now (i.e. replacing Slot with a much better coach in order to save what’s left of the season) might suggest that: 1) they still haven’t identified the long term successor; 2) the one that they’ve identified isn’t available at least before the summer. I’m not sure which option worries me more, especially in the light of team’s performances over the last calendar year, which are only getting worse.
Not being funny, but every fucking week a fixture comes around and you (and others) say this one . He has to win this one or he’ll lose his job.
If they were going to sack him, he’d be gone already. If Alonso’s availability was the X factor, he’d be sat in the dug out now.
I’ll be bloody furious if they sack him now, not because it would be the wrong thing to do, but because if they are sacking him now, they might as well have done it a month ago.
- They see this season as an aberration, and back him to continue.
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It is not silly at all. When you you have success like we had last season it is actually really hard to identify what parts of the change made any difference. You run the risk of falling into the lucky underwear problem where you ascribe your success to the wrong things. The longer this malaise goes on with Slot showing so little evidence of having any solutions, the more viable it becomes to conclude that maybe the things he thought worked last year were actually incidental and that his biggest cause of success last year was in making few enough changes to not impeed the momentum there already was
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I see what you’re saying, but maybe there’s a middle ground. Might be good at tinkering but not at building a new team or installing a completely new ‘philosophy’ for example. Or readjusting when things go wrong. I realise this is broad stuff, but something along those lines. 
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If only ancelotti wasnt a blue, in the summer he would have 100% been FSG’s choice to replace slot if he goes.
IF that’s what Xabi wants to do then by all means, we should.
But maybe a deal has been struck and Xabi prefers, even with a World Cup, to have the group from the start of a new campaign, rather than coming in right now. There’s a chance the squad could stay in a funk, and then those last few games start to become part of Xabi’s record, even though he is only running the rule over the dying embers of a season.
I do hope it will be Alonso, but I suspect it will be summer.
“Them” are the people who make these kind of decisions. The kind of people that do the sacking and can’t be sacked.
He’s not getting sacked if we’re still in the CL and FA Cup.
I think it would be particularly graceless to conclude that because things have gone wrong this year, then automatically everything that happened last year was a fluke.
He navigated the 24/25 season exceptionally well, and over 38 games were the best coached team. Nobody expected Liverpool to win the league in that season.
If he gets sacked (and I really don’t think it’s a given that he does) my response will be that it’s understandable as things looked to have gone too far, but thanks for the league title. I won’t ever forget it.
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Slot’s title win is etched in the record books. We should not be taking it away from him, or diminishing the achievement. We only have two Premier League titles and he has one of them.
It has gone pear shaped to the extent that it will be a big surprise if he stays on beyond the summer. If and when he goes, it will be as a Premier League winning Liverpool manager.
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But that isnt what I said though.
You made an assumption that things you saw him do last season was important in our success, but you are treating is a given that we all have to accept otherwise we’re not operating fairly. And that just isn’t true. These are open questions about what actually contributed to our success last year and they are really difficult to answer and we will all likely land in different places on these questions.
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Few dodgy results here and there (before things completely fell apart) and we were back in the race for a Top5 finish.
I’ve always said if qualification for CL gets in real danger they won’t hesitate to sack him and I stand by that.
8 games to go. 3 weeks between our next two league games. Highly doubt the Club would not interfere to secure the £120m CL money.
Even if they have a successor in mind, that successor won’t be able to implement any significant changes without a full summer of training. So, the question remains whether it makes sense to bring in that successor now, knowing that if the season continues to derail, they might not be able to arrest the slide and thus their hiring will get off to an ignominous start, or whether it makes sense to bring in a caretaker to shift the vibes for the next two months, or whether you ride Slot and hope he can keep things afloat until the summer.
I think they settled on the latter, as it would provided stability through the remaining UCL and FA Cup runs and would have provided for a cleaner break for all parties involved. But that calculus would change if they get knocked out.
I don’t like the suggestion Livvy made that would have won the league title just as well as Slot. It’s a particularly disingenuous way to debate because it’s making an assertion that simply can never be disproved.
The simple fact is that Arne Slot was the Liverpool head coach, and he won the league. That’s undeniable. Everything after that, every attempt to downplay his contribution, his decisions and how he set up the team, just feels like retrofitting an opinion based on how cross he is making us now. This bastard has ruined my weekend again, so I’m not having the idea that he gave me the best day of my life in April. That must have been down to someone else.
Can a year of wildly inconsistent results, strange tactics and reduced physical performance (latest case in point: Tottenham players ran almost 9km more than Liverpool’s) count as an aberration? I really hope not and I’m sure they are not blinded even if they are not oblivious to the mitigating circumstances. These past few months have seen some of the worst football I’ve seen Liverpool play in more than 20 years - and I’m talking about the aspect when our lads have the ball at their feet.
I could make excuses for Houllier, Rafa or Kenny, given they didn’t have the best of players at times, but Slot has some of the best around at his disposal and for almost a year he’s been failing to organise them into a cohesive unit that can build attacks and beat the press by incisive passing or effectively press the opposition into mistakes.
The worst part of it? Between the losses against Forest and PSG last season, Slot was pretty much immaculate in his team selections, tactics and substitutions. How do you get from that to scraping for a home draw with relegation-battling Tottenham at home, who are missing 12 first-team players and have lost four on the trot under a new coach…
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If it could be guaranteed, it’s a no-brainer. But for me I would change it to, “Highly doubt the club would not interfere to TRY to secure the £120m CL money.”
If we make a change between the next two league games I could understand it. But nothing would be guaranteed about CL qualification.
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There is also the idea that switching guarantees we don’t qualify. With the problems in the way we play I don’t see a new manager bounce changing much.
Not in enough time anyway.
I guess the bonus is a new manager gets to properly assess the squad.
Just need FSG to know.
You could be doing the same thing. You think that he gave you one of the most memorable days as a Liverpool fan and can’t accept that maybe it wasn’t down to him in the first place.
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Cool, you dont have to. But it doesnt mean your opinion is right. And in the interest of respect, referring to other people’s opinions as disingenuous is best to avoid, especially in cases where you cannot even identify that what you are treating as a ground truth is itself nothing more than your opinion.
Slot came in to a side that was already incredibly competitive. It was a side that was already put together to win. It then won. I think one thing we can say is the question of whether it would have won anyway under Jurgen had he stayed on is a bit pointless because he was done. He didn’t have it in him anymore and so change was required. Slot was the choice and he delivered, but his subsequent struggles do raise questions about about last season - how uniquely critical was he to that success and in what way. They are uncomfortable, but the longer this goes on with no sign of progress the more relevant and fair they become. It is not at all uncommon to have new leaders achieve success by changing little more than cosmetic stuff and then struggle one the momentum of the previous regime runs out.
FWIW, even if ALL he did last year was avoid getting in the way of a side already in the ascendency then I think he deserves credit for that.
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