The Liverpool Offside 2025-26 Season Review, Part One: Everything Is The Worst

Part 1: The Worst Liverpool Season We Can Remember

Nothing went the way anyone hoped or planned for Liverpool in 2025-26. That’s a statement that would be hard for anyone to argue against.

The Reds’ title defence was lover before October as poor results caught up with poor performances. In the end Arne Slot’s embattled side managed Champions League qualification thanks to the Premier League getting a fifth slot and with the joint-lowest points total ever, but that speaks more to good fortune for Liverpool than anything good Liverpool did.

With the season ending with everyone still looking for silver linings or signs that perhaps this group was just maybe belatedly developing anything resembling tactical identity, we wanted to know if the no good horrible very bad season that was ranks as the worst TLO’s writers have seen over the years. Was it as bad as we all felt, or have we just spoiled by the successes of the Jürgen Klopp era?

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Dexian

Was it the worst Liverpool season I’ve watched? Quite possibly. Between Diogo’s passing, the club being tone-deaf on ticket pricing, and a turgid on-pitch product it’s been dreadful all around. Granted, we all should have known we were in for a difficult season the moment the players had their preseason plans thrown for a loop when Jota passed, but still, it’s difficult to comprehend just how badly this Liverpool side have fallen off this season.

I’ll give Slot some credit, though, in that I thought he handled the immediate aftermath of Diogo’s passing very well. I’m also always wary of looking back at the Klopp years with rose-tinted glasses, but even in 2020-21 and 2022-23, there seemed to be very obvious fixes for those squads and things improved towards the end of the season.

This particular group now seems to have so many problems up and down the pitch that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what needs to be done to fix it, and with how good we know many of these players are it’s hard not to look at the manager. The only on-field issue I can think of that Slot actually managed to fix this season was our set-piece woes on offence. That’s not a good sign.

Jordan

I don’t know, man. I can remember 2014-15 and somehow became a fan during the Hodgson period. I’ve seen some terrible things. In more recent seasons, though, even the bad years under Klopp felt, things better than this because it always felt like solutions were actively trying to being worked on and found.

When we struggled before, as bad as it could feel in the moment there would soon come a point where we knew that at least weren’t just trudging through the rut. There was a plan. We were working on getting out of it. So in a way, yes, I’d say this is probably the worst season our generation has seen. Twently losses in all competitions is a literal record. Conceding as many last minute goals as we have was another one. So it sucks.

There’s no real other way to put it. It just sucks. Ending the season feeling like things still weren’t getting better sucks. Even as one of the first people to bang the grief drum and believe that it was all largely going to get worse before it got better this season, I didn’t imagine the levels of worse we could fall to. There were very few good things to hold onto like bad seasons previous.

Of course 2020-21 was a bad season, too, but at least we had the Alisson goal along with Rhys Williams and Nat Philipps rising to the occasion. This season felt like one bad thing after another, with almost nothing to break it up. I also won’t shy away from acknowledging that I wanted Slot to leave at the end of the season, and now that we’re here and he’s staying, it feels even more hopeless in a way than that 2014-15 season did, because I have so little faith in him or anyone in charge right now being the ones who know how to right the ship.

I had always hoped we would somehow find some fire, some determination, and push through, but it seems like we just weren’t able to do that. This doesn’t even include some of the other things that happened around the club, like the ticket prices and the protests, and a general toxicity flaring up again within our fanbase. We were all so hopeful at the start of last summer, and it has only spiralled in the wrong direction since. 

The thing is though that being a fan of football, and maybe being a Liverpool fan in particular, means having a level of faith, even if it’s just a single cell of it. The world is cyclical, and we had almost 10 years of good times. We also had something devastating happen to the club, again, and it might just be our time again in the mud until we figure our way out. Hopefully someone or something throws us a rope again. I hope it doesn’t take another 10, 20, 30 years. 

Mari

I think it’s the most frustrating Liverpool season I’ve ever watched, not the worst. I have certainly seen worse Liverpool teams play. I flew to Liverpool to watch a terrible win via a Christian Benteke offside goal (pre-VAR) back around 2015 that made the almost-title of 2013-14 feel very much like a blip before a return to mundanity.

I refuse to do the math, but I think the majority of my Liverpool-supporting life has been watching an okay side fight for the crumbs of European football in an era when Pep Guardiola-inspired perfection wasn’t even required to win a title. I was used to hoping for improvement, but never really anticipated the levels that were coming. I didn’t then know that Jürgen Klopp was to come.

It’s easier to swallow mediocrity when you haven’t seen sustained greatness, is what I’m saying, and on paper this 2025-26 team really should have been challenging for something, you feel. 

The injury-heavy season in 2020-21 led to some really dire stuff, too: we had almost no attack due to having no fluidity (or available senior players) in the centre of defence, and as a result individual matches in that winter period were hard graft to watch. Much of that season was hard to watch, really, but it had an underlying reason that felt temporary and fixable—and high points like the Alisson goal.

The issues undergirding this season are harder to articulate, because most of them are literally out of our view as fans (grief, integrating a huge number of new players, losing players in key moments or having them lack fitness, etc.). It’s hard to grapple with the reasons for the struggle when the actual reasons are so hard to pin down.

This season was more difficult than others that I’ve experienced because you just knew these players were collectively capable of better results, of better play, and regardless of the caveats and emotions that we and especially they felt across the months it nonetheless always felt hard to understand how this group just kept conceding those goals on a weekly basis. Knowing what they’re capable of made it harder to watch them fall short. It made it harder to watch them never figure things out.

I enjoyed myself in specific moments nonetheless. I will be forever grateful I got to witness the first match of the season, and feel the cathartic release of the fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” seemingly directly to Diogo Jota and his brother André. I think that collective moment healed us in a way that was impossible for the players on the pitch, who lost a friend and would have missed him in the dressing room every week. I loved Federico Chiesa’s winner on the opening day, finally giving us a reason to sing what was always a real banger. I loved Rio Ngumoha’s winner the next time out, suggesting real promise in youth. I loved watching Dominik Szoboszlai in almost every minute of every match this season, and the early emergence of Hugo Ekitiké was an absolute joy—for him seemingly as much as for us. 

This is also a season of momentous goodbyes, with Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson departing, and major question marks around the futures of the likes of Curtis Jones and Joe Gomez as well. Part of what makes this season feel so bad is that it’s an ending, I think, and we have no idea if the future will be anything nearly as good as what we got to see under the likes Robertson and Salah. It would perhaps be easier to take if what we watched all season maintained and built on some early joy rather than seeming to give us frustration and missed opportunity. Only time will tell how bad this season is: a frustrating blip or a series of decisions that spelled the end of an overwhelmingly great period for the club? 

If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor, and all that. 

Noel

It’s interesting in a way that there are multiple angles we could take to define worst and still have this season rank out at or near the top. It was just so miserable in so many ways, starting with the obvious last summer. And I do think everyone involved needs to be granted a little grace for having to prepare for a season of football while grieving a lost friend and teammate.

I also do think, fair or not—and life, sadly, often isn’t—the job of a manager is to get the players through that. A manager has to find a way to channel grief, perhaps even use it to strengthen team bonds, to somehow find a way to turn it into motivation. Arne Slot didn’t do that, but what a horrible hand to be dealt just when you’re flying high off a Premier League title.

On the pitch, though. Woof. Once we hit November and December and it had fully sunk in. Then slumped into January in the midst of the saddest unbeaten run in history—just one middling performance and dull draw after another. Kept stumbling through February, March, April, and May. There was no respite. It was miserable. I’m glad it’s over. And mad we wasted a year; that we wasted the final year of Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson and maybe a few others.

Our press has become increasingly less effective going back to around January 2025 when last season’s team had essentially wrapped up the league. Passing has gone sloppy. Patterns of play are non-existent. Defensive structure remains fragile. Fitness is concerning. And even as the season ended, there were no signs of improvement.

When Liverpool struggled under Jürgen Klopp there was at least always an identity and, by the end of the season, there were always signs of improvement. Right now there’s none of that. So. It was miserable season. But worst is a high bar. Was it the worst? I’m going to cautiously say it was—and I was here for Roy Hodgson.

Hodgson’s tenure was miserable, too, but the squad wasn’t as strong and the expectations were lower. In the transfer window, Hodgson was given Joe Cole and Christian Poulsen and Paul Konchesky to bolster a side that had fallen apart in Rafa Benitez’ final season. Arne Slot got Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitike and Florian Wirtz to bolster a title-winning side everyone agreed held the foundations for long-term success. Hodgson had also taken over at a club in chaos off the pitch. His Liverpool were the verge of administration. It was, just as for Slot last summer, a very bad hand to be dealt as a manager. And Hodgson didn’t do a good job. Neither has Slot.

Given the squads and expectations, for me Arne Slot has clearly done less with more in 2025-26 than Roy Hodgson did in 2010-11. Considerably. Given how we know the players Slot had at his disposal can perform, 2025-26 was more disappointing. Given we were told even just a year ago this was a side set up to be dominant for years to come, one that would need only minor tweaks moving forward, to get to the end of it all and be told now this side needs a complete rebuild is more disappointing.

Because of all that, I’m going to say this has been the worst season I have ever watched as a Liverpool fan. It was shit. And it’s hard to have faith in the people who got us here being the right ones to fix it.

Steph

Everyone likes to point to Roy Hodgson’s miserable half a season as the nadir for Liverpool in recent memory. And I’m not disagreeing with that. But the circumstances around that season were so unusual and exceptional that the whole thing, some 16 years on, feels like a fever dream. What do you mean a helicopter got Andy Carroll to Melwood ahead of the transfer deadline? Surely I’m remembering that wrong.

And despite the very low lows of 2010-11, there were also some incredible highs to buoy the fans despite poor results. Getting rid of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, avoiding administration, the return of King Kenny, Luis Suarez joining the team and instantly providing a spark. The lows were low, but there was also good to hold on to. 

By comparison it’s hard to come up with any positives for this season. No, let me correct myself. The one bright spot for me this season was seeing Rio Ngumoha start to blossom into the player he hopefully some day will fully become. I’d put his winner against Newcastle as my favourite moment of this season. Considering that was back in August, that might be saying something.

But despite all the disappointment, I really do want give this team some grace. Losing a teammate and a friend so suddenly like they did will have had ramifications that we will never even know about for the players. I know I’m not the only fan who watched some of these dismal matches and imagined how Jota would have done it better. His absence was obvious on the pitch, and I think it would be unfair not to take that into consideration.

So was this the worst season in recent memory? Yes, I think so. Some reasons for that they couldn’t have helped. But truly, there are simply too many world class players in this squad to play as consistently poorly and concede as many set-piece goals as they did. I can’t remember the last season I was this terrified every time the opposing team got awarded so much as a throw-in. 

Not to mention that we had to sit through the back half of the season with the knowledge that it would be the last at the club for Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson and maybe one or two others along with them. When we’re having a bad season, at least I can be excited when it’s over because I can convince myself that the next season will be better. They didn’t give me that this time around.

Zach

Yeah, Hodgepocalypse aside, it’s difficult to remember such a shitty season, especially with expectations so high. And in 2010-11, things only felt truly helpless for half of it and we had a brief resurgence once Dalglish returned to the dugout, including a 3-1 win over Manchester United. Results like that along with the catharsis of getting rid of the owners and avoiding administration brought more joy than we’ve had at any point this season. 

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the worst part about this season is just how boring and predictable it all ended up. Even putting the defeats—all 19 of them!—to one side, even the matches we managed to win were not at all enjoyable. Our offensive strategy seemed to consist of “get it to a boss lad and hope he does something boss,” which is a far cry from the immediately identifiable playing style and patterns of attack we’ve seen from recent Liverpool squads.

Not to be outdone, our defense looked as if they could give up a goal at any given moment, and by god did they manage to concede some soft goals both by way of team dysfunction and shocking individual errors. Then, in addition to being boring and predictable, we were somehow also brutally unlucky.

Wirtz and Isak finally link up in December to maybe start to do what we moved mountains and emptied bank vaults to do? Nope, sorry, Isak gets his leg snapped in two 0.05 seconds after scoring. Ekitike having a good debut season? Achilles tear. Do you like having a right back? Well, bad luck, Spinal Tap had an easier time holding on to drummers. You know dozens of right backs spontaneously combust every year. Nature of the position.

And then, of course, there was the loss of Diogo Jota. In addition to it being a tragedy in and of itself, he’s also clearly a lad we desperately could’ve used around the gaff as a player and personality. How things have gone will certainly not be how anyone in the squad wanted to honour Jota, and that may have even made the grieving process more difficult than it already would have been. 

So, yeah, all things considered? Worst. Season. Ever.

Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com