The Liverpool Offside 2025-26 Season Review, Part 2: Placing Blame
Part 2: Who’s to Blame for Liverpool’s 2025-26 Going Wrong?
When everything seems to have gone wrong, almost every player seems to have got worse, the press regresses and patterns of play are non-existent and fitness a concern and we end the season in May with no clear idea what this team was ever actually meant to be, tactically, it would be easy to just point at head coach Arne Slot as the problem. The club, though, feel differently, and seem set to continue with Slot in 2026-27.
It’s clear, too, that Slot was dealt a difficult hand. Sporting director Richard Hughes’ transfer dealings last summer largely failed to replace key players, cut away too much depth, and left an unbalanced squad for Slot to work with. And the tragic passing of Diogo Jota, while it feels unpleasant to use as an excuse, especially nearly a year on, certainly impacted pre-season preparations. We wanted to try to figure out, then, who or what we felt was most responsible for Liverpool’s 2025-26 collapse.
Jordan
I don’t really want to place blame on anyone, to be honest. I know, anyone can go back and read my frustrations in match recaps and find that yeah I probably did blame Slot a lot for how we played throughout the season, and it was really easy to blame Slot, or FSG, or Hughes and Edwards, or whoever at various points this season. Now that it’s done and we’re left with the dust of it all, though, I don’t know if any one person, or even the collective, deserves blame for how the season turned out.
One of the primary concerns of the season was the fact that we appeared sluggish, tired, and unable to maintain any sort of level of tenacity to compete in the Premier League. You can blame Slot and the physios for that, sure, but a lot of those foundations are built in preseason. And then Andy Robertson comes out and says the physios didn’t want to work on anyone in pre-season because they were so devastated by the loss of Diogo. That the squad didn’t want to train because they were so heartbroken. So then you think, well, of course.
That’s where the injuries came from, that’s where the fatigue came from. Are there things that could’ve been done to mitigate this sort of thing? Could they have focused more on building up fitness during the season? Absolutely, but hindsight is 20/20 and I’m sure at the time, they were all struggling to figure out what the best way to go on was. Putting your head down and just getting through it is often the only way to do it, even if it means being less successful and just getting it done. Liverpool got through it, but it left marks.
You really can’t just plan for a beloved player to die tragically in a car accident. And when it does happen, there are no plans for how to continue on, because grief is an unwieldy and different thing for everyone. It often doesn’t hit everyone at the same time and in the same way.
This doesn’t even include the various other losses the team has suffered, from Ibrahima Konate losing his father (yeah that was this season too) and Mohamed Salah losing his grandfather, in addition to the loss of their friend and teammate. Grief can compound on itself, and every loss can feel bigger and worse, even ones that are maybe smaller—like losing games or tournaments. And when you’re trying to just keep your head above water, to just find any sort of win, every small thing hurts more.
Who do you blame in that instance? Who deserves blame in these instances? No one. There are no guarantees that if we changed coach, if we changed the club and transfer management, even if we changed the ownership, we would get better. So what’s the real point in blame other than not sitting with the difficult idea that our problems are mental and emotional and the only real way to heal from them is time—and unfortunately time isn’t a luxury that a football club and its players will ever be allowed.
Mari
It’s a cop out, this, but it’s one that I think is probably in character: only time will tell. I don’t really want to lay blame at any one person’s feet when I don’t know exactly what went wrong. A certain amount of issues might fix themselves or get addressed over the summer. Some of the decisions that were massive might not be as bad as we think (do we know if Luis DĂaz wanted to stay at Liverpool, for instance? I have to side with the club in that his output in the latter half of the season would make a big financial outlay on him a risk in a new contract).
I don’t think there’s a playbook for players on how to cope with the loss that they felt, and I feel comfortable assuming the fallout of Diogo Jota’s death impacted their play, including at the level of concentration. At times Liverpool seemed a team incapable of the very basics. There are no easy answers, and players’ experiences here are frankly none of my business. But it’s always going to be worth returning to in these discussions.
I won’t pretend to be objective and reasonable in full, however. I am personally not onboard with rumblings that we’re now losing the likes of Curtis Jones (should he go), for instance, both because I think he has the quality to make a difference, is a homegrown player, and that it’s important to the fibres of the club to develop Scousers to play for Liverpool. Should Jones leave I think it’ll be a direct result of his lack of opportunities this season, and I do think his limited minutes were an error as others underperformed.
Integrating players more gradually would have been smarter, as well. Liverpool’s business meant a lot of new players were learning the ropes at once (in a context that must have been strange and challenging as a dressing room reckoning with loss), and the Reds were still thin on the ground for certain positions.
This obviously could have been handled better, even if no one would say no to any single name brought in over the summer in isolation (I do, for the record, think Florian Wirtz is a very special footballer, though not one who can make perfect a struggling team). What worries me is that the expected outgoings this summer mean we can expect more integrating of players next season. Whatever the issues there are, they need to be arrested before they spread, whether that mean changing personnel or approach.
Noel
Given the larger context around this season and how it started, and that dealing with grief would reasonably be expected to have set back any preparations, on one hand it does feel unfair that the first instinct for many—myself and I think most of us included throughout the season—is always going to be to ask, well, what went wrong and whose fault was it?
At the same time, fair or not, that comes with the territory. Arne Slot gets a base £6.5M salary to manage Liverpool Football Club. The figures for Richard Hughes as sporting director are less easy to pinpoint, but it’s millions plural. Theirs are jobs that come with massive pressure and massive public scrutiny but also a massive wage, and they aren’t jobs anyone ends up in by accident. They are in the limelight, they chose it, and they’re compensated better than just about any other human being on the planet to do it. So. About the blame.
Liverpool’s press efficiency has regressed of the past 18 months, give or take. Passing and patterns of play have also regressed. Defensive organisation has regressed. Fitness has regressed. All of these things boil down to being Slot’s responsibilities as head coach. All of these have regressed over timelines that reach back at least to January of last year. Which is to say it can’t all be about last summer and Jota’s tragic passing. The trends got worse this season, but those trends clearly began last season.
As for last summer, fair or not, in exceptional and unexpected and painful times it’s the job of the head coach or manager or however the club want to define it to guide his players through. To find a thread of strength for them to all hold on to amidst the suffering. To reinforce the strength of the team unit. To provide purpose in moments when it has been lost.
Sport is filled with endless stories of players and teams taking tragedy and coming out the other side collectively stronger—because of how they were led through. It might not have been fair on Slot the job fell to him to try and do that, but it was his job and on the evidence of the past season he didn’t do it very well. It’s either that or you reach back to the second half of last season and the start of Liverpool trending in the wrong direction and, well, then it’s on Slot, too.
Which brings us to Hughes. You simply can’t look at where this team is today, with important players aging out and new ones largely failing to impress and a squad lacking depth and severe weaknesses at key positions and then look at the amount was spent last summer and come to the conclusion he’s done his job well.
It doesn’t matter that people were excited by multiple £100M signings in the moment. Big numbers are always exciting to fans. The proof is on the pitch, and after Slot, Hughes, and guy whose job we’re not even sure what it is now Liverpool aren’t doing the multi-club thing Michael Edwards were given a squad that seemed primed for long-term success, that we’re now told Liverpool need a complete rebuild to challenge for titles and trophies says someone screwed up. And it’s Hughes whose job title says was in charge of giving Slot a functional squad to work with.
Maybe he’ll get it right at the second time (and third summer) of asking, but not to put too fine a point on it, sporting director at Liverpool Football Club is too big a job to be learning it on the fly.
Dex
I’m not sure I buy into the notion that Richard Hughes had himself a particularly bad transfer window last summer. Kelleher had been wanting to leave for a starting position for like two years, and it was time to let him pursue that. Diaz was waiting on a new contract and wanted a big payday that wasn’t coming. Harvey Elliott chose Aston Villa over suitors like Leipzig, Fulham, Brighton, and West Ham.
Liverpool obliged Elliott by working out a loan structure that Villa could do despite PSR issues only for both player and club to be screwed by Villa’s own internal strife. Left-winger replacement and centre-back (aka the Guehi saga) probably should have been sorted out, but it’s not like we didn’t have one or two gaping holes in the squad more often than not even during the best Klopp-Edwards years. That’s just how things go when you’re not Manchester City.
So then Ekitike was a clear hit, and Kerkez started slow but did eventually establish himself as one of the more consistent performers on the team. Isak was starting to find his groove before that gruesome fibula injury. Wirtz seemed to improve as the season went on, and Liverpool always looked worse offensively when he was out of the lineup.
While Wirtz lacked the kind of big game impact most expected him to bring, he probably would do better in a team that wasn’t dysfunctional in and out of possession. Liverpool would do well to base every future attacking acquisition on if he can help make Wirtz’s life easier. I also think Mamadarshvili will look better when we’re not routinely conceding five big chances a game. Like, I would not be surprised at all if we looked back at the end of next season and think, oh, these players are actually really good!
I guess this is a long way of saying that the coach does need to get more out of these players, though. Even if you’re of the view that Hughes did a really poor job, and even if the Jota tragedy set everyone back, I still think it has been exacerbated (in some cases quite unnecessarily) by some of Slot’s choices. I’m not looking at pre-game lineups and squads and thinking that Wolves, Brighton, and so on have better squads than us.
At the end of the day, the coach just has to squeeze more out of the players that he has, and given there were no signs of him figuring out a way to do that even as the 2025-26 ended, I’m just not sure I can think of any manager or coach who would then be able to turn it around from this point, and that worries me.
Zach
Jota’s loss makes this season almost impossible to judge objectively. Pre-season, I was hoping that Jota would turn out to be a rallying cry for the club, someone to unite us and get behind. I’m sure that’s what he would’ve wanted, and no doubt what the players would’ve wanted as well, especially compared to how things actually played out.
But grief is never so simple or straightforward, and it affects everyone differently. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this team was deeply affected by his loss.
That said, I really do have to question last season’s transfer strategy, especially in light of losing Jota. Did we need to sell Quansah, Diaz, Nunez, and loan out Elliott? It seemed like any (or all) of those players would’ve proven valuable during the campaign.
Then again, given that Jones could hardly get a game at times—over an Alexis Mac Allister who appeared to be running through quicksand—I’m not sure how more squad members would’ve helped Slot. And then, of course, multiple things can be true: we could have been grieving as a club whilst also suffering from a questionable transfer strategy and poor squad management. Yahtzee!
Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com
Post a Comment