Arne Slot: How can Liverpool head coach stop the boos and get fans back onside? | Football News

Liverpool’s latest underwhelming display of the season against Chelsea last weekend was met by boos around Anfield, but head coach Arne Slot says he knows exactly what is wrong with his team and how to get them playing like champions again.

“I know what we need to get that done,” said the Dutchman when quizzed post match on the home fans’ unhappiness, before insisting: “I am 100 per cent convinced we will be a different team next season if we can have the summer we want – different in terms of results, different in how things look.”

Despite a clearly unhappy supporter base and fans’ favourite Xabi Alonso waiting in the wings, Slot has said he believes he will be given the chance to put things right next season.

While Fenway Sports Group – the club’s owners, are understood to have no plans to part company with the man who won the Premier League in his debut campaign on Merseyside.

Slot’s up against it when the crowd are letting you know that.

Sky Sports’ Paul Merson

However Slot, who only has a year left on his deal at Anfield, must now prove he does have the answers to the multitude of problems that have seen his side produce a meek title defence. The champions currently a whopping 24 points worse off than this stage last season having suffered 11 league defeats, and 18 in total, the most since 2014-15.

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So, where exactly has it gone wrong this campaign and what can be done to get the Reds challenging again?

‘Soft Reds too easy to play against’

Liverpool’s regression this season can in many ways be traced back to defeat at Crystal Palace, at the end of September that brought to an end a seemingly promising five-game winning start to the defence of their title.

Eddie Nketiah’s 97th-minute winner came after the Reds failed to deal with a long throw into their box, the second time they conceded from a set play that afternoon highlighting how slow Slot and his coaching staff were to adjust to the increasingly physical nature of the Premier League this season.

Set-piece coach Aaron Briggs paid the price with his his job in December, but despite Slot then taking a more hands-on role here. Chelsea’s equaliser on the weekend was the 18th time his side has conceded from a set play this campaign, the joint second-worse record in the league.

The continued inability to deal with set pieces this season has been symptomatic of the team’s soft underbelly, as Roy Keane highlighted in Liverpool’s recent 3-2 loss at Man Utd, when a slipshod first-half display all began when needlessly conceding early on from a corner.

“I think the worst insult for a team is when people say you’re easy to play against,” he said. “Liverpool are, certainly, this year. If teams think you’re easy to play against, that’s an insult off the back of winning the league. That will hurt the players and the manager the most.

“If you want to stop counterattacks, stop it at source. Decision making, being in the right positions. The softness with Liverpool is even in their decision making.”

There can be no reason for these shortcomings to continue next season.

Win fans back by letting go of the handbrake

The boos that accompanied the full-time whistle at Anfield on Saturday will no doubt have hurt Slot, but they were the result of yet another lacklustre performance from his side, that has left many fans bored with what they have been served up for much of this season.

Liverpool’s final expected-goals total of 0.56 against a horribly out-of-form Chelsea was their lowest since edging Arsenal at home back in August, while you have to go back more than five years for the previous time they created so little at Anfield.

This is all in stark contrast, of course, to the fast-paced, heavy-metal football on display for much of previous manager’s Jurgen Klopp’s time in charge of the club, which by comparison does his successor no favours at all.

Slot says it has been “hard to hear” fans calling the Reds dull and boring to watch and that he “completely disagree” with that view, instead continually laying the blame for their attacking struggles at the door of his strikers.

However, as my colleague Adam Bate noted in his latest ‘Debrief’ column, his team are actually seventh in the Premier League for xG scored this season – their worst rank in a decade – so it is not so much his forwards have been misfiring, more the chances are just not being created for them.

Not only that, but this campaign has also seen a continual decline in Liverpool’s overall attacking metrics since Slot replaced Klopp two years ago (see table), with Jamie Carragher saying on Sky Sports recently: “The worry is not that there is no identity. That is the identity.”

And as the former Liverpool captain concluded: “It is on the manager’s shoulders” to address these creativity issues if supporters are to be won over again next season.

Can Slot get his attacking trio to gel?

Liverpool’s vision last summer was to spend big on the type of high-quality technical attackers who could help them with the increasing number of low blocks they had struggled to navigate in the second half of their title-winning campaign.

After Hugo Ekitike arrived in July for £79m, Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak then joined for a combined £241m. However, the latter’s fitness issues after missing most of preseason in order to force through his move to Anfield and the Frenchman’s recent Achilles’ problem have meant the trio have been on the pitch together for just 119 minutes in all competitions this campaign, including 37 minutes in the league, while combining for a measly seven goals (only one of which involved Isak and Wirtz).

Slot will rightly expect such injury misfortune not to strike again next season – the Reds also lost another summer signing, centre-back Giovanni Leoni, to a season-ending ACL in September.

While right-back Conor Bradley’s campaign was curtailed by a damaged knee in January. Jeremie Frimpong and Alisson Becker have both missed large chunks of the campaign with muscle issues – and last summer’s arrivals will all benefit from having spent a year acclimatising to life in the Premier League.

But even when Slot can field that trio together again and it may not be this year with Ekitike set to be sidelined for at least the next six months while he recovers from the nasty-looking injury he picked up against Galatasaray in March. Can he prove Carragher wrong after the Sky Sports pundit recently claimed the two Liverpool No 9s cannot play together up front?

However, if he cannot solve that particular attacking conundrum, then his days at Anfield are numbered.

‘Three players that need to go right into the team’

Incredibly, despite the biggest transfer outlay in the club’s history last summer, this campaign’s on-pitch struggles show Liverpool will need to strengthen again next season if they want to regain the title.

Slot agrees, recently claiming the Reds are set to go through another transitional period this summer and while he was confident it will “not be as drastic” as last year’s extensive overhaul, others are not so sure.

“They’re going to have to do a little bit of a rebuild,” said Gary Neville after Liverpool’s loss at United earlier this month. “There’s a bit of a job to do there in terms of obviously getting the recruitment right again in the summer.”

And that’s before you even take into account the departures of experienced stars like Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson, with question marks also over the futures of both Alisson and Joe Gomez that would leave a sizeable hole to fill.

Carragher, though, has identified three areas of the team sporting director Richard Hughes and Slot must look to strengthen this summer.

“I want Liverpool to go back to buying the right players for the right money and what they need right now,” he told Sky Sports.

“They won’t be able to do what they did last summer, they don’t have that type of revenue. They don’t need to bring six or seven players in, because it’s more change, but there’s three players that need to go right into the team for me.

“Replace Salah with a right winger, a right back and a central midfielder, then the players you bought last summer like Ekitike, Isak, Wirtz become better players.”

Interestingly, West Ham United Jarrod Bowen, 29, is reportedly one of the forwards Liverpool are looking at to replace Salah in what would signal a shift away from the club’s recent strategy of targeting younger profile players like Wirtz and Ekitike.

Must secure Champions League football as launchpad for next season

And finally, it is vital Liverpool get the three points they need in their final two games, starting at fifth-placed Aston Villa on Friday Night Football, to be mathematically sure of Champions League football next season both in to fund this summer’s rebuild, but also to end the campaign on some kind of high.

Despite all the many highs under Klopp, the Reds did endure similar struggles to this season in both 2020-21 and 2022-23, even failing to qualify for Europe’s premier club competition in the latter campaign.

However, impressive finishes in both years helped lay the foundations and instilled confidence for Quadruple tilts the following seasons, underlying the importance of a strong showing at Villa Park and then at home to high-flying Brentford to close out the campaign.

As otherwise, the worry is things could quickly turn again against Slot were Liverpool to struggle once more at the start of next season, especially given – as we heard at Anfield on Saturday – so many fans appear to have already made up their mind on the Dutchman.

And that could leave Liverpool in limbo mid-season, looking for a new manager when all the top candidates, especially the Chelsea-linked Alonso, have already been snapped up this summer – exactly as happened at Man Utd in 2024 with Slot’s compatriot Erik ten Hag.

“The drop-off has been so stark and there’s been no improvement really from day one until the end of the season in results or performances that you think, ‘Is it going to get any better?’ Carragher said on a recent Monday Night Football.

“My worry with Slot and Liverpool is, are we going to be in a situation a little bit like Ten Hag where he had a great first season?

“He didn’t win the league – Slot won the league, that’s a completely different level – but the second season was really poor.

“Then they keep the manager on the back of what he did in his first season and then it carries on poorly, and then you’re getting to October or November and thinking you’ve got to change the manager.

“I think that’s a little bit of a fear with Liverpool supporters.”