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We’re Liverpool Football Club.
We’re not Chelsea. We’re not Man United. We’re not Spurs.
We’re a club where faith courses through our veins. A club of resilience.
It’s there in our song - “At the end of the storm, there’s a golden sky”.
This season has been difficult. No one can deny it and no one does deny it.
But if you zoom out of the minutiae and look at the bigger picture, it was always going to be difficult.
Not many people talk about this but Arne Slot is NOT an experienced manager by any stretch of imagination. This season will be his 5th complete season as a manager. He’s still very much at the beginning of his coaching career but in that time he’s only ever known success, whether it was taking AZ Alkmaar to the cusp of a title during COVID, winning the Eredivisie with Feyenoord or winning the Premier League.
This season is the first time he’s truly had a “bad” season as a manager.
Think about that. Truly deep it and you’ll understand why the Liverpool hierarchy are not willing to throw him out of the back of his first truly bad season as a coach.
Success and failure are two sides of the same coin. You cannot feel success without putting yourself in a position to feel failure. All of the best managers, whether it’s Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex, Mourinho, Wenger, Ancelotti…they all had periods of failure which they had to learn from in order to grow and become even bigger successes.
Luis Enrique, the darling manager of European football…he failed spectacularly at Roma. He fell out with key players in his squad and had to leave to go on a sabbatical. He came back to Celta Vigo a few years later and again didn’t have roaring success. Another sabbatical before he was given a chance at Barcelona where he finally had his first big success with Messi, Neymar and Suarez delivering him a quadruple.
But again, he leaves Barcelona due to pressure and after a few years ends up as Spain National Team coach…Spain exit every tournament he competes in at a knockout stage. More failure.
Now he’s at PSG and he’s seen as an ultra successful manager but his success right now is the end of a 15 year period punctuated by many moments of failure.
Arne Slot is still in year 5 as a coach. This is his first big test in his managerial career. After the way he’s handled the custodianship of the club after one of the darkest moments since Hillsborough, he deserves another chance at a fresh season where he can show whether he’s learnt from the failures of this season.
Because if he has, then all the PhD guys who crunched the numbers which said he’s the most outstanding coaching talent in Europe will be supremely vindicated and Liverpool Football Club will be blessed at the fact that we have people who make decisions, not based on emotions of the fanbase during a highly emotional 12 month period, but based on clear-sighted data and from working with Arne day in day out
