Arne Slot remaining at Liverpool can actually be a positive for the club

FSG are right, and (almost) everyone is wrong.

We are so far through the looking glass when it comes to short attention spans and managerial churn that even 40-day reigns like Ange Postecoglou’s at Nottingham Forest have begun to appear perfectly acceptable.

The constant acceleration has allowed absurd ideas to be normalised; has made sacking Slot, less than a year after he won Liverpool just their second league title in 35 years, look like a reasonable response to an off-season framed by uniquely traumatic circumstances.

But before we even turn to the genuine trauma, the reported reasoning by FSG is sound.

The ability to cope with the transition following Jurgen Klopp’s departure in 2024 has been grossly underplayed and Slot’s success is now being used against him, as if the 2024/25 title was somehow inevitable.

It was not, and his brilliance ought not to be so easily forgotten.

Then there’s the injury crisis, the enormous transfer outlay last summer, and the decline of Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk, three factors that have combined to show that Liverpool are in the midst of a complicated and difficult period of generational ending.

Any manager on the planet would struggle with those circumstances.

Management, lest we forget, is extremely difficult. We should not be lured in by whoever is the latest fashionable young coach, should not assume changing manager is an easy solution.

It took Klopp several years to win his first trophy and at various points during his first two seasons people questioned whether he was on the decline and would ever reach the heights of his Borussia Dortmund days.

Xabi Alonso turned down the challenge of replacing Klopp whereas Slot embraced it. Alonso also failed spectacularly to cope with a complex situation at Real Madrid, meaning he is completely untested outside the safe bubble of total control at a much smaller club, Bayer Leverkusen.

With Salah and Andy Robertson set to leave in the summer and others rumoured to follow, there is no guarantee Alonso would understand how to deal with the specific sensitivities of managing Liverpool at the end of an era.

In this case, the sense of ending is particularly acute for what should be obvious reasons.

“At a certain point, things come to an end and then others have to carry on hopefully with successes, of course,” Van Dijk said after the defeat to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday.

“It’s the reality, the big reality, and that’s why it’s so disappointing. It’s very tough to deal with. Things will eventually always come to an end.”

It’s very tough to deal with. You don’t expect to hear words that strong from a club captain, mid-season. But then again for Van Dijk’s and his team-mates’ endings are particularly poignant.

Throughout this season Liverpool have looked vulnerable, fragile, wobbly, erratic, unpredictable, emotional, and – perhaps most of all - lost. They show flashes of their old selves but then they suddenly crumble. They seem to stagger around the pitch in a daze.

This is also a description of grief.

When Diogo Jota died last summer many people acknowledged that the tragedy would impact Liverpool for a long time and that any and all responses should be respected.

The club and its players deserved time, patience, and respect. Where has that attitude gone?

Grief is not processed and forgotten in a few short months. It changes, it develops, it comes and goes in its strength, but its presence will permeate everything Slot and his players do.

What often gets missed about the impact of Jota’s death on the Liverpool squad is how the sudden shock will have radically changed their personal identities, their self-assurance in the world. Losing a friend and colleague profoundly shakes your sense of security.

These are multi-millionaire young people who won the lottery of life, who, until last summer, must have felt invincible, even more so than the average twenty-something.

Each player has been forced to confront their own mortality these past months. They will know – they will feel, in a way those who have never suffered bereavement cannot – that life is fragile and everything can disappear in a moment.

For most Liverpool players, many of whom have young children, the ground beneath their feet suddenly became unsteady.

Is it any wonder they have looked so unfocused this season? Have played so emotionally, making errors and conceding goals in sudden flurries? Have often appeared to lack confidence, lack self-esteem?

If ever there was a time for compassion towards a manager and his squad this is it.

Had Slot been sacked this season then years from now, with the benefit of perspective, people would have drawn a clear line between the tragedy of Jota’s death and the dismissal of their title-winning manager less than a year later.

Thankfully, Liverpool’s owners appear to have avoided that sad and unfeeling ending for Slot.

This season has been very difficult for the players, staff, and supporters. Not everyone will have managed to make explicit or conscious the link between their own anger and pain regarding Liverpool’s performances and their feelings about Jota.

But it would benefit everyone for the club to draw together, ignore the easy pull of a shiny new manager, and get fully behind the man who gave them so much joy in 2024/25.

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