Liverpool’s season has gone from cruise control to crisis chat in the space of eight weeks – but the mood around Arne Slot’s future is still more “hold your nerve” than “sack him now”.
Back in September, Slot’s Liverpool looked like a sequel to last year’s title win rather than a comedown from it. Seven wins from seven in all competitions, a Carabao Cup victory over Southampton, and new record signing Alexander Isak off the mark. Talk then was about how far they could go, not how fast they could fall.
Since then, it’s all fallen off a cliff. Liverpool have lost eight of their last 11, crashed out of the Carabao Cup, and Saturday’s 3-0 humiliation at Anfield to relegation-threatened Nottingham Forest has dumped them down to 11th in the Premier League. Isak, the £125m headline signing, hasn’t scored since that debut strike, and a £450m summer spend suddenly looks like a very expensive identity crisis.
So, is Slot actually in danger? According to a string of ex-pros and pundits, not yet.
Former Liverpool midfielder Igor Bišćan says the pressure is normal, but the job isn’t on the line. For him, last season’s title – delivered while following Jürgen Klopp and amid major upheaval – still counts for a lot. He points to the sheer number of new faces and insists Slot deserves time to make a new team out of them, not just a quick verdict off the back of a nightmare run.
Gary Neville’s in the same camp. The ex-Man United defender has called this a “really bad time” for Slot but insists there’s “no way” he should be close to the sack. Neville loves the aggressive, front-foot style but says the Dutchman now has to “reverse back down the road” a bit – make harder selection calls, tweak the approach, and stop going punch-for-punch when Liverpool are clearly coming off second best.
Ex-Reds defender Stephen Warnock also doesn’t see an imminent axe. Given the scale of the rebuild and the chaos of the summer, he believes Slot has more than enough credit left – though he adds the obvious warning: keep losing and any manager becomes vulnerable.
Martin Keown is harsher on the performances, saying “the wheels are coming off” and questioning how a team that’s had so much money spent on it can go six defeats in seven. But even he stops short of demanding a change in the dugout, framing it instead as a “major problem” Slot now has to solve, fast.
What happens next probably decides the tone of the whole season. Liverpool are still functioning in Europe, with three wins from four in their Champions League group, and they host PSV next in a game that suddenly feels like a pressure valve.
After that comes a brutal league run: away to West Ham, home to Sunderland, then away to Leeds in the space of a week. Keep losing, and even the most patient voices will get twitchy. String wins together, and this whole spell can be packaged as an ugly early-season wobble for a title-winning coach trying to bed in a new era.
For now, the consensus is clear: Arne Slot is under serious pressure, but not under notice. The fans are furious, the table looks ugly, and the football’s gone from fearless to fragile – but the man who took Liverpool back to the top still has time to prove this is a blip, not the beginning of the end.
