Arne Slot, results and the problem with passive football

I’ve been a critic of Arne Slot, but I’m not desperate for him to fail. If he ends up staying for a good few years, it probably means Liverpool have kicked on results wise, and I’d happily take that.

The flip side is that it’s hard to see him lasting long if our league form doesn’t move up a level. At a club like Liverpool, you can talk about projects and processes as much as you want, but the table still shouts the loudest. If there isn’t a clear, sustained improvement there, the pressure will build quickly around him.

Results matter, but style does as well

For me, it isn’t just about picking up more points, it’s about how we get them. Under the last manager we saw the football evolve in stages, but you could always feel the intent, the front-foot energy, the idea that we were going to impose ourselves on the game.

I’m not asking for the full heavy metal approach every week. That level of chaos isn’t always realistic over a long season, and football has moved on a bit from that extreme anyway. But what we can’t be is passive. Sitting off, letting teams grow into games, playing safe for long spells and hoping the quality bails us out now and again just doesn’t feel sustainable here.

At Liverpool, supporters will accept a lot if they can see a clear identity on the pitch. High tempo, brave with and without the ball, willing to take risks in the final third. If results improve but the football still looks cautious and reactive, I don’t think that buys Slot as much time as some might think.

A young coach learning on the job

To be fair to him, I do think he is learning. You can see little tweaks in how we press, how high the line is, how quickly we try to play through transitions. But he comes across as stubborn as well, and that’s something you see with a lot of younger coaches across the league right now.

There’s a real obsession with principles and philosophies. They’ve all grown up on tactical theory, on patterns and structures, and they want to prove their way is the right way. The problem is when those ideas clearly aren’t working on a given day and they still refuse to change anything meaningful.

I don’t really understand that inflexibility. For me, the best managers are the ones who keep their core beliefs but still adjust to what the game needs and what their players are actually good at. You can see why coaches want to stick to their blueprint, but the Premier League has a habit of exposing anyone who won’t bend.

What Slot needs to show from here

So where does that leave Slot? In my view, he has to show two things. First, that he can push our league form up to where a club like Liverpool should be. Second, that he can nudge this team away from passive football and towards something more aggressive and ambitious again.

If he manages both, the whole mood changes and the conversation becomes about how far he can take this group. If he doesn’t, then however good the talk about projects and philosophies sounds, it probably won’t be enough to keep him here for the long term.

Written by Hugo Spritz: 13 December 2025