I’m not pretending I’m a convert to Arne Slot’s way of doing things. I’ve been critical for months, and I’m not one of those who’d slap a gold star on fifth and call it progress. But there’s a bigger point here that gets missed when the debate turns into “style wars”.
FSG don’t run Liverpool like a fashion show. They run it like a business that happens to be a football club. As long as the club stays profitable, keeps growing in value, and remains relevant at the sharp end of the Premier League, the owners aren’t losing sleep over whether the football is pretty enough for everyone’s tastes.
Style is only a problem when it hurts results
Truth is, playing style only becomes an ownership-level issue when it starts costing you. If the football is turgid but you’re still in the Champions League places, bringing in the matchday money, shifting shirts and staying on the biggest stages, then from their angle the model is working.
That doesn’t mean the hierarchy won’t have opinions. If the tactical choices look consistently poor, or the team looks like it’s being coached into trouble, that will get raised internally. But it’ll still come back to one thing: what’s it doing to results?
Top four with “ugly” football is still top four
Fans can get hung up on the idea a manager should be binned for not playing the “right” way. I just don’t see it. If you qualify for the Champions League, you stay competitive, and you’re not drifting into mid-table anonymity, you’re not getting emptied because the football isn’t as fun as you’d like.
And if you somehow won a major trophy while playing what people call anti-football, do we honestly think the decision-makers would turn their noses up? They’d be parading it and banking the upswing that comes with it. We’re not talking about a club with the expectation of winning every year, no matter how much we’d all love that.
FSG have lived through far worse than a fifth-place finish
Context matters. FSG arrived when Liverpool were already deep in a rough spell, and they’ve seen plenty of managers fall short here. Klopp himself had finishes that weren’t close to a title, especially early on. That doesn’t make it ideal, but it does underline how ownership tends to judge these things: trajectory, competitiveness, stability.
So no, Slot won’t be judged on aesthetics in isolation. If it falls apart to the point you’re bottom half and going backwards, then the conversation changes quickly. Short of that, “I don’t like the style” just isn’t a sackable offence in the real world.
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