Why Liverpool Look Short of Legs Now

A lot of the chat always ends up circling back to Klopp, and I get why. Under him, even when we hit a sticky patch, it rarely felt like a slow, unavoidable decline. You could feel the team had a baseline: intensity, fitness, a sense of rhythm. I used to look at the calendar and think, “Good, another game.” Three times a week suited us. A week off, an international break, even just a breather, and we’d often come back a bit flat.

That’s the reference point for me. Not because Klopp was perfect, but because the physical level was obvious. We were hard to play against, and not just because of tactics. We could run. We could press. We could squeeze teams into mistakes and then play at a pace that made Anfield feel like it was dragging the ball into the net.

The PSG tie and the feeling we never reset

My own worries about the set-up and the pace of our play go back to the PSG tie last year. Whether people agree or not, that was the moment it started to feel like something was shifting. The side still had quality, still had good spells, but it didn’t always look like it had the same spring.

The way I see it, the squad were still carrying Klopp’s fitness work. They’d built up miles in their legs over years. Then comes that run of games between PSG away and at home, with heavy minutes on the same first XI. Add in extra time, add in the emotional hit of coming up short in the big races, and it starts to look like a team that just stumbled over the line. The brutal part is this: I’m not convinced we’ve fully recovered from that stumble.

Last season’s second-half fixes vs this season’s drift

One thing I actually liked last year was Arne’s eye for change. It felt like we’d often improve after the break, because he could spot what wasn’t working and tweak it. First half might be cagey, even underwhelming, then suddenly we’d come out with a bit more structure and a bit more bite.

This season, that pattern hasn’t landed the same way. Games can drift. The tempo drops. We don’t always look like we’ve got that extra gear when it’s needed.

Fitness isn’t a detail, it’s the whole point

For me it comes back to legs. Not as a lazy shout, but as the foundation of how Liverpool have been at our best. If we’re short physically, everything suffers: the press arrives late, second balls go missing, attacks get slowed down, and we start playing in moments rather than waves.

So when people say we’re clearly on the way up, I’m not there yet. I hope I’m wrong, because we all want the same thing. I just can’t shake the feeling that we look undercooked, and until that changes, the rest of the conversation is noise.

Written by Chrisymate: 4 January 2026