Liverpool's Season Review: A Manager's Honest Reflection
Arne Slot walked into the press room at Anfield with Champions League qualification secured, but there was no sense of celebration. Fifth place, a flat 1-1 draw with Brentford, and a farewell that never caught fire. This was not the title defence Liverpool imagined, and the head coach did not pretend otherwise.
Slot did something managers at this level rarely do. He admitted, plainly, that he got things wrong.
"We, I, haven't been perfect," he said, the words landing with the weight of a season that never quite found its rhythm. Every decision, he insisted, was made with preparation and conviction. Not every one survived contact with reality.
Salah, the bench and the breaking point
The defining fault line of this campaign will be revisited for years: Mohamed Salah, benched in November and December as Liverpool’s form collapsed. Nine defeats in 12 matches turned a wobble into a crisis. The fallout went far beyond tactics.
Salah’s public criticism of Slot tore away the usual veneer of unity. The club responded with what amounted to a one-match suspension. From there, the relationship never truly recovered. By the time this season limped to a close, Liverpool’s most iconic forward of the modern era was negotiating his exit, a year before his lucrative contract expired.
On Sunday, all eyes were on him. One last league outing at Anfield, one last chance for a flourish. He did provide a reminder of his enduring class, sliding a pass into Curtis Jones’ path for the opener. It was neat, composed, familiar.
It also felt like a fragment from a different time.
Liverpool’s lead lasted just six minutes. Kevin Schade rose to head Brentford level and, in that moment, the match neatly mirrored the season: promise, briefly, then a soft surrender of control.
Selection calls that will linger
Salah’s handling will dominate the headlines, but it was not the only decision that will be picked apart.
Slot kept faith with a core of under-performing players long after their form had evaporated. The loyalty never quite turned into a resurgence. At the other end of the spectrum, 17-year-old Rio Ngumoha stayed on the fringes until injuries and circumstance left the head coach with almost no alternative but to turn to him.
By then, the sense of missed opportunity hung heavy. A campaign that could have been a platform for a new generation instead became a lesson in hesitation.
Slot did not try to claim infallibility.
"Not every decision can be the right one," he said. "It would be stupid for me to sit here and say all the decisions I've made were the right ones. But before I made them, it felt every time they were the right ones to make."
The line captured the essence of Liverpool’s year: a plan that looked coherent on the whiteboard, then frayed under the strain of events no one could fully control.
A season scarred before it began
Some of those events cut far deeper than form or selection.
Before a ball was kicked, Liverpool were shaken by the death of Diogo Jota in a car crash on the eve of pre-season. There is no metric for the emotional toll of losing a teammate in such circumstances, no neat way to fold that grief into a league table.
On the pitch, the damage was easier to chart. "If you asked me one word to describe this season, I would describe that with the word 'injury'," Slot admitted.
He was not exaggerating. British record signing Alexander Isak missed 28 matches and started only eight Premier League games. The spine and structure of the side were repeatedly ripped out.
Alisson Becker, the ever-present anchor in goal, sat out 20. First-choice right-back Conor Bradley missed 32. Jeremie Frimpong was absent for 19, Wataru Endo for 18. New 19-year-old centre-back Giovani Leoni saw his debut, and effectively his season, end after just 81 minutes.
There were stretches where Slot barely had choices to make. "A lot of times I didn't even have to make decisions or choices," he said, pointing to the weeks when the team sheet almost wrote itself from the medical report.
Liverpool still dragged themselves over the line and back into the Champions League. In isolation, that is an achievement. In the context of a title defence, it is a comedown.
Brentford’s step forward, Liverpool’s step back
For Brentford, the afternoon carried a different kind of frustration. Victory would have delivered a first-ever European campaign. They fell short, but ninth place still marks a significant step for a club that continues to punch above its weight.
"It shows we are a good football club," head coach Keith Andrews said. Finishing in the top half, he argued, should never be taken as routine. "The fact we have been able to do that two years in a row is pretty special."
While Brentford could frame the draw as a marker of progress, Liverpool were left with a result that felt entirely on brand for this season: enough control to take the lead, not enough conviction to keep it.
Jones’ opener, crafted by Salah, should have lit the fuse on an emotional farewell. Instead, Schade’s header snuffed out the noise and left Anfield watching a familiar script unfold.
An imperfect season, an honest verdict
Slot tried to hold two truths at once. On one hand, he stressed the value of Champions League qualification after a year of trauma and disruption. On the other, he acknowledged the gulf between that outcome and the expectations that come with managing Liverpool as defending champions.
"Not what I would have loved us to achieve this season before we started," he conceded, before circling back to the context that shaped everything: injuries, loss, and a squad stretched to breaking point.
This was not a defiant defence of his record, nor a plea for sympathy. It was something rarer in elite football: a manager admitting that his best, under these circumstances, still fell short of what the club demands.
The season ends with Salah on his way out, questions over how the squad will be rebuilt, and a manager who has already shown he will not hide behind the badge when decisions go wrong.
Liverpool are back in the Champions League. The standards at Anfield, though, run higher than that. The real judgement on Slot will come next season, when the excuses run out and the injuries ease. When the choices are truly his again, what kind of Liverpool will emerge?
