Arne Slot’s Liverpool rough patch echoes Jürgen Klopp’s. What lessons can be drawn?

As talk swirled of the club’s worst run since the relegation season of 1953/54, the Liverpool manager did not mince his words.

“It doesn’t work in the moment, and there are some reasons for it: we don’t score goals and we concede at least one, which in the moment looks like it is enough against us,” he said. “We have mentality, it’s just not the mentality we are used to probably. But the boys want to win games.They wanted to win this game today. I saw that. We made mistakes still, that’s the problem.”

That candid assessment was offered not by Arne Slot following Liverpool’s dismal 4-1 Champions League defeat to PSV Eindhoven on Wednesday night, but by Jürgen Klopp in the aftermath of a 1-0 Premier League loss to Fulham on 7 March 2021. It was the eighth defeat in 12 games for Klopp’s side, and the parallels with Liverpool’s current plight are striking. 

Slot has now presided over nine losses in the past dozen matches. As he has acknowledged, it marks the worst run of his managerial career, a nadir that invites obvious comparison with Klopp’s run. “I wish I could say no, but yes it is,” the German replied when asked if the Fulham loss was one of his lowest points as a manager. 

For both men, the setbacks came hard on the heels of a season in which Liverpool had been crowned Premier League champions. Both periods saw midfielders ushered into service as makeshift defenders: for Jordan Henderson and Fabinho in 2021, read Ryan Gravenberch, Dominik Szoboszlai and Curtis Jones in 2025. Then, as now, the demotion of Don Welsh’s side to League Division Two in 1954 offered the most recent reference point for a wholly unexpected predicament.

At the same time, there are also marked differences between the two campaigns – distinctions from which Slot could perhaps draw some important learnings.

How did Jürgen Klopp’s rough patch at Liverpool differ from Arne Slot’s?

Klopp’s side were not only playing in stadiums bereft of fans due to the global pandemic, leaving a void felt especially keenly at Anfield, but were also in the throes of a defensive crisis so deep that the German was forced to utilise 20 different central defensive partnerships over the course of the campaign. 

Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez suffered season-ending setbacks in the early months of the campaign, while Joel Matip was in and out of the treatment room. The similarly frequent absence of defensive midfielder Fabinho, who missed roughly a third of the campaign with various injuries, only deepened Liverpool’s vulnerability. 

Cumulatively, those difficulties derailed Liverpool’s title defence and forced Klopp to rely on an untried centre-back pairing of Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams during the all important run-in. His side nonetheless mounted an impressive rearguard action to win each of their final five games and secure a place in the Champions League, a prize that at one stage had looked beyond them.

It should also be acknowledged that, for all their problems, Klopp’s men were a hardier bunch than Slot’s side, with four of their eight defeats coming by a single goal. There was an important distinction, too, between their domestic travails and their European form. As Klopp admitted, the Champions League offered respite from an underwhelming Premier League campaign.

“We had to switch off that Premier League stuff, to get here and to give it a proper try,” said Klopp after a 2-0 victory at RB Leipzig that propelled Liverpool into the last eight. “The boys really enjoyed themselves tonight, which is important.”

Although Liverpool went out to Real Madrid in the next round, victory in Saxony that March night marked a turning point in their season. Three straight Premier League wins followed, and they would not be beaten in the competition again, winning eight and drawing three of their final 11 games to finish third. The storm had passed.

What can Slot learn from Liverpool’s similarly torrid run under Klopp?

Fast forward to today and the challenge facing Slot is likewise to salvage positives from the wreckage of Liverpool’s title defence. 

A positive for the Dutchman is that he is playing with a significantly stronger hand. There can be no doubt that the club’s failed summer move for Crystal Palace defender Marc Guéhi has proved costly, given the subsequent loss of Giovanni Leoni to long-term injury, the abject form of Ibrahima Konaté, and the fitness doubts surrounding Gomez, who had a pain-killing injection in his knee last week. Even so, Slot’s squad has a depth that Klopp’s lacked; at no stage, for instance, has the Dutchman been without two bonafide centre-backs, however much he could argue that other considerations have forced him to improvise.

The same cannot be said of the right-back position, where injuries to Conor Bradley and Jeremie Frimpong have repeatedly forced Slot to make do and mend this season. Szoboszlai has deputised most frequently, while Wataru Endo and Jones, who started against PSV, have also been ushered into service. The situation is nonetheless far from ideal. Szoboszlai, a shoo-in for the club’s player of the season so far, has performed with distinction, but his energy, pressing and attacking threat are plainly needed higher up the pitch. 

Slot’s apparent reluctance to put round pegs in round holes is doing Liverpool few favours, however. Faced by a dearth of centre-backs, Klopp turned to specialists wherever he could, signing Ozan Kabak on loan from Schalke and eventually favouring battleground promotions Phillips and Williams. Could Slot be doing more to follow suit? Is it not worth looking within for solutions? Academy right-backs Josh Davidson and DJ Esdaille have earned rave reviews, and while they are respectively aged 20 and 17, and remain relatively untested, it should also be remembered that Trent Alexander-Arnold made his first-team debut as an 18-year-old. Apparently, he didn’t do too badly.

Why Arne Slot should be making more use of Joe Gomez

Similar logic would suggest Slot could be making more effective use of Gomez, certainly once the England international is fully fit. With Konaté lurching from disaster to calamity – against PSV, his failure to complete what should have been a routine clearance in the build-up to the visitors’ third goal effectively put the game beyond Liverpool – the need to take the Frenchman out of the firing line for a period is clear. Slot, however, has tended to leave Gomez on the bench this season even when fit, notwithstanding the fact that he is better suited to the right-back role than any of the midfielders who have been preferred. It has to change, not least because dropping Gravenberch into defence when Liverpool are chasing games has only exacerbated their defensive frailties.

Like Klopp’s Liverpool, Slot’s side had been able to take solace in their European performances before Wednesday night’s calamity. Now, even that source of refuge has been taken away, with tough away games against Inter Milan and Marseille to come over the next two months. While victory at Anfield in their final league phase fixture against Qarabağ on 28 January would probably guarantee Liverpool’s progress into the knock-out stages, even that cannot be taken for granted at his juncture.

Against this bleak backdrop, it was slightly alarming that Slot portrayed Liverpool’s challenges in broad brushstrokes earlier this week, when he confessed to feeling guilt over a malaise he branded “ridiculous, almost”. When Liverpool’s title defence crumbled in 2021, Klopp emphasised the importance of the here and now, of the next game, of the need for “a goal and a clean sheet”. Slot, like all managers, is also a disciple of the next-game mantra, and yet the mask slipped somewhat as he reflected on the wider significance of the club’s plight. 

“Something I didn’t expect to be in, not at any club I worked at, let alone if you are the manager of Liverpool,” said the Dutchman. “That is unbelievable. It is unexpected for the club, for me, for everyone, but we are also working at a club that, if you ever needed to face this, maybe this is the best club to face it. Because the harder it gets at a club like this, the more we are together, the more we are trying to do the things Liverpool usually achieves.”

Again, the contrast with what went before is instructive. As the dust began to settle on Liverpool’s season-altering win over Leipzig in 2021, Mohamed Salah offered a simpler, more immediate perspective. 

“We don’t have to look to the big picture,” said Salah, “because sometimes when you do, we get pressure, and we see too much pressure carried on to the pitch. We just need to leave the pressure off the field and just play football.”

Perhaps it is once again time to cast aside questions of expectation and what it means to be Liverpool manager, and just play football.