Liverpool Have Tried Three Different Identities in Three Years, and It Shows

Arne Slot walked into Anfield in the summer of 2024 with an impossible job description, replace Jürgen Klopp without changing what made Liverpool work. He pulled it off in his very first season. Eighty four points, twenty five wins, only four defeats, ten points clear of Arsenal, and Mohamed Salah setting a Premier League record with forty seven goal involvements in a single season. Twelve months later, the club sacked him.

The title should have opened the door to reinforcement, not reinvention, but the summer of 2025 brought both. Liverpool spent somewhere in the region of four hundred million pounds on Florian Wirtz, Alexander Isak, Hugo Ekitike, Jeremie Frimpong, Milos Kerkez, Giovanni Leoni, Giorgi Mamardashvili and Ármin Pécsi. Look closely at that list and a pattern appears. Three attacking players competing for the same zone of the pitch, two full backs, a centre back, two goalkeepers. Not one recognised defensive midfielder among them.

The same summer took Trent Alexander-Arnold to Real Madrid and sold on Luis Díaz and Darwin Núñez, unwinding a spine that had just won the title. Then, on 3 July 2025, Diogo Jota died in a car accident, a loss that no transfer window and no tactical plan could account for. Whatever Slot tried to build in his second season, he built it on a squad and a dressing room that barely resembled the one crowned champions a few months earlier.

The numbers told the story soon enough. Liverpool finished fifth, seventeen wins, nine draws, twelve defeats, sixty three goals scored against eighty six the year before, fifty three conceded against forty one. No trophy, quarter final exits in the Champions League and the FA Cup, and on 30 May 2026 Slot left with immediate effect.

Andoni Iraola arrived from Bournemouth in June with a reputation for high pressing, aggressive full backs and control through midfield rather than around it, a third distinct footballing idea for largely the same group of players inside three years. Four games into this season Liverpool have one win, three draws, six points and seventh place. They have not lost, but they have not really won either, and Alexander Isak, the most expensive arrival of last summer, has three goals in all competitions to show for it.

My own reading of this, for what it is worth, is that a midfield built from Wirtz, Ekitike and whoever else gets pushed in front of the back four cannot compensate for the absence of a genuine holding midfielder, someone whose job is to break up play rather than start it further forward. Klopp had that balance, Slot inherited it and then spent it away, and Iraola has inherited a squad built for two other footballing philosophies before he has had the chance to build his own on top of it.

If you had to pick one position for Liverpool to fix before the next transfer window, would it be a genuine number six, or would you rather they just stopped changing systems altogether?