Sorry, but Arne Slot's record just isn't stacking up

By the time the final whistle confirmed Liverpool’s 1-0 win over Tottenham in May 2025, Arne Slot had matched the most celebrated start in the club’s managerial annals: 62 victories from his first 100 fixtures, a figure that places him shoulder-to-shoulder with Kop icon Kenny Dalglish. A Premier League winners’ medal already glints in the 45-year-old’s trophy cabinet, and the club remain alive in both the FA Cup and Champions League. On paper, the Dutchman is overseeing a golden dawn; inside Anfield, the mood music has turned ominously flat.

The numbers that once sounded like trumpets now ring hollow. Liverpool followed a record-breaking £450 million summer outlay with a slide that began long before the autumn chill. After roaring to 11 wins in Slot’s opening 12 competitive matches, the Reds have lost 24 of their subsequent 50, a sequence that includes four consecutive defeats and nine losses in 12 during one grim mid-season stretch. A 2-0 FA Cup surrender to Plymouth, albeit with a rotated side, hinted at frailties that would soon become chronic. Paris Saint-Germain bullied them out of the Champions League last 16, Newcastle edged them in the EFL Cup final, and PSV compounded the misery with a shock Anfield win.

Teams have decoded Slot’s once-prized midfield structure, exploiting the spaces Jamie Carragher warned about on live television last August. Liverpool’s early-season knack for late rescue acts—five successive league wins achieved by goals struck after the 80th minute—proved unsustainable. Since Crystal Palace inflicted a first domestic defeat in September, matches have become coin-flips: the Reds neither dominate territory nor manufacture repeatable patterns of attack, relying instead on opposition errors or flashes of individual brilliance.

Injuries have bitten—Diogo Jota’s long-term summer absence robbed the attack of its most subtle link—yet the malaise runs deeper. Once the title was mathematically secure, Liverpool’s hierarchy allowed the squad to disperse for celebratory jaunts in the UAE while Slot headed to Ibiza. Four end-of-season fixtures, opportunities to blood youngsters or refine tactics, passed with the intensity of a testimonial. Pre-season returned a squad physically and mentally lighter; the cohesion that carried them to the summit never returned.

Technical tweaks have come and gone. Assistant Aaron Briggs was tasked with curing set-piece ills; Mohamed Salah was briefly demoted to the bench as the manager searched for a spark. Neither intervention staunched the bleeding. The manager’s halo, burnished by that blistering opening third of the campaign when Manchester City imploded, has slipped irrevocably. Supporters, once willing to toast the historic 62-win milestone, now greet each fresh setback with the weary resignation of a side whose trajectory points downward.

Slot may yet reach 200 matches in the dugout, but the trajectory of his second century suggests a win-rate nowhere near the benchmark he shares with Dalglish. Liverpool bankrolled a project designed to entrench the club at the English and European summit; instead they find themselves mired in a fight to rediscover identity. The record books say Anfield possesses a managerial prodigy; the evidence on the pitch says the numbers no longer stack up.