Arne Slot’s Tactical Plateau

Functional, not Funky

This is essentially part one of my post-season review (before it has even ended). It is long, so feel free to read to certain point and bookmark & return if necessary.

I’m not caveating this because Liverpool deserve to be where they are, in every competition – Top of the league, lost the League Cup final, out of the Champions League and FA Cup.

There have been multiple reports in recent weeks that the frontline of is getting overhauled in the summer, and I think we are all in agreement that it is much needed. Nunez and Jota just aren’t reliable enough in different ways and when you look at the likes of Alexander Isak, Ousmane Dembele and Harry Kane you are left wanting, pining for a #9 as good as them. For a club that will win the Premier League this year, you expect to have one of the world’s best 10 centre forwards in your team. This currently isn’t the case.

This does not however address Liverpool’s biggest problem on the ball this season which has become glaring in recent weeks.

Liverpool cannot play out from the back.

Read that again and if you agree with me, ponder on how mad it sounds for a team 12 points clear at the top of the Premier League in the year 2025. If you don’t agree, please feel free to let me know why in the comments (after reading the rest of this piece).

I’d rather be wrong about this.

To deep dive, let us first look at the players’ qualities when judging if they should be building out from the back.

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Goalkeeper:

Allison Becker, Caoimhín Kelleher

Given his reputation before arriving, Allison hasn’t really lived up to how good we all thought he was with the ball at his feet. Basically, after a season or so we thought he was second best in the league behind Ederson. His Brazilian understudy has since proven to be in a league of his own.

It’s weird talking about Kelleher because he should go at the end of this season for himself, more than anything but I would argue he is as good, if not better with the ball at his feet, aside from the big counter attacking throws and long passes Ali makes. Still, both are well above average and more than capable of playing their part in build-up.

Centre Back:

Virgil van Dijk, Ibrahima Konate, Joe Gomez, Jarrell Quansah.

Virgil is Virgil, Konate isn’t great but not terrible – actually shown some good long-range passing this season.

Gomez has been making great line-breaking passes for years and the thing that stood out about Quansah last season was how calm he was in possession.

Full Back:

Trent Alexander-Arnold, Conor Bradley, Andrew Robertson, Kostas Tsimikas

I don’t think Trent or Bradley need addressing but our left backs leave a little to be desired. Don’t get me wrong, they are good, but I remember Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain joking about how bad Robbo is in a rondo. He certainly isn’t intricate and now that sides are switching which full-back they invert into midfield or even inverting both at the same time, it says a lot that neither Slot or Klopp have chosen to invert either Robbo or Kosti.

Midfield:

Alexis MacAllister, Dominik Szoboszlai, Ryan Gravenberch, Wataru Endo, Harvey Elliot, Curtis Jones

Endo is the obvious odd one out here, but he is among the names being touted as moved on in the summer and maybe Szobo isn’t as good when facing his own goal, but then, he plays further ahead of the rest. Looking at the positives, Macca, Jiro and Curtis are amongst the most press-resistant in the league and Elliot’s standing serves as an example of what is at the heart of this piece – read on please.

Basically, we’re left with one area of the pitch where we can improve upon but overall, most of us surely have to agree that Liverpool have the personnel to play out from the back against an aggressive press if organised properly.

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Liverpool showed right from the start of this season that when we play out from the back, it will happen down the wings, rather than through the middle of the pitch. The thinking from Slot (which I agree with) is that it’s less risky to play out this way. A square pass to a pivoting midfielder being turned over is more likely to result in a decent effort on goal for the opposition.

Brighton (A) 23/24

Whereas, when the ball is out wide, there is much less space to work with, Losing it wide requires the player winning the turnover to move the ball centrally with a pass or dribble. Basically, it’s much harder to create a good chance there. Most of them just go out for a throw-in.

Ipswich (A) 24/25

Everything that has allowed Liverpool marginal gains in the Premier League is built on the ethos of risk and reward. Liverpool have better players than pretty much every other team. The only exceptions could be City and Arsenal.

Knowing this, Slot understands the odds are in Liverpool’s favour across the season and if you play in a functional way and get as close to the best out of your regular starters as possible from game to game, everyone is happy and has a clear goal to work towards.

The issue I have is that against other elite managers, ours has been had on toast multiple times.

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When PSG start the 2^nd half at the Stade de France, they immediately and deliberately kicked the ball out for a throw-in to Liverpool, next to the corner flag in our half. I have to admit, I applauded my monitor at the sheer Aura of it. The message from Luis Enrique’s side was simple, “You cannot play out from the back”.

From there, PSG pounced upon Liverpool and who can blame him/them for thinking so? The previous forty-five minutes consisted of Liverpool lumping the ball to Mo Salah, telling him to stick his arse into Nuno Mendes and hoping he wins enough duels to get us up the pitch in a meaningful way.

By comparison, PSG have endless midfield rotations with Vitinha, João Neves and Fabian Ruiz. They play with a single or double pivot depending on what they need relative to the opposition and can play both full backs deep or high as well. You then have Ousmane Dembele playing as the falsest of nines even helping on either flank if that is where the space is.

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Below you see a 3-2 build up with the double pivot of Ruiz and Neves and Vitinha higher. Dembele is also pulling left.

When Ruiz picks the ball off his centre-half, Neves moves up a line.

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Here is another rotation just minutes later. Nuno Mendes moves up and Vitinha who was previously basically in PSG’s frontline has dropped into their backline now to give his side their 3-2 build-up again but with a different threat ahead as Mendes’ running power is now a factor and Dembele, previously pulling left, has pulled right this time.

It is so funky, given the positional ethos that Enrique works with. Normally in a positional style, the team playing it are deemed to be boring e.g. Arsenal or City – Players are set in their position and move the ball frequently in an indirect way. At its best, it is paradoxical – players have set positions but move interchangeably to the point where it flows smooth enough to seem almost freeform. It is equal parts functional and funky. The footballing equivalent of jazz where each player doesn’t just have 10,000 hours of experience but appear to have 10,000 hours of experience playing with each other.

Slot isn’t a positionalist, but he is a pragmatist and he would do well to take a leaf out of the Enrique playbook in understanding that sometimes, you need to do something funky from the start. Functionality can only get you so far.

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I mentioned Harvey Elliot previously.

If you are in doubt about Harvey’s quality, refer to the FBref comparison with Martin Odegaard below.

The data is on a per90 basis over the last 365 days so it is a fair reflection on both players’ performance. Harvey Elliot is good – really good and has barely been seen for Liverpool this season. My best guess is that Liverpool’s regular midfield of Szoboszlai, Gravenberch and MacAllister is a perfect blend of the technical and physical qualities that Slot desires – and I agree. Having Elliot and MacAllister both in your starting Eleven makes you smaller, which impacts midfield duels and set pieces (as the cup final showed).

What Elliot brings to the midfield however, is a sense of the funk we could have. Touching back to PSG, none of their midfield three are giants either. He can drop in and help beat a press, he can be a playmaker further up the pitch, much like how we see with Odegaard at Arsenal. He can effect the game centrally or wide. He retains possession. He plays a game where technicality presides physical duels.

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The other week when Liverpool went to the Etihad, the side got through most the match after an early lead with a session of what is basically low-blocking the life out of a deflated, idealess and Erling Haaland-less Man City team. Again, Liverpool did not play out from the back. Liverpool’s gameplan consisted of long balls to Salah and Diaz.

In the long run, Liverpool winning that game with a low block will serve the side well. We know they have that in their locker. “2-0 is the most dangerous scoreline in football” is factually not true but in a one-off game, away to a side with loads of quality, I was slightly on edge. Not because The Reds looked like conceding but because one goal in a low-scoring sport can throw up something weird. I would prefer my 2-0 wins to be more possession based, rather than seeing my team defend their own box for most of the game.

Also this season we can look to the fixtures against Wolves, Chelsea and the Emirates where Luis Diaz looked the loneliest person alive being fed 30-70 aerial duels against an unnamed Premier League footballer in his 30s. These games were a struggle and Liverpool got through them because they had more quality than the opposition, rather than being tactically better.

Basically, the manager isn’t doing well enough in these moments. Especially in first halves - which I wrote about this at the start of the year, here

In the League Cup Final, against Newcastle, the same problem was on display. Everyone knows Newcastle always go man to man on their press. It’s just how they play. A couple of weeks ago at the Etihad they got destroyed by Man City because of it. It was that man Ederson who proved the difference maker, stepping out and becoming a play-maker - Giving City the numbers advantage.

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Below is the build-up to City’s opener. Guardiola exploits the press by dropping Haaland deep and having the pace of Omar Marmoush to exploit the space in-behind with a favourable 1v1 against Fabian Schar.

This exploitation occurred over and over again until City ran out 4-0 winners.

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Arne Slot’s Post-Match Press Conference - Liverpool 1-2 Newcastle

This is as close to an admission as you’ll get that the manager got it wrong against Newcastle.

I’m going to be very blunt - I have no idea what the managers gameplan was here.

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Below, we see the man to man press from Eddie Howe’s side. Something of note is that Jacob Murphy isn’t exactly touch-tight to Andy Robertson and Virgil isn’t interested in passing to him.

When the ball goes back to Kelleher, Isak chooses to press him. If he had the freedom to, our Keeper could play a pass into Konate for a layoff to his Captain.

From there, we would have the numbers to build down our left-hand side, or through the middle. Kelleher can also play a riskier turn and pass to Robbo. We essentially have a 3v2 numbers game in our favour which could extend to 4v2.

Instead, we lump it to Salah or Jota endlessly. From there, Newcastle’s height and strength brings the game home for them. It is theirs the entire time. You are not only asking our small forwards to win aerial duels but also asking our midfield to win second balls against the most physically dominating midfield you will play all season.

We don’t have Trent Alexander-Arnold in the game, and he is such a cheat code from deep but I’m just not having that as an excuse. You should be more flexible.

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Coda: The Big Irony

When Arne Slot was announced as Jurgen Klopp’s successor, the emphasis was on him being Liverpool’s new ‘Head Coach’. Not the ‘Manager’, but ‘Head Coach’.

Basically, at the time, we got Richard Hughes in as Sporting Director, the two would work in-tandem managing the squad, with Hughes playing the link between, Head Coach, Research Department and Scouting Department, forming the Voltron of the club’s recruitment and performance – which I am fully in favour of.

Ironically, Slot’s management of his squad and players in a macro-sense has proved to be better than his coaching or, micro-management that you would associate with say, Pep Guardiola.

I’ve had the inverse idea around Mikel Arteta and how his team show genuinely baffling numbers defensively and the eye-test backs up that he is one of the games all-time great defensive coaches (yeah, I said it).

However, he isn’t a great manager. Look to him wheeling out speakers blaring, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ ahead of his sides trip to Anfield (21/22). Look also to his side playing for a 0-0 away to Man City when City had 3 of their back 5, missing last season. Also, him wringing every last second out of his starting 11 for the past two seasons to the point where they are falling apart in this and continuing to do so when everyone knows the league is done now.

When Slot came in, he got a lot of things right on the wider scale – stop conceding from set pieces, allow for more players to play against the ball when in possession and play a more controlled game to earn results against the lesser sides with a minimum of fuss. He has done this immaculately and gotten us 12 points clear at the top of the league as a result.

What we now need to see tactically next season is a little bit more nuance. A little bit more funk. A little bit more edge against sides who also have great footballers at their disposal. We need to come away from games against Arsenal, City, PSG, Newcastle etc. and say, “The manager’s done them there”.

The knee-jerk for any Liverpool fan having read this is to look at our season, the fact we’re winning the league and tell me Slot has been amazing. That is very true. He has been. But I want you to look at the PSG tie and the cup final defeat to Newcastle and think about the fact that we all agree the best team won in those fixtures.

Winning league titles is where it is at right now though and it is obscene for Slot’s Reds to be so far clear going into the last 9 of his first season. He and they have earned that. I will be enjoying it so much from here on. I hope you do to. It is the functionality that’s gotten them here and whilst I am not advocating for them to forsake that, I would like a little bit more funk from time to time.

Take care.