Slot's Composure Crumbles as Liverpool's Peculiar Season Spirals

The Premier League sack race odds make for curious reading. The favourites include a manager overseeing the relegation of a club that's been a top-flight fixture bar four seasons, another desperately trying to send down an actual ever-present while spouting nonsense about fences and windmills whilst sipping from a mug bearing his rival's crest. Then there's the 19th-place manager, and rather remarkably, the boss of the fourth-placed team.

That final name belongs to Arne Slot, and Liverpool's campaign has been nothing short of bizarre.

The Reds aren't having a particularly poor season collectively, but Slot personally? He's having a considerably worse one. Our assessment suggests fourth place sits about right for Liverpool's actual level of performance. They've essentially played the fourth-best football—or if you're feeling generous, the 17th least dreadful—across the division this term.

Two crucial points emerge from this. First, it's still not sufficient. Not when substantial investment was directed towards strengthening a squad that finished top last season. Second, and this is the real puzzle: their underlying performance hasn't fluctuated dramatically throughout the campaign. They've been mediocre-to-decent consistently, yet their results have been wildly erratic.

Five wins to start, then six losses in seven games. Four victories in the next six matches. Three consecutive draws. The actual quality of play hasn't shifted dramatically between these stretches—save perhaps for that alarming 2-1 home loss to Manchester United, where panic set in during an entire second half spent chasing an equaliser.

Here's where Slot becomes central to the narrative. He's handled the vicissitudes of English football poorly this season—a stark contrast to his composed debut campaign, when he subtly refined Klopp's blueprint with remarkable effect. This year, the noise appears to have gotten inside his head entirely.

The circumstances demand acknowledgement: Diogo Jota's death created genuine trauma throughout the club, providing legitimate mitigation for collective distraction. But managerial authority must ultimately prevail. Slot's greatest strength last season was wielding control over a squad fundamentally shaped by his predecessor—an seemingly impossible task executed with impressive ease.

Now, with a squad increasingly his own, he appears to possess less control than ever. Events seem to be happening to Liverpool and to Slot rather than the other way around.

His inability to treat triumph and disaster as the impostors they are during those early months set the tone for everything that followed. Yes, we all got swept up in both the brilliant start and the subsequent collapse. But we're not the manager. He shouldn't be getting as caught up in the hysteria as the rest of us. He certainly shouldn't be essentially accusing Manchester United of cheating for the audacity of rotating their squad—perhaps football's darkest art, but hardly unprecedented.

He's supposed to be above such reactions. Yet here we are, genuinely contemplating whether he might become the third Big Six manager this season to be outmanoeuvred by Thomas Frank's windmill-tilting Brentford outfit.