Liverpool Is in the Midst of a $500 Million Collapse
The Premier League’s defending champion spent more on talent than any club in Europe last summer. But after six defeats since late September, its title defense is already on the rocks.
Few sights could be more dispiriting to the rest of English soccer than Liverpool cruising to a championship last spring and immediately adding half a billion dollars’ worth of talent.
The record-breaking spending spree represented much more than a club retooling after a romp through the Premier League. This was a show of force. Liverpool was building for a dynasty.
Instead, this season is spiraling into the club’s most catastrophic campaign in decades. Liverpool has lost nine of its past 12 games in all competitions, marking its worst run of form since the 1950s. It sits in 12th place in the Premier League, 11 points behind league-leading Arsenal. And the club is even looking up at its crosstown rival, Everton, in 11th place.
As far as title defenses go, English soccer hasn’t seen a collapse this dramatic since Leicester City chased its Cinderella championship with a 12th place finish in 2017.
“This season is a shock,” manager Arne Slot said this week. “And it’s very, very unexpected if you look at the quality we have.”
The most recent fiasco came on Wednesday night, when Liverpool lost 4-1 at home in the Champions League against PSV Eindhoven. The defeat came on the heels of consecutive 3-0 shellackings by Nottingham Forest and Manchester City, which means that Liverpool has now racked up three consecutive defeats by at least three goals for the first time in 77 years.
The situation is so dire that sections of the Liverpool faithful have begun to wonder aloud whether Slot’s time is running out. Although the Dutchman was only hired before the 2024-25 season—and delivered a title in his first season in charge—there’s little relief in English soccer for managers in a tailspin. Only two of the 20 coaches currently in the Premier League have tenures longer than five years, while 13 have been in their jobs for less than two.
“It’s lower than the level expected at Liverpool,” Slot said. “For sure I take the responsibility and I feel guilty for it.”
At the heart of Liverpool’s crisis is a total evaporation of its attack. A side that averaged over 15 shots per 90 minutes in the league last season is now producing barely a third of that total.
Slot knew that his side was aging and needed turnover—which is precisely what the club attempted to address by breaking the British transfer record twice in the space of three months. German playmaker Florian Wirtz, signed from Bayer Leverkusen for $156 million in June, has delivered just two assists in 15 games and exactly zero goals. Striker Alexander Isak, meanwhile, is still waiting to score his first Premier League or Champions League goal since his $165 million move from Newcastle. At this point, he isn’t even an automatic starter.
Making matters worse are Liverpool’s former stalwarts fading from view. At 33, Mohamed Salah is finally beginning to slow down with only four goals in 12 league games. This time last year, he had more than twice as many.
All of which seems profoundly out of character for Liverpool in its modern era. Under its American owners, Fenway Sports Group, the club had been a model of succession planning. It replaced key players, such as Sadio Mane and Robert Firmino, before they had a chance to go stale and made a seemingly smooth transition from former manager Jürgen Klopp to Slot.
But if this season shows anything, it’s that not much has to go wrong for the wheels to come off completely. A couple of signings underperforming in their first three months at Anfield, a superstar showing his age, and a few individual errors can be the difference between title defense and existential crisis.
The problem now is that Liverpool has limited scope to make changes. The club can’t add new players until January, by which time it will be fully out of the title race and could be facing elimination from the Champions League. It wouldn’t be unheard of for the owners to make a midseason change in the dugout—they did it twice before appointing Klopp—but Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk explained that the real blame lay with the players.
“This season we don’t have any consistency, we concede far too many goals, we are losing battles, and everyone is responsible for it,” he said.
“And I hope everyone sees that.”
As the club’s own fans filed out of Anfield before Wednesday’s final whistle, it was impossible to miss.