Liverpool Should Stick With Arne Slot

Maybe not for long with the way things are going. But how many better managers are out there, even at other clubs?

Arne Slot must feel like Homer Simpson. The hairline is very similar, in fairness. Every time he gets rescued from the canyon of a bad performance with some seeds of positivity, Liverpool stumble their way back down the mountainside. The stone of triumph has been replaced with the stone of shame within six months. The weight of it might sink him.

The Reds’ latest in a line of rock bottoms was hit against PSV Eindhoven on Wednesday night. After Virgil van Dijk conceded a ridiculous penalty, Liverpool posted 10 shots worth 1.15 expected goals without reply. But the three chances worth at least 0.22 xG in the final 35 minutes were all for the Eredivisie side, all converted. D’oh.

Plotting the non-penalty expected goals on a timeline shows that the Reds were not behind on this front at any point. When the first shot of the game is from the spot and converted, a chart like this can be a little misleading. It provides a flavour of when each team was dominating though.

The corresponding chart for the Nottingham Forest loss looks broadly similar, with a decent first half followed by a slump after the interval. Bear in mind that the scale changes for each chart so the dominance was not quite so strong. Even so, it should be impossible to lose these two games by a combined 6-1 on non-penalty goals.

The large dips in the charts explain the unlikely outcome. Liverpool push the rock up the hill through a series of mostly low value chances, then see it tumble down the other side when their opponents have much better opportunities.

How much of the blame for this should be assigned to Slot is debatable. He didn’t make Ibrahima Konaté air-kick the ball for PSV’s third goal but he does keep selecting the error-prone Frenchman. Similarly, Slot isn’t at fault for Cody Gakpo missing potential headed equalisers in front of the Kop against Eindhoven and Manchester United. He persists in selecting players who are not fully fit which hinders the team’s attacking potential though.

The pressure could be reaching breaking point. My view? FSG will think that scorelines being worse than underlying numbers is no reason to hastily fire a Premier League winning manager. It’s also worth considering a point in Michael Reid’s review of the PSG match:

[Slot] still, by the way, boasts the best win rate of any manager to take charge of 50+ games in Liverpool’s history (63.2%) - ahead of Klopp (60.9%). Which further highlights how remarkable this drop-off in form is.

As bad as the last two months have been, Slot possesses a much larger body of work at the club which is seriously impressive. It has been amassed against the strongest Premier League there has ever been too.

While that won’t sustain his job security for ever, there’s also the question of who is out there who could better manage a group of grieving young men who are bereft of confidence? With FSG assessing data to answer that question, there’s a good chance their answer will be nobody.

As has been noted elsewhere, if the Liverpool job came up now with Slot managing elsewhere, he’d be one of the leading candidates to get it. Lest we forget, his AZ Alkmaar side were level on the points at the top of the Eredivisie when Covid came along to abandon the 2019/20 season. He then took Feyenoord to the title before guiding them to their highest points total in history the following year.

He has succeeded everywhere. There aren’t too many better CVs on the market, which we can ‘prove’ using ClubElo’s data. Their system rates teams who exchange points relative to their strength when they play each other. For instance, Liverpool only gained 5.2 Elo points for beating Real Madrid as the teams are deemed to be of similar standard. They lost 24.6 in defeat to Forest because they are not.

As you can apply this data to teams, so it can be assigned to the managers that lead them. ClubElo have a ranking of active coaches, who are those that have worked within the last four years and have at least 100 games in their database. Slot is currently 17th, ninth among currently employed managers. As Pep Guardiola is top, the Dutchman can’t even claim to be the best bald fraud in the business.

There is also an all-time list, which features the Reds’ head coach at number 27. Jürgen Klopp is sixth, for the record, three places above José Mourinho. Normal One one, Special One nil.

Any such ranking is slightly unfair in that lengths of career vary wildly. Sir Alex Ferguson took charge of over six times as many games as Slot, so had far more opportunities to accumulate Elo points. Despite this, the Scot is still below Arne in the standings.

Dividing each manager’s Career Elo by their matches makes sense to give them a pro rata score. You’ll never guess who is top among those men with at least as many games as Slot on their CV?

By this measure, Liverpool’s current manager is the best they could hope to appoint. Applying the same criteria to the all-time list has Slot at the top too.

The quants at the club will use far more advanced data than this. However, it’s worth noting that Ruben Amorim - who was on the post-Klopp shortlist - is 0.002 Elo points per game ahead of Slot, having taken just three fewer matches.

In this system they have had the same career. Both men being considered by the Reds in the summer of 2024 suggests their decision makers probably look at something along these lines.

If they do, who is better than Slot? There aren’t many realistic options. I mentioned former Dortmund boss Edin Terzic as a plausible candidate in the PSV match thread and he does score well from his limited career. But if FSG prefer players with 150+ games-worth of experience when recruiting, would they go for a coach with 116?

Probably not. The talk is they are happy for Slot to continue. Based on this, it’s easy to see why.

The current top 20 active coaches according to ClubElo