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The date is March 5, 2025, and Liverpool have just won at PSG’s stadium in the first leg of their Champions League Round of 16 tie.
This 1-0 victory at the Parc Des Princes was secured for Liverpool by an 87th-minute Harvey Elliot winner, but the match’s underlying statistics told a far different Champions League story.
Eventual tournament winners, PSG, took a mighty 27 shots to Liverpool’s two, forcing heroics from Alisson, who left France with nine saves, 2.26 goals prevented and a Man of the Match award.
Arne Slot's long Liverpool goodbye may begin and end with the same Champions League fixture
Fast forward just over a year later, and the days of Arne Slot’s Premier League-winning Liverpool side feel like an age ago.
Now fifth in the Premier League table, out of the Carabao Cup following a 3-0 home defeat to Crystal Palace and even more brutally dismantled in their 4-0 FA Cup exit to Manchester City last weekend, Liverpool’s only remaining hope of silverware is the Champions League. But to do it, they’ll have to see off the same side that arguably sparked the beginning of the end for Arne Slot’s Liverpool career last season.
The long goodbye has been in effect for the Dutchman since that Round of 16 second leg, where PSG scraped a 1-0 win, then defeated Liverpool on penalties. After a stuttering end to their Premier League-winning season, Slot is on the verge of leading the club to its most defeats in a single season this century - 16 at present, with 19 the record set by their 2004-05 and 2009-10 sides. The latter cohort actually won the Champions League.
Painfully, if you were to survey Liverpool fans across the globe, I’m confident they’d say those 16 losses still somehow undersell the frustration the Dutchman has put them through this season.
It was easy to dismiss last season’s Carabao Cup final loss to Newcastle and the exit to PSG in the Champions League as a Liverpool team firmly placing its focus on securing the club’s first-ever Premier League title win in front of fans. But last weekend’s FA Cup defeat to Manchester City, who have now beaten Slot’s men three times this season by an aggregate score of 9-1, will go down as one of his lowest moments, brutalised in the only competition they had a reasonable chance of succeeding in.
That wasn’t priority management; it was calamitous. Arne Slot hasn’t just lost his players, with the likes of Mohamed Salah and Alexis Mac Allister taking shots at the Dutchman this season, he’s lost a lot of fans too.
Xabi Alonso’s name - one of FourFourTwo's likely picks to succeed Slot in the event of his departure - was sung by the travelling Liverpool support as they left in mass following the fourth and final goal in their defeat to Pep Guardiola’s men - a once legendary rivalry, now City’s favourite team to play.
As their loss total continues to rise, it appears more and more likely that the supreme talent of Mohamed Salah won Liverpool the league last season, not Arne Slot. To see an Anfield great announce his departure merely seven months into a two-year contract extension will surely raise the question: How much of Liverpool’s winning culture, the self-proclaimed mentality monsters that formed under Jurgen Klopp, has been beaten down and eroded by the Dutchman’s leadership?
In a season where Arne Slot and the Liverpool hierarchy have been accused of throwing players under the bus, the Reds’ manager didn’t do much to dispel the allegations after his comments towards Liverpool goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili yesterday.
In a pre-PSG press conference, the Dutchman said to reporters: ‘You need a good goalkeeper, but for 35 minutes at the Etihad, we didn’t need one. I was hoping he’d save a few.’
If his tactics weren’t enough to warrant the sack, his equally questionable man management should have Liverpool owners FSG worried.
If the Dutchman is allowed to stay, it will make the task to reinstate the culture that Klopp bred an even more mighty one. A loss against PSG could finally see the end of his reign.
According to Paul Joyce, Northern football correspondent and Liverpool expert for The Times, a win against PSG could signal an attitude problem as the root cause of the team's woes - potentially perpetuated by the manager in charge of handling said attitudes.
How ironic that the very fixture that began Arne Slot’s long goodbye could give it a swift, brutal end this evening. And how stark that Liverpool fans may even be excited for it.
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