[Marcel van der Kraan, De Telegraaf] - ´Traditional´ club Liverpool throws its own culture overboard with the dismissal of Arne Slot; Dutch coach receives eight million.
There is a culture where the club´s style is supposed to rise above everything else. But that style and culture have been thrown overboard in one fell swoop with the forced departure of the Dutch manager and his entire entourage, because exactly 12 months after winning the national championship, only a Champions League ticket has been secured…
Slot gets only a hundred matches
Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley were coaches in the golden years of the seventies and eighties who sat on the bench for between 500 and 800 games. Kenny Dalglish (until the early nineties) coached over 300 matches, Rafa Benitez 350 games in the first decade of this century, and Jurgen Klopp, as Slot´s predecessor, also nearly 500 games, just like Paisley.
And Slot? He reached the tally of 113 matches in exactly two seasons. No trophy in the second year? Then you’re not good enough in the eyes of the fans, you get heaps of criticism from your own supporters, it explodes on social media, and the club doesn’t dare to go any further. Liverpool, just like other billion-dollar clubs in the Premier League, has degenerated into a ´hire and fire´ club.
Under Slot, Liverpool won the Premier League in the first season to everyone´s total surprise. In the nine seasons prior, Klopp had managed that only once. But lo and behold, a year later he is out on the street.
Disappointments at the end
The fact that Slot was unable to use his major signing Alexander Isak, a €150 million striker, for almost the entire season because he immediately suffered a serious injury, and the fact that his second striker Hugo Ekitike is also sidelined for a year, has not been a mitigating circumstance for the fans or the club management. And that is not to mention Mo Salah, who has barely performed since signing a €22 million contract.
No immediate success in the Premier League means packing your bags and leaving. In total, exactly 50 percent of coaches (ten out of twenty) have been sacked this season. Too bad for Etienne Reijnen, by the way, who had just resigned from his job at Feyenoord, packed his bags in a different way in the Netherlands, and was ready to make the move to Liverpool. Feyenoord has actually already filled his position. Reijnen is already done before he could even start…