You know, we often spend the summer imagining that next season is actually going to be the one that delivers a proper four-way Premier League title fight. Does it happen? No, it never does. I mean, we somehow delude ourselves into thinking it might… but it might happen in 2025/26.
Here’s our four-part series looking at the potential champions. Arsenal have had their credentials lauded and Chelsea have been tipped for the top. Today it’s the turn of Liverpool.
Not our hottest take of the summer, admittedly, but here goes anyway: we reckon Liverpoolwho won the Premier League last season by 10 points and have spent hundreds of millions of pounds this summer on excellent footballersare among the contenders for the 2025/26 title.
Yeah, we said it.
But there’s something very interesting about Liverpool this season, we reckon. Because it feels like there’s a vast range of possibilities for this team and none of them would be particularly surprising.
Were Liverpool to once again win the league at something approaching a canter, we’d barely bat an eyelid. Yet where we perhaps differ from others is that it also wouldn’t really surprise us much to see them finish 25 points adrift having barely got in the title race at all.
Partly by design, partly by accident (you can argue the ratio among yourselves), Liverpool went into last season pulling off a very neat – we’d suggest near impossible – trick of moving on from a legend of a manager yet benefiting from a crazy amount of continuity.
Much of that was down to Jurgen Klopp, who was on record as saying he wouldn’t have felt comfortable leaving Liverpool – no matter how little energy he had left for the job – unless he knew his successor was inheriting a functioning and functional squad.
He did that to such an extent that Arne Slot didn’t even need any new players at all (sorry Federico Chiesa) to come along and evolve-not-revolve that squad into compelling title winners.
For all Klopp’s groundwork in leaving the squad in such rude health, Slot’s achievement remains a staggering one. It’s impressive enough to be sufficiently ego-free to realise that nothing here was broken, more impressive still to actually fine-tune the machine as he did.
While nothing Slot did or changed was extravagant or revolutionary, there were still notable elements of putting his own stamp on what was already working. Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch were notable improvers as the season went on, while the decision to tell Mohamed Salah in particular to simply continue being brilliant was, you’d have to say, the correct call.
Easy to be glib, but the sheer scale of the buy-in the undemonstrative Slot got from what was unmistakably and unshakeably Klopp’s squad tells you a great deal about him and those players.
But this year presents a very different challenge. Now there are new players to integrate. Now this is going to look more like Slot’s own team.
How this staggered transition – new manager one season, new-look team the next – pans out is going to go a long way to defining the 25/26 season for everyone, not just Liverpool.
The players that have come in are enormously exciting. It’s beguilingly possible – probable, even – that Liverpool will be even better this time around.
We can’t, though, quite agree with those seeking to declare the trophy’s return to Anfield a done deal already. It’s a long old time since a team that isn’t Manchester City retained the title, and as we’ve already said there are plenty of teams who’ll feel they have something to say about it.
Such has been the nature of this summer’s frenetic transfer window and the added pressure imposed by the Club World Cup that Trent Alexander-Arnold’s departure for Real Madrid already feels like it happened several years ago. But it does bear remembering that it is a thing that happened.
He will be a huge miss for Liverpool. His was such an unusual range of skills to be found in a player in his position that he is close to irreplaceable. We’ll all find out soon enough just how different Liverpool’s creative efforts look without their right-back/playmaker.
It feels with all these teams like the start of the season is so important, but none more so perhaps than Liverpool. Thanks to the level of their dominance last season it already feels like they’ve assumed the Man City position where what they do is going to be more important than what anyone else does.
If anyone else makes a good start, it’s not going to matter all that much if Liverpool have also made a good start. That’s where the focus will be, and that’s where people will see the likeliest champions. Partly it’s common sense, partly it’s recency bias.
What feels certain after last season is that Slot will work it all out. By the end of the season we expect Liverpool to be absolutely formidable. What will define their season, and by extension everyone else’s season, is how long it takes them to get to that position with the inevitable flux brought about by inevitable and necessary changes to the squad.
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The final and unavoidable uncertainty around Liverpool comes, of course, with the impact the Diogo Jota tragedy has on the entire club.
It feels ridiculous and wrong to even be talking about how that might impact something as unimportant in the grand scheme as a football club’s season, yet at the same time to ignore it altogether is to overlook a monumental event that obviously will have an impact on every one of Liverpool’s players.
It presents another layer of potential awkwardness for new arrivals who can never truly share in the grief felt by Jota’s team-mates and colleagues. But it also provides the potential for a unifying and driving force. The power of the ‘do it for Jota’ that will define everything Liverpool do this season shouldn’t be overlooked or underestimated.
And everything we know about Slot suggests a manager with the humanity and emotional intelligence to understand how best to handle things for different players at different times.
There might not be much Liverpool could do that would shock us this season. But another title still seems the least surprising possibility.
