Top 10 mistakes, missteps and errors in Liverpool’s catastrof*ck title defence

Liverpool are having a bit of a do, aren’t they? It is now, absurdly, six Premier League defeats in their last seven games for a team that had five flawless results – if not five flawless performances – to start the season.

So desperate are Liverpool to recapture last season’s magic, to bottle that title-winning lightning, that they’ve even resorted to the desperate measures of losing to nil at home to Nottingham Forest for no good reason . That’s where they are now: desperate to bring back those 24/25 vibes, even the bad ones.

With the champions having dropped out of top spot, and then the top four, and then the European spots, and now the top half altogether , one does start to wonder just how far this could end up going and at what point something drastic must be done.

But for now, let’s just consider the current already calamitous situation and 10 mistakes that have led us here.

Any centre-back, really, but it’s the hubris of their ‘pursuit’ of Guehi that must go down as one of the biggest blunders of the summer from anyone . Perhaps it was just too easy, too straightforward a deal for a club that had started to revel in the more invigorating, showy end of the transfer spectrum.

One way or another, the apparent straightforwardness of this deal is the precise reason it didn’t happen. The fact Palace were willing to do business if everyone was sensible, and the fact the player himself was so obviously keen, meant it felt like a formality.

And left Liverpool feeling confident/arrogant/foolish enough to believe that deal could be crossed and dotted in the last few hours of the window, even if it left Palace no time to sort out the mess they would be left in by losing their captain at such a late stage of the window.

A centre-back was such an obviously higher priority than yet another shiny new toy for the attack that the failure to address it makes Liverpool look like they are being run by actual children.

The good news for Liverpool is that so far, this has kind of worked. Virgil van Dijk has indeed been able to get through every single minute for Liverpool in both the Premier and Champions League.

Here endeth the good news. Because he has been largely cack. And if he hasn’t been cack, Ibrahima Konate – who suddenly looks like the oldest 26-year-old in existence – has been cack. Every single Liverpool game this season has felt like it’s involved one of the two desperately trying to hold the other’s hand and drag them through it before disaster strikes.

Only very occasionally has this worked, and it’s hard to escape the notion that this is becoming a doom spiral where the struggles of each are dragging the other one down, which makes them struggle more and drag the other one down.

And the results are in: Liverpool have already lost more Premier League games than in the whole of their title-winning effort last season, and already conceded very nearly half last season’s 41 goals against. Only the bottom four have worse defences this season than the champions. That’s very bad.

It doesn’t help that the man signed to replace Andy Robertson long-term at left-back is having such a time of it. He’s not perhaps the most high-profile Premier League-proven player struggling to get used to his Anfield surroundings, but he’s no less of a problem for that.

And it really, really doesn’t help that Van Dijk has absolutely no chill about it. Watching Van Dijk look at Kerkez with something approaching naked disgust every time Liverpool’s defence comes undone – which is often – has become one of our low-key fascinations of the season.

We would rather like to play Van Dijk at poker. And we don’t even know how to play poker.

We’re going to come on to the on-field issues in the next entry – we’ve already seen in the above that none of these 10 factors are really discrete considerations; they all by necessity and inevitability bleed into one another to create the whole unsightly mess.

What we’re looking at here is Liverpool’s wider reaction to a player deciding they would quite like to play for Real Madrid, actually. Literally nobody outside the Liverpool ‘This Means More’ bubble found this shocking or surprising in any way.

Excellent player who has served his boyhood club with nothing but distinction quite fancies trying his luck for a bit with the biggest club in the world. Non-Liverpool folk could understand the disappointment at losing a player to a bigger club, because unless you are yourselves Real Madrid, you’ve been there. What was harder to grasp was the confusion and then anger this standard bit of football food-chain action provoked.

The apparently genuine puzzlement that Liverpool might not represent the absolute pinnacle for a player. It really does seem to have rattled the club in an unnecessarily core fashion.

The unpleasantness was allowed to taint the closing days of last season when it should have been party time, and seems to have struck quite hard at Liverpool’s very idea of themselves. And they’ve not recovered.

Where non-Liverpool folk do perhaps have to hold their hands up a bit is that we perhaps didn’t appreciate as Liverpool fans did just how good Trent Alexander-Arnold was for them.

We all knew he was brilliant, obviously, but part of the hateful reaction to his departure perhaps stemmed from Liverpool fans suspecting more than the rest of us did that TAA wasn’t just another brilliant part of this brilliant team, but the absolute key to the whole caper.

And the problem with a playmaking right-back with outrageous vision and the technical chops to carry out that vision is that there aren’t really very many of those around.

It turns out he wasn’t just Liverpool’s most important player; he was also the most uniquely irreplaceable.

What you ought to do in that situation, tough as it is, is accept you can’t replace him specifically with one player and try as best you can to make up his contribution in the round.

Liverpool have instead tried with increasing desperation to recapture something of TAA’s spirit by just throwing Dominik Szoboszlai in at right-back instead.

Now, you absolutely can turn central midfielders into attack-minded full-backs – it’s one of Pep Guardiola’s favourite bits – but that really does need to be because you’ve spotted some hidden defensive nous among their midfielder’s skillset. Not because they’re a brilliant attacking midfielder and that’s what your old right-back actually was.

Nobody is missing Alexander-Arnold more than Salah, though. It’s testament to his own absurd standards that four goals and two assists in 12 Premier League games constitutes unthinkable disaster and prompts questions about whether he can ever recapture the glory days.

But still. There were signs at the back end of his brilliant 2024/25 that all might not be well, and those signs are now howling alarm bells. The basic numbers aren’t rotten, but the performances are.

Games are passing Salah by this season. At times he just looks lost on the pitch. He looks behind him and sees no Alexander-Arnold. Around him in attack are more unfamiliar faces. This is a player whose best work has always been characterised by a fleetness of both thought and foot; a certainty about what best to do with the ball in any situation and the talent to do precisely that, more often than not.

There have been dips before for Salah, but none like this. And the brutal reality of sustained loss of form when you’re 33 is nagging questions about whether this is just the natural ebb and flow of such ethereal ideas as form and confidence, or the cruel passage of time slowly robbing you of what made you great, reducing you to the humdrum and workaday.

We saw something similar happen to Son Heung-min at Spurs last season, and the sudden lack of certainty that has gripped Salah feels very similar.

We’re also not sure Slot is helping at all by just constantly throwing him back out there. Salah has played all but five minutes of Liverpool’s collapsing Premier League campaign to date, and the current evidence all points to this hastening the great man’s decline rather than playing him back into something approaching decent form.

The floppiest flop in the Premier League hall of flops? Too early to say with any real fairness but yes, yes he is . An absolutely honking waste of £120m at this time, a Prem-proven elite striker who is somehow not just failing to contribute positively but actively making things worse.

And this is where it all gets so silly. We were all guilty, weren’t we? We all had our heads turned by Liverpool signing a second massively expensive striker to go with the massively expensive playmaker they’d already secured.

But while Liverpool gleefully pursued the shiniest transfers at every turn, egged on by, well, literally everyone, they neglected to attend to the very real but far less exciting squad issues elsewhere. How many of the other problems on this top 10 could have been solved by spending the time and money thrown at the Isak Saga at them instead? We can never know for sure, but we reckon at least three and possibly as many as five.

A lot of these 10 things are, inevitably, on the manager one way or another. But we do perhaps need one entry dedicated specifically to his wider failure to grab hold of the situation.

This isn’t about his tactical mistakes or selection missteps. This is about how a mini-crisis was allowed to balloon into a full-blown one on the back of a manager facing his first slightly tricky period as Liverpool manager and reacting very badly.

It’s been a greatest hits of headloss. Blaming referees for perfectly straightforward decisions. Blaming opponents for adopting ‘tactics’ designed to make things ‘harder’ for Liverpool.

Perhaps the only bright spot from the shameful defeat to Forest – and we are grasping at the very dimmest bright spot imaginable here – was that Slot was at least blessed with some self-awareness in the aftermath, looking inward rather than whinge about the opening goal in a 3-0 home defeat.

‘No one wants to hear me now talking about refereeing decisions if you lose 3-0 at home to Forest. I should look at myself first and my team.’

Absolutely spot on. Well done, Ar… oh, you weren’t finished.

‘But it does show you how a goal can change the momentum of a game. Before I was just waiting for us to score a goal. Afterwards we hardly created anything.’

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

It’s progress, though. Of sorts.

A sign of the times really that a player signed for a nine-figure sum struggling as much as Wirtz has nevertheless ended up as the least of Liverpool’s worries. At least here there is ample mitigation.

At least with Wirtz there are your usual caveats about adjusting to the league and all the rest of it. At least here there is something beyond just pure hope and copium that leads you to imagine a brighter future.

But we’d all probably have a better chance of keeping our collective head if we aren’t constantly told that doing things like assisting a couple of goals in 6-0 wins over Slovakia has ‘answered his critics’. Not one of the criticisms of Wirtz has centred on his inability to create a couple of goals in familiar surroundings against the 45th best team in international football.