Liverpool FC 2025-2026 Season Review: Disappointing and Difficult Campaign Shrouded in Mourning | OneFootball

The 2025-2026 season was one filled with both sadness and disappointment. Having won the Premier League title just a few months before, many were hoping that Arne Slot could continue in the same vein, proving himself to be the Bob Paisley to Jürgen Klopp’s Bill Shankly.

Whether that would have happened or not is something that we’ll simply never know, but things went badly wrong over the course of the campaign to such an extent that Richard Hughes and Michael Edwards felt that the only correct thing to do was to give the Dutchman his marching orders on the Saturday of the Champions League final.

Here is how the season panned out and where things went so wrong:

The Loss of Diogo Jota

If anyone attempts to talk about the 2025-2026 Premier League campaign for Liverpool without talking about the deaths of Diogo Jota and André Silva then whatever they have got to say can be ignored immediately.

You can also ignore the opinions of anyone who says that it’s an ‘excuse’ to talk about what happened, or declares it to be ‘disrespectful’ to mention the loss of the brothers in relation to Liverpool’s season.

In my opinion, it is a hell of a lot more disrespectful to suggest that the squad shouldn’t have been impacted by the death of a friend and colleague in genuinely horrific circumstances.

Having celebrated his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, and the mother of his three children, less than two weeks prior, Diogo Jota and André Silva died in a car accident. As Andy Robertson said, the first time that many of the squad members saw each other for the first time after enjoying the trophy parade around Liverpool was on the flight to Portugal in order to attend Jota’s funeral. We saw in the first game of pre-season how visibly upset Mohamed Salah was, with Robertson also talking about Jota after leading Scotland to World Cup qualification and Caoimhin Kelleher mentioned it midway through the season too.

When the news broke, the football world came together in its grief, with everyone saying that we would need to be understanding and compassionate about Liverpool’s season, that it wasn’t going to be a normal one and that the players would clearly struggle to cope with the death of someone that was universally popular in the dressing room. That compassion lasted for about a month before people started criticising performances and attacking the head coach. It was a season in which supporters of the club, once touted as being the most knowledgeable around, showed themselves to lack any patience or understanding when it mattered.

Poor Performances on the Pitch

Those that have spent the best part of the past year criticising Arne Slot will say that the performances weren’t good enough and they would be absolutely right in that assessment. No one is likely to have watched Liverpool play football across the past ten months and been of the impression that they were playing brilliantly. It was a disappointing time on the pitch, yet the spectre of the death of Jota loomed large and was far too easily forgotten by many. Countless people decided to respond to the performances as though it was a totally normal season and the head coach simply lost his way, without asking why.

Slot, of course, suffered the loss of Jota in the same way that his players did. In some ways, things were worse for the Dutchman because of the fact that he had to shoulder the burden of his young squad, helping them through the tragedy, whilst also being just 46 years old and living away from his wife and children.

Few critics of his will have given any thought to that, instead simply attacking him for the football that we ended up watching. I am certainly not trying to claim that the football was fine, I just wish people had more thought about what everyone at the football club have been going through, with it not having even been a year yet.

An Unbalanced Squad

For all that Arne Slot has taken the blame for what happened during the 2025-2026 Premier League campaign, there is no question in my mind that Richard Hughes needs to be given a large portion of the blame. The Sporting Director was responsible for putting the squad together, which was made clear when Liverpool very deliberately chose to give Slot the title of ‘head coach’ rather than manager. There were celebrations from many when deals were struck for Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike and Alexander Isak, but that meant that the lack of speed on the wings, which Slot’s football approach needs, went unanswered.

There was also the fact that the protracted negotiations for Isak meant that he arrived at Anfield without having enjoyed a pre-season, which resulted in him being unfit. That was also true for pretty much all of the Liverpool players, given the fact that pre-season was all but halted after news of Jota’s death broke. It was felt by the club’s coaches that asking the players to engage in the likes of the Bleep Test would not be appropriate whilst they were all grieving. We know that Jürgen Klopp repeatedly said that pre-season was the most important time for getting fitness into the players, so it’s little wonder we looked unfit all season.

Injuries, Injuries, Injuries

Arne Slot was asked for a word to sum up the Liverpool season and the one that he chose was ‘injury’. It was an entirely fair one for him to turn to, given the club’s terrible luck on that front. Yes, Isak was unfit when he arrived, but it certainly didn’t help that he finally got back to full fitness and had his leg broken in a tackle from Micky van de Ven of Tottenham Hotspur that went unpunished because the Swedish striker scored. Hugo Ekitike had proven himself to be something of a revelation during the campaign, only for the striker to rupture his Achilles tendon during the match against Paris Saint-Germain at Anfield, ruling him out indefinitely.

Then there’s whatever the hell has been going on at right-back. We will all remember the moment that Conor Bradley suffered a serious injury against Arsenal prior to Gabriel Martinelli disgracefully shoving him off the pitch. Jeremie Frimpong, who had been brought in as the new right-back with an excellent injury record at Bayer Leverkusen, suffered repeated injuries throughout the season, whilst Wataro Endō, who performed well in the position against Sunderland, picked up an injury that ruled him out for the rest of the campaign. It resulted in me making a joke that being right-back for Liverpool was like being the drummer for Spinal Tap.

Add in the season-ending injury suffered by Giovanni Leoni and it isn’t hard to see why it is that Slot felt injuries were the dominant story of the campaign. None of it, from the players and coaches grieving to the repeated injuries and the curtailed pre-season is an excuse for what happened, but it is a reason. The powers that be, perhaps covering their own arses, decided to sack Arne Slot in order to head in a different direction in the forthcoming campaign. The man himself left with dignity, writing a classy open letter in the Liverpool Echo that thanked people for their support. Whether getting rid of him was the right decision, only time will tell.