What Liverpool Need to Happen to Play in the Champions League Next Season | OneFootball

It has been a dog of a campaign. Whether you think Arne Slot is the worst manager ever to sit in the Anfield dugout or you’re someone who believes that he’s been extremely unfortunate in numerous different ways, there is no escaping the fact that the sooner this season is over, the better.

The good news for the Reds is that, in spite of how poor a season it’s been, we are still more likely than not to end up playing Champions League football again next season.

The bad news is that we could still find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, given the large number of permutations that are in play for Liverpool on the final day.

Here is the law of the land for the Reds:

It’s in Our Hands

The most positive aspect of the final day of the season is that Liverpool’s fate is in the club’s own hands. If we managed to beat Brentford or get a draw against them, we will end up in fifth place at least. If we win and Aston Villa lose, we’ll finish in fourth thanks to our goal difference.

Even if we lose, we’d still have a goal difference advantage, so we need to ensure that we don’t lose heavily and hope that Bournemouth don’t spank Nottingham Forest in their game.

Obviously, this is a possibility, but Forest are at home and won’t be wanting to end things on a bad note given the positive end to the campaign that they’ve enjoyed.

Then there is the possibility of us finishing level on both points and goal difference with Bournemouth, which will mean that Goals Scored is the metric that the Premier League will turn to next. At the moment, they’ve scored five times fewer goals than us, so we’d need to lose 1-0 and have the Cherries win 5-0 in order to take things to head-to-head points.

They beat us at the Vitality and we beat them at Anfield, meaning we’d be tied on that metric as well as the head-to-head away goals, given that we both scored two in the respective away matches. If all of that happens, what comes next is a one-off match to decide who gets the place.

We’re Pretty Much Home & Hosed

It is certainly the case that Liverpool could somehow contrive to miss out on Champions League football next season. The reason that possibility exists is that we would need to have a cataclysmic end to the campaign, which would fit in with everything else that’s happened up until this point.

In reality, we are in a situation whereby it is harder for us not to end up in European football’s elite competition next time around and that’s before we even think about the possibility of Aston Villa winning the Europa League tonight and then ending up coming fourth, which would see sixth place in the Premier League get a Champions League spot.

City’s late equaliser means that Brighton still have a slim chance of making the Champions League. They need:

Finish 6th, which is UCL if Villa finish 5th and win UEL

— The Sound of Football Podcast (@sofpodcast.com) 6:14 · May 20, 2026

I am also confident that we’ll get the job done against Brentford anyway. In spite of how bad our season has been, everyone at Anfield on Sunday knows that we’ll be saying goodbye to Andy Robertson and Mohamed Salah, with Alisson Becker and Curtis Jones also possibly leaving us in the summer.

The players won’t want anyone on that list to depart on bad terms, even if they have demonstrated a dislike of the manager in their reactions to Salah’s Instagram post earlier in the week. Brentford are a good team, but we’ve beaten them at Anfield before and I think, with Champions League qualification on the line, we will do so again.

It Still Hasn’t Been a Good Season

If we get Champions League football, that will be a decent end to the season when you consider how bad things have been at times over the past ten months. We should be ashamed that Arsenal were able to win the title with 82 points, given how hard we had to work to come second behind Manchester City under Jürgen Klopp.

That is something that we can’t do anything about, however, so we need to accept the fact that this season has been what it has been and we just need to take our medicine and walk away with what we’ve got.

No one will be happy heading into the summer. Personally, I think that the players have been really poor throughout the campaign, but given the loss of Diogo Jota in the summer, it is understandable. I also extend that same level of understanding to Arne Slot, who not only had to cope with the death of a player but also had to guide his squad through that. That isn’t to excuse how poor we’ve been all season, but it is to offer

some mitigation that far too many Liverpool supporters aren’t willing to think about. For now, let’s just get a Champions League place and rebuild from there