Why Liverpool are turning to Andoni Iraola to fix their biggest issue | OneFootball

If it was Andoni Iraola’s excellence that took him to Liverpool, he and they almost had cause to rue it. Bournemouth ended the season on the charge, unbeaten in 18 league games. Liverpool finished it on the slide, taking just two points from their last four matches, winning only three in 10. Had the campaign gone on for another couple of weeks, Bournemouth would probably have leapfrogged Liverpool. And if that would have rendered Arne Slot’s dismissal more of a formality, it would have denied Iraola Champions League football at Anfield next season, assuming a man who has verbally agreed to take the job does so.

As it is, the sight of Liverpool and Bournemouth side by side in the table showed they were respective underachievers and overachievers. Just as they were opposites, Iraola looked a natural antidote to Slot. When Liverpool decided they wanted more front-foot, urgent and aggressive football, they might have been writing a job description for their preferred candidate.

Bournemouth had the most shots from fast breaks last season. They pressed high and effectively. When Mohamed Salah called for a return to the heavy metal football Jurgen Klopp purveyed, in an implied criticism of Slot, he might have been imagining Iraola’s Bournemouth.

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Andoni Iraola overachieved at Bournemouth, but can he make the step up at Liverpool? (Getty)

Liverpool could give testament to the potency of Iraola’s attacking football; the opening game of the Premier League season brought a 4-2 victory for the defending champions, but only after a scare. Antoine Semenyo scored twice from lightning counterattacks, each offering evidence Liverpool were vulnerable to transitions.

In the return game in January, Iraola illustrated that Slot’s revival was not built on the firmest of foundations. Liverpool arrived in Dorset unbeaten in 13 games but departed defeated, 3-2. Amine Adli’s injury-time winner came into two categories that damned Slot’s Liverpool: late concessions and set-piece goals.

So, having highlighted some frailties, Iraola will be charged with addressing them. Slot was the continuity candidate who initially prospered with Klopp’s players, but his football became less Klopp-like. Meanwhile, football shifted in a way that meant Slot, from a contemporary figure, suddenly appeared a man out of time, bemoaning the more physical game but struggling to come up with an answer to it.

Iraola can seem at the vanguard of a movement, as Klopp did. His style of play could explain why Liverpool showed little interest in his fellow Basque, a childhood friend who had looked better qualified for the top job at Anfield, in Xabi Alonso. That Bayer Leverkusen, where Alonso completed an unbeaten season in the Bundesliga, had wanted Iraola shows how they can be interlinked.

Indeed, rewind to 2023 and Leeds, embroiled in a relegation battle they would ultimately lose, sacked Jesse Marsch and turned their attention to Iraola, then of Rayo Vallecano, and Slot, still at Feyenoord. Each had the sense to stay put. Iraola seemed a logical candidate: he had played for Marcelo Bielsa, a manager who transformed Leeds, at Athletic Bilbao. A bigger influence on Iraola, however, was Ernesto Valverde, who figured prominently in Liverpool’s thinking when they looked for a successor to Slot.

If the Basque Country can seem a heartland for progressive football thinking, Bournemouth may be a less likely one. But Liverpool’s sporting director Richard Hughes has twice shown a ruthlessness in jettisoning seemingly successful managers to bring in Iraola: first, Gary O’Neil, who had kept Bournemouth up when most predicted relegation and then the Premier League winner Slot, in a way Liverpool accepted felt harsh.

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Liverpool are set to swap Arne Slot for Iraola, a year after winning the Premier League (PA Archive)

The links between Liverpool and Bournemouth already include Milos Kerkez, who performed better for Iraola than Slot. They could have featured Semenyo, who was admired at Anfield before he joined Manchester City; instead, Liverpool’s summer business entails finding a replacement for Salah and the kind of fast winger who suits Iraola. There were those at Bournemouth who thought that Illia Zabarnyi, now at Paris Saint-Germain, would end up on Merseyside as Virgil van Dijk’s long-term replacement. Current transfer speculation suggests the Ukrainian may yet.

That Iraola rebuilt Bournemouth in an uncomplaining fashion after sales and ended with a record unbeaten run despite being stripped of Semenyo, Zabarnyi, Kerkez and Dean Huijsen equips him for the role of the head coach, where Hughes and Michael Edwards take more responsibility for transfers; though it would help if they got more right this summer. But Liverpool, further up the food chain than Bournemouth, will need to sell less.

Iraola’s arrival can still leave questions. He was transformative at Vallecano and Bournemouth, but neither is judged in terms of trophies. The Cherries could endure winless runs – their first nine games under Iraola, a spell of 11 last season – without the same kind of pressure such sequences would bring for Liverpool.

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Iraola led Bournemouth to the brink of the Champions League, but has yet to manage a campaign alongside European football (Getty)

His high-speed football requires time on the training ground: Bournemouth only played 40 games last season, Liverpool slogged their way through 57. The slowness of their football was not purely down to Slot, amid injuries and exhaustion. European football may mean Iraola has to change.

Iraola has shown a capacity to get forwards scoring, and if he is charged with doing likewise to Alexander Isak, first he has to get him moving; it is hard to press with a static centre-forward. He has displayed an ability to improve players – even after those who were sold, Adrien Truffert, Alex Scott, James Hill and Eli Junior Kroupi took sizeable strides forward last season – which could be welcome as too many of Liverpool’s regressed last year. He works well with young players, and much of the £500m Liverpool have committed to signings in the last 12 months went on youthful figures, whether Florian Wirtz or Hugo Ekitike, Kerkez or Giorgi Mamardashvili, Giovanni Leoni or Jeremy Jacquet. The way Zabarnyi and Huijsen kicked on under Iraola may bode well for Liverpool’s young centre-backs.

It means Iraola has ticked many a box, albeit without winning major silverware or managing a super club. They may still seem the biggest elements, but Liverpool can see Iraola as the outsider who can reconnect them with the identity they had and lost.