Arne Slot can only change Liverpool so many times before someone else does

CommentsSportopinionRichard Garnett Central Audience Sport Content Editor12:55, 11 Mar 2026Arne Slot marked his 100th game in charge of Liverpool on Tuesday evening with a sorry 1-0 defeat to Turkish champions Galatasaray that once again raised more questions than answers.

The partisan fans of Istanbul clubs are renowned for their fanatical support, deafening noise, and ability to create an intimidating atmosphere rarely matched.

It's the precise ingredients that this current version of a Liverpool team appears incapable of dealing with, and as Galatasaray proved in the redeveloped Ali Sami Yen Stadium (now known as RAMS Park), you don't have to even be particularly good to knock the Premier League champions off their stride.

Ramshackle defending, wayward passing and an absence of genuine aggression were the order of the day here. But let's not forget a lack of killer instinct.

The Reds' right-sided defensive pairing of Joe Gomez and Ibrahima Konate looked solid enough on paper, but the mere sight of Noah Lang having the audacity to attack with pace down his left wing looked like too much to handle in the first half.

Had they taken the brilliant chances they were gifted in the early exchanges (like Atletico Madrid did on three occasions against Tottenham Hotspur shortly after), Liverpool might have won this match. Instead, they were lucky not to return to Merseyside with a greater deficit to overturn.

A 1-0 defeat sets up a big return leg at Anfield and Slot will no doubt call upon the home crowd to lift itself for one of their famous European nights. Having seen Galatasaray's defensive abilities, I remain confident that Liverpool l can turn this tie around at home, but sadly, that is where my optimism ends.

The Reds are the defending Premier League champions and invested a phenomenal amount of money in the summer on big-name players, but you wouldn't know it. Every time they record a victory that alters your mindset they eventually revert to a deeply uninspiring outfit that have lost nine times in the Premier League, three times in the Champions League and handed victory to Crystal Palace in the Carabao Cup on a silver platter.

That's 13 defeats across the season, hardly the return of champions.

Liverpool's plight was well summarised by Jamie Carragher on Tuesday night. Working as a pundit for US network CBS, he said: "This was an end-to-end game that was a bad game for Liverpool. Bad result. Really poor in the second half as well. They started well, but a lot of that was due to the mistakes of Galatasaray. I don't think they're a great team.

"I still think Liverpool will go through, but this is a worry for the manager and the team. What we saw tonight is what we saw earlier in the group stages here. This team is a million miles off where it was supposed to be this season, which was with us talking about them in the same way that we speak about Bayern Munich right now.

"The whole point of Liverpool spending over £400million in the summer was to go from the next step of winning the Premier League to winning the Champions League. We're talking about a team that have now got to change a deficit against Galatasaray, which I think they will. But, I don't have any hope of Liverpool going any further [in the Champions League] if it's Paris Saint-Germain in the next round, which I think it may be."

The Reds started the week with hopes still high in two cup competitions that could return some silverware in what has been a wildly unpredictable season. But by Monday evening, they had been drawn away to Manchester City in the FA Cup quarter-finals and having landed in what, on paper, looks like the harder side of the Champions League draw, you would have to be of an abnormally positive disposition to think that they could actually win it.

Failing to claim silverware is a normal occurrence for most clubs and not a sufficient reason in isolation to make a drastic alteration to the coaching staff. But Carragher's subsequent comments should give the current incumbent cause for concern, if he didn't have plenty already.

"I think the performances from Liverpool this season are a big worry for the manager," Carragher said. "I've said before, he's (Slot) got to do something, change something. He's tried everything. In lots of different ways, but nothing seems to be able to work. At no stage in this season have I felt that Liverpool were in control of a football match.

"It's either end-to-end basketball, so he wanted to stop that and change that, so it just becomes slow, boring and predictable. It's not all about the manager, but as we know, managers carry the can."

Even if the Reds fail to win a trophy this season - as I fully expect to be the case - Slot can potentially prolong his project by securing Champions League qualification for next season via a league position that could be as low as fifth. But even that looks to be in the balance.

Liverpool can start by beating a Tottenham side on Sunday that is tumbling from one crisis to the next. Anything other than a victory over the relegation-bothering Europa League holders can rightfully be considered a catastrophic failure.

Slot must show that he is up for the fight between now and the end of the season, but the big question is, are his players?

If he can't get a tune out of such an expensively assembled squad, then the eventual outcome is inevitable.