Liverpool clinches Premier League title and makes a statement about what really matters in modern soccer

English

Gazeta Express

28/04/2025 19:21

When Jürgen Klopp left Liverpool last spring, the Premier League was drifting into a new era. Just as one esteemed coach was departing the league he’d helped define, a fresh one, Mikel Arteta, was rising. And so, it seemed, Arsenal and Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City seemed poised to rule the Prem for the foreseeable future. They’d finished No. 1 and 2 in each of the previous two seasons. They entered 2024-25 as joint favorites, in part because all four of their equally rich rivals were led by unproven managers.

Over the past eight months, Liverpool has emphatically refuted that logic.

The Reds romped to the top of the table, and on Sunday, with a 5-1 thrashing of Tottenham, clinched their second Premier League title, because, from August through April, they had the best — and healthiest — squad.

They also won the league, of course, because Arne Slot managed his squad wonderfully. The first-year coach, who’d spent his entire career in the Netherlands, instantly adapted to England. He empowered Mohamed Salah and maximized Ryan Gravenberch and trusted Trent Alexander-Arnold, warts and faults and all.

But he did not reinvent Liverpool, as many expected. He recognized, instead, that soccer can still be a player-driven sport. And he allowed his players to drive him to a trophy.

The lesson of Liverpool’s Premier League title

He did not do what so many modern managers try to do, and what the media often wants them to do: impose their beliefs and personality on their new clubs. When Erik Ten Hag arrived at Manchester United and Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham, for example, both seemed to follow the Guardiola-Arteta-Klopp playbook. They brought semi-revolutionary ideas. They tried to establish their authority and put their stamp on a “project.” This, of course, is what their clubs were paying them (handsomely) to do.

And this, today, is what fans demand from their coach: a dominant figure who overhauls tactics and sets culture, who drives the entire narrative of his team. This is what Guardiola did; this is how Klopp challenged him; this, the thinking goes, is how Arteta dragged Arsenal up out of a decade-long rut. Each transformed his team, whether with positional play or “heavy-metal football” — with something distinct. This became the preferred route to the Premier League’s summit.

But it is not the only route.

That is the lesson of Liverpool’s 2024-25 triumph.

Slot’s team is different than Klopp’s were, but not in any flashy, easily definable way.

It was the best because it rolled out the best players, and Slot’s brilliance was in simply allowing that to be the story.

He is intelligent and detail-oriented. His tactics helped Liverpool win games on the margins. His lineup rotation and substitutions kept key players fit and fresh. To be very clear: He had an active hand in this title.

But it was his passive approach that paved the way for Liverpool’s statement: Players (still) win soccer games.

How Liverpool ran away with the league

Slot and the club recognized the squad it had built was perfectly capable of contending. He did not arrive with a wish list and beg, adamantly, that Liverpool sporting director Richard Hughes go out and sign five expensive stars. Instead, the club signed just one player — Federico Chiesa, who has not started a Premier League game all season. The 19 players who have started at least once were all at Liverpool last year.

Slot simply worked with them, and they delivered. Salah, with less defensive responsibility and more attacking freedom than he had under Klopp, put together perhaps his best season. Virgil van Dijk cemented himself as the league’s best defender. As City aged (and Rodri tore his ACL) and as Arsenal starved for creativity, Liverpool’s Gravenberch, Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai grew into the most complete and balanced midfield trio in the league.

Slot never suppressed any of them. He stuck with Alexander-Arnold despite his defensive frailties, and with Luis Díaz despite his inconsistency. The end result is a title secured with four games to spare.

Critics will argue it’s a title won almost by default. Arsenal lost all its strikers. City lost its legs, its stars and its control. Neither will top 80 points. Their slumps allowed Liverpool to waltz into a double-digit lead that nobody ever threatened to erase. The Reds, meanwhile, were commanding at times but never truly rampant. Their goal differential, currently +48, could ultimately be the lowest achieved by a Premier League title winner since Leicester City’s +32 in 2015-16.

But they are deserving champions, and instructive ones. Soccer, they reminded us, doesn’t need to be about the person on the touchline. It is, at the end of the day, about the people who score goals and prevent them and create them.