7 months ago
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Photo by Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images
Third place and silverware might be a successful season for the Reds by most measures, but it’s hard to take when for a time everyone believed a storybook ending was possible.
If you’d played out the season in reverse, nobody would be upset. Coming off the collapse of the old core that marked 2022-23 and with a wholly rebuilt midfield, a stumbling start followed by the new pieces starting to click into place and a strong push to finish the season third while winning silverware would have been success.
It would have been a very, very good season. It would have been a 2023-24 that, if you’d offered it to Liverpool fans at the start of it all, most would have taken. So when people say to step back, to take in the whole picture, to judge this side within the context of it being the start of a new Liverpool group rather than the finished product, they aren’t entirely wrong.
While we’re being rational and reasonable, it’s also not wrong to note that in the current footballing paradigm, the fans of 19 other Premier League sides should probably start every season not expecting to win much of anything. In the past, before the rise of Manchester City as a sportswashing front for a human rights abusing petrostate, that number might have been 14 or 15 or 16.
Now it’s 19, which isn’t really all that much different except that now, rationally, the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool and Chelsea and Manchester United and Tottenham are where the West Hams and Aston Villas were a decade ago: in amongst the best of the rest but not favourites to win much of anything at all.
It’s the same reality for every German club that isn’t Bayern Munich—which makes Bayer Leverkusen’s wild run this season all the more special and, at the same time, sad. Because it quite likely will end up a once in a lifetime experience for their fans. And because no matter what’s happened this season, the fans of every other German club, rationally, won’t expect to beat Bayern next season.
It’s the same Spain, just with Real Madrid and Barcelona on top while Atletico Madrid nip at their heels—something perhaps a little closer to the Premier League a decade ago. And any hint of competitiveness to France’s Ligue 1 is long gone. All of which leaves Italy as the only top league, followed by Portugal and the Netherlands in the next group, with something of a claim to competitiveness.
Yet at the same time it’s quite clearly, obviously wrong—and can come across as little more than a transparent coping mechanism—to try and wave away disappointment at Liverpool’s current collapse with reason and rationality. Because sport, and football no less than any other, isn’t about logic and rationality.
Nobody goes to a season’s worth of away days or wakes up at 4AM or finds ways to cut off work to watch eleven men kick a ball around out of logic and rationality and the hope that over the course of ten months they do okay and meet expectations. Especially not when a run of results does go the right way and your club, no matter where it stands in the pecking order, looks like it’s primed to beat out those rational and reasonable benchmarks.
Once that happens, you start to dream. Expectations, no matter where they might have realistically been set at the start of the year, get ticked up a level or two. The momentum builds and with it the belief that more than meeting expectations might be possible. And when that gets ripped away, as it inevitably will be for most, it hurts. To take on an air of superior rationality about that and pretend it doesn’t or shouldn’t feels unfair, in a sporting fandom context.
There’s also in Liverpool’s particular case the small matter of one Jürgen Norbert Klopp, who announced three months ago now that he would be departing Liverpool at the end of the season. That announcement, if anything, seemed to galvanize the team, with fringe players and inexperienced youth players stepping up and delivering as first team stars suffered injuries and the fixtures piled up.
That Liverpool side won the League Cup, shouldered its way fully into the Premier League title race—for a time even established themselves as favourites in said title race—and were considered consensus Europa League favourites. There was talk of Liverpool 2.0 before his announcement given how quickly the new pieces had fit into place in the autumn, but this was something more than that.
Then it all fell apart. But not because of the things one might expect, with injuries stretching the squad too thin. Rather it all fell apart because the established stars returning from injury couldn’t deliver to their usual standard.
It fell apart because a defence anchored by Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konaté that had seemed impenetrable started to show cracks. It fell apart because the attack, all veteran and established players, stopped scoring from open play. It fell apart because the team looked increasingly exhausted at a time when everyone expected the returning established stars to boost their chances.
Much of the discontent will be focused on those attackers. Through a torrid month of April, all who weren’t the once and once again injured Diogo Jota forgot how to score from open play. The finishing rates of Darwin Nuñez and Luis Diaz, already a question mark for many, got precipitously worse. Meanwhile, Mohamed Salah, the Reds’ highest-paid player and one of the club’s all time great attackers, had his worst sustained run in a Liverpool shirt.
Ending with third place and silverware will mean that Liverpool might have got, by rather roundabout way, to just about where they wanted to and thought they should be at the start of the season. But this was an exceptionally unlikely route to there, and just about the most painful way that such an objectively successful season could have been achieved.
To fall apart over the final ten games of Jürgen Klopp’s tenure. To be knocked out of the FA Cup and Europa League by sides that, on paper, Liverpool were clear favourites to beat going in. To watch fringe and youth players power the Reds to the League Cup and into contention for the unlikeliest of storybook quadruples only to then watch the stars return and everything unravel.
In a year or ten, this collapse won’t be what anyone remembers of the Klopp era. In a year or ten, people will talk instead about Dortmund and Barcelona. They’ll remember winning the Champions League in Madrid and ending three decades of futility in the league. They’ll remember watching an all time great Liverpool side with greatest attacking trio in the club’s history at one end of the pitch and arguably their greatest ever goalkeeper at the other.
This isn’t ten years from now, though. Right now, all the reason and rationality in the world can’t help but look a transparent coping mechanism for what has suddenly become a sad and deflating end to the Jürgen Klopp era. When you’ve come to believe that, just maybe, a dream storybook ending might be possible, it hurts when what you get instead is a weeks-long funeral procession.
