How Liverpool said goodbye to a club legend and somehow won the Premier League

The signs were ominous. One by one, the executives responsible for Liverpool's only Premier League title in 2020 were leaving the club. They weren't leaving for better jobs, or even for other jobs at all. They were just getting out.

"All good things must come to an end," sporting director Michael Edwards said in November 2021, announcing his intention to resign. Edwards -- who had signed Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk, Alisson, and most of the rest of that championship side -- was the first. Ian Graham, the director of research whose proprietary algorithms not only pushed Edwards to sign those players but had identified Jürgen Klopp as Liverpool's ideal manager, followed him a year later.

By then, Mike Gordon, the Fenway Sports Group (FSG) president and minority shareholder who had been overseeing operations of the club for a decade, had started stepping back from his responsibilities. Fenway, which had bought the club out of bankruptcy court in 2010 and restored its stature as an international force, admitted it was considering selling out entirely. Finally, in January of 2024, Klopp himself announced he'd finish the season and move on.

Liverpool's cupboard was hardly bare. In March, two months after Klopp's announcement, the club sat atop the Premier League table, on track to give him a magical farewell. "He didn't decide to leave a club that was in, like, sixth of seventh place and had reached the end of their cycle," said Nedum Onuoha, the former Premier League center back who is now an ESPN analyst. "They still had some time left."

By May, though, Liverpool had faded to third, with only a Carabao Cup to serve as Klopp's valedictory. Salah, van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold would enter the last season of their contracts that August with no extensions in sight, while recent signings such as Ryan Gravenberch, Cody Gakpo and Darwin Núñez had not met expectations.

Over the previous six seasons, Liverpool had enjoyed its best run since the creation of the Premier League, finishing third twice, second twice, and winning it once. Now that run of achievement seemed to be sputtering to a close. An official club video was produced to honor all that Klopp had accomplished; it felt like a wake.

Arne Slot, who was hired in May as Klopp's successor, had never managed -- or even played -- outside the Netherlands. He was introduced only after Xabi Alonso, the former Liverpool standout who had led Bayer Leverkusen to their first Bundesliga title, decided to stay in Germany. Was Slot anything more than a consolation prize?

"If you work in this league, everyone gets better every season," Slot said in July, explaining the challenge he faced.

But Liverpool hadn't improved the side that had finished last season nine points behind Manchester City. The new sporting director, Richard Hughes, targeted only one major potential signing over the summer, defensive midfielder Martín Zubimendi -- and didn't even get him. Zubimendi refused to leave Real Sociedad.

Around football, many analysts chose Arsenal to finally push past Manchester City and win the league. The rest, with only a few exceptions, predicted a fifth consecutive title for City. Liverpool had spent more time than any other club atop the Premier League last season, but with Klopp gone and no additions to the squad, they were barely in the conversation.

Somehow, they are now Premier League champions, with little suspense after winning 22 of their first 30 games. No Alonso? No Zubimendi? Klopp's departure? Slot's inexperience? None of that mattered, it turned out.

In recent weeks, too, Salah and Van Dijk signed extensions that will keep them in Merseyside as a core of suddenly outstanding young players matures around them. (Alexander-Arnold is leaving for Real Madrid, but replacements at right back already have been targeted.)

From the end of one historic era, Liverpool have segued directly into the start of another, to the surprise of almost everyone. How did that happen?

Replacing iconic managers is a perilous business, something no team had successfully done in the Premier League era.

Arsenal tried when Arsene Wenger retired in 2018 after 22 seasons and three Premier League titles. Since then, though, they've won only a single FA Cup, in 2020. Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down at Manchester United in 2013; more than a decade later, after 10 other coaches have taken charge of the team, United still haven't found a satisfactory successor. (This season, they've already clinched their worst finish of the Premier League era and could end as low as 17th, the last place above relegation.)

Mauricio Pochettino didn't get a trophy at Tottenham Hotspur, but he did lead them to a Champions League final and their best run of domestic finishes since the early 1960s. But once José Mourinho replaced him in November of 2019, the club reverted to its previous irrelevance, its state of dilapidation well-chronicled (despite winning this season's Europa League, Spurs will finish in the Premier League's bottom five).

Tellingly, though, Liverpool were doing more than replacing a manager. Despite continuing to be competitive in the years after 2020, the club had lost its way. Without returning to the methodology inherent in their corporate DNA, Liverpool wouldn't be champions today.

In the club's first decade under FSG, which also owns baseball's Boston Red Sox and hockey's Pittsburgh Penguins, its actionable advantage was a willingness to let information be its guide. It didn't matter what principal owner John Henry personally wanted, or Gordon or Edwards, or even Klopp. How Liverpool proceeded -- in terms of what players to buy, what strategy to pursue, even the way to approach each game -- was heavily dependent on the information generated by Graham's research team on one side of the room at what was then the Melwood training facility, coupled with Dave Fallows' scouting staff on the other. Together they provided Edwards with a steady stream of data, in multiple forms.

Winning validated that approach; over time, though, competing with the world's top clubs became more difficult. After conquering the Champions League and the Premier League in successive seasons, Klopp wanted to wield the influence of the Wengers and Fergusons who had come before -- influence that came at the expense of Edwards, Graham and the others in the back room. "When you have success, it's hard to deny the man most responsible for it the power to make those decisions," says a former club executive. "But people got confused. Why were we moving away from our model?"

Fenway had pioneered the use of advanced data analysis in the Premier League, going as far as hiring a particle physicist with no experience in -- and little understanding of -- elite football to study movement patterns on the field. They had identified Klopp as their ideal manager, then targeted players suited to implement his fluid, wing-prioritized system. In short, they had been smarter than everyone else. Now, though, the organization of their football staff was looking increasingly like that of most other trophy-winning clubs, with a powerful manager at the top.

Klopp's departure created an opportunity. Edwards, whose increasingly distant relationship with the former manager had precipitated his departure, was enticed to return as chief executive of football operations, essentially Gordon's old position with a new title. "But what you get extra from 'Eddie,'" Graham says now, using Edwards' nickname, "is that he's got the firsthand football experience that Mike didn't have."

Edwards understood the difficulties inherent in replacing iconic managers, and the way he intended to avoid them was to undertake an international football manhunt on an unprecedented scale. The more information he had on each candidate, he felt, the less likely he was to pick the wrong one. "He isn't happy until he knows everything," is how Graham describes Edwards. "You can never get to 100%, of course. But I think what sets him apart is he'll spend a lot of time and effort trying to get to 90%."

play

1:48

Were Liverpool really good, or was the Premier League really bad?

Mark Ogden and James Olley discuss the critics of Liverpool's Premier League title win in Arne Slot's first season as manager.

As his sporting director, Edwards hired Bournemouth's Hughes, with whom he had worked at Portsmouth years before. The previous year, Hughes had plucked Andoni Iraola from Rayo Vallecano, a tiny club in LaLiga. Iraola turned out to be an uncannily good fit for Bournemouth, so Edwards tasked him to work with Will Spearman, the former physicist who had stepped into Graham's position as head of research, to do the same for Liverpool.

Edwards and Hughes considered all the usual suspects, and plenty of unusual ones. Sporting CP's Ruben Amorim, now at Manchester United, was a favored candidate until the data revealed that his style of play that relied heavily on wing backs was poorly suited for the team Klopp had constructed, which didn't really have any of them. Inter Milan's Simone Inzaghi performed well across the various metrics, but he didn't speak English. Alonso took himself out of contention early, but he has only been a first-team manager for a couple of years, which wouldn't have been ideal.

Slot was. He built the Feyenoord teams that won a league and a cup along the same lines as Klopp's Liverpool, though he deployed his weapons differently. He had a history of overperforming the available resources, which seemed propitious for the club whose wage bill is only England's fifth largest. And he had a knack for developing young talent, which Liverpool will need as it completes its generational turn.

Liverpool executives insist that Slot was anything but a consolation prize. "He is the guy we wanted," one said. But rather than naming him manager, which Klopp had been, and Brendan Rodgers before him, and Rafa Benítez and Bob Paisley and all the rest before that, his title was head coach.

Slot would be responsible for the first-team's strategy, tactics and philosophical approach. Fenway would take care of the rest.

play

2:23

Onuoha: Don't downplay Liverpool's title win with 'weak league' talk

Nedum Onuoha praises Liverpool as "very deserving" Premier League champions after securing the title vs. Spurs.

In February, Liverpool traveled to Manchester City and beat the defending champions 2-0 in a statement game that served to make their coronation as Premier League champions all but inevitable. The night before, the players slept not at a Manchester hotel, but at home in their own beds. They did the same before the match at Anfield against Spurs that same month, overturning a 1-0 first-leg deficit and putting them into the Carabao Cup final. And before the title-clinching game against Spurs -- and every other league home match all season.

Klopp's intense Gegenpress approach had demanded a full commitment. So did his belief that the more time a team spent together, the better they would play. So before every home game, the entire team would spend the night together at a Liverpool hotel. (In recent years, it was the Titanic, just off the waterfront.)

That practice is widespread across the Premier League. Beyond adding to team unity, benefits include reducing the differences between games at Anfield and elsewhere and limiting exposure to distractions from friends and family members. The bonding served a young Liverpool team well during Klopp's first few seasons.

But after nearly a decade, Slot's arrival was an opportunity for the squad to catch a breath. "We were very fortunate that, for eight or nine years, we had the same manager, the same coaches, the same way of working," says left back Andy Robertson, one of the squad's most senior players. "But we enjoyed the new manager and new staff coming in and doing things differently. Giving it a bit of a freshen up."

Slot is happy enough to facilitate family harmony, but as with much of what he does, it's underpinned with analytics. "People tell me, people who have more knowledge than me about it, that you always sleep better in your own bed," he says. "And sleep is a very important part of getting the best possible performance."

Slot presents as an old-fashioned football coach, at home in a boot room or with a whistle around his neck. These days, though, the decisions he makes may be as information-driven as those of any Premier League manager -- any north of Brentford, at least. Since his family remains in the Netherlands, he has little to do each night but sift through data and construct a game plan. "We get a lot more information on the opponent now," says Gakpo. "How they play. And where we can hurt them."

At AZ Alkmaar and Feyenoord, Slot's football was mathematical in its precision. He preached patience: exploiting opportunities, grabbing a lead, then putting a game on ice. The beauty of such a style was not always apparent to the terraces, but it was in the changing rooms. (When Slot's name surfaced as Klopp's replacement, some of their Liverpool teammates asked Gravenberch and Gakpo, who had played against his teams in the Dutch Eredivisie, what to expect. Gravenberch gushed. "They asked us what he was like," he says, "and we said to them, 'You'll like him. He really wants to play football.")

But Slot knew that transitioning away from Klopp's more dramatic "heavy metal" approach would be a process. "And it is a process still," Gakpo stresses. "We are reminded of that every day when we train. On the pitch, the style of play and ball possession is quite different. So is the approach of the games off of it. How the manager wants us to think about the opponent, what he shows us about the opponent: that's different."

Maybe the most significant alteration is Slot's desire to run Liverpool's attack from the back line through the central midfield. "We want to kill the opponent with passes," Gravenberch says. "We want to keep the ball as long as possible in the middle. We want to draw them in. Only then do we play to the wing."

A remarkable talent with an uncanny ability to thread balls through a cluster of defenders, Gravenberch had been especially frustrated under Klopp. He was signed away from Ajax by Bayern Munich -- and then, for nearly $50 million in September of 2023, from Bayern by Liverpool. But he got lost playing box-to-box in Klopp's system.

Slot knew that his football would play to Gravenberch's strengths, which include both receiving the ball and finding creative ways to move it onward. When Liverpool failed to land Zubimendi, Slot already had his solution at the training ground. "I'm the same guy I was," Gravenberch said. "The difference is how we play. And my confidence. When you play good games, the confidence comes back. That's what has happened to me."

Even with all his pregame calculations, Slot empowers players to make decisions on the fly. "They're able to read the situations and play to meet them," Onuoha says. "So somebody like Gravenberch can one minute be coming short to meet the ball and get it from Van Dijk, and then in another moment Van Dijk might be able to just hit a diagonal ball to Salah if that opportunity presents itself."

Salah, especially, thrives in a system that melds structure to fluidity. One of the most efficient finishers in English football history, he is enjoying perhaps his finest season. He has been involved in nearly three-quarters of Liverpool's league goals this season, an astonishing percentage -- with 28 goals, five more than second-place Alexander Isak, and 18 assists, seven more than Jacob Murphy -- winning the Player of the Year award for a third time and being essential to the title push.

In the Premier League clincher against Spurs, Salah put a 3-1 game out of reach. It happened after Dominik Szoboszlai sprinted through the middle of the defense with the ball, keeping it in the center of the pitch as long as possible. As he approached the penalty area, he laid it off to Salah on the right wing. Salah left-footed it just inside the near post, completing a prototypical goal for Slot's Liverpool and ending any remaining drama.

For the second time, Liverpool were Premier League champions.

play

1:28

Why Slot the coach would never pick Slot the player

Arne Slot's former teammates and coaches explain how Slot the player was different from Slot the coach.

Winning a title in a manager's first try is a formidable achievement. But for much of the season, Liverpool were chasing history.

As of February, they were still alive in all four competitions. Then, in short order, they were put out of the FA Cup through a shocking defeat at Championship tail-ender Plymouth Argyle, and then the Carabao Cup by dropping the final to Newcastle. Soon after, their Champions League aspirations ended when Paris Saint-Germain rallied from a first-leg deficit to trounce the Reds at Anfield.

The Premier League title will be celebrated for months in Merseyside and beyond, not least because their first one happened under the shadow of COVID-19. Still, the feeling lingers that there could have been more.

Because of that, perhaps, Liverpool may not even be favored to repeat when the new season begins in August. Yes, Salah and Van Dijk are returning, and one major transfer, Valencia's Georgian keeper Giorgi Mamardashvili, already has been signed. But the way that Liverpool sputtered to the finish -- losing only one match from August to December but six more during the new year -- has taken some of the glitter off their achievement.

Still, a plan is in place. The transfer window following a manager's first season is a particularly important one, and the retooled research department under Spearman will play a major role. "With Klopp leaving, they can say now, 'This is how we do things at Liverpool,'" Onuoha says. "Not how one particular manager wants to do it, but the way that Liverpool does it."

And that, as it turns out, is the change that mattered most. Slot's hiring was a masterstroke, but it was a byproduct of the solution to the problem, not the solution itself. Structuring the decision-making process around information was how Fenway's Liverpool constructed their first Premier League champion, and how they retooled to create this one. The next one, they strongly believe, will come in the same way.