Arne Slot Faces Crucial Test at Anfield Amidst Season Struggles

Arne Slot will walk out at Anfield on Sunday with the season bruising his reputation and testing his resolve. The visit of Brentford is not a title coronation, not a lap of honour, but a full stop at the end of a difficult second chapter.

Twelve months ago the same fixture felt like a festival. Liverpool, under their new Dutch coach, had just claimed only the club’s second Premier League crown. The stadium shook with joy, champagne flew, and Slot – the fresh face from Rotterdam – grabbed the microphone and bellowed Jurgen Klopp’s song back at the supporters who had already taken him in as one of their own.

This time the backdrop is very different. Fifth place. No trophies. A campaign that sagged in the middle and never quite recovered.

From De Kuip to the Kop

Slot’s journey to this point has been relentless. Two years ago he was being serenaded at De Kuip, Feyenoord supporters rising to their feet to applaud the coach who had made them champions of the Eredivisie and then followed that with a second-place finish.

They knew he was leaving. They knew where he was going. That did not blunt the emotion.

After Feyenoord’s final match of the 2023/24 season, Slot walked the pitch slowly, applauding every corner of the stadium as the fans roared him back. Then came the song. ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ rolled down from the stands, the anthem that binds Rotterdam and Liverpool, and suddenly the farewell felt like a handover.

By the time he arrived on Merseyside as Klopp’s successor, Slot already knew the words. He already understood the weight of that chorus. It may have helped when he stepped into the furnace of his first Anfield game and made it look easy, guiding Liverpool to the title in his debut season in England.

The transition looked seamless. It wasn’t. It never is. But the results masked the strain.

Second season, sharper edges

This year stripped away the gloss. Slot’s second campaign has carried all the hallmarks of the so‑called “second season syndrome”: expectations rising, margins shrinking, patience thinning.

Liverpool’s football lost its edge across a grim Autumn run when six defeats in seven games shredded confidence and invited questions. The pressure on the 47-year-old intensified with every setback. Some inside and outside the club doubted he would even reach this final weekend in charge.

He has. And crucially, the hierarchy are standing with him. There is no whisper of a reset, no appetite for another upheaval. Slot remains the project, the man trusted to turn a bruising year into a staging post rather than a warning sign.

That stance matters. So does what happens in the stands on Sunday.

Anfield’s role in the reset

The Kop has seen enough to recognise a hard season when it lives through one. Legs have looked heavy, ideas occasionally blunt, luck scarce. The crowd can turn on that, or it can lift it.

Feyenoord showed the way. They did not judge Slot on a single year, or even a single table position. They judged him on the body of work, the identity he gave their team, the belief he restored. That is why they sang for him as he left, even after “only” finishing second.

Liverpool’s supporters have always prided themselves on something similar. Sunday offers a chance to prove it again: a gruelling campaign acknowledged, a manager under strain backed, not indulged.

There will be no title parade this time. No drenched microphone, no manager leading the choir in a song that belongs to his predecessor. Yet the mood does not have to be sour. It can be something else: realistic, maybe, but hopeful.

Salah, Slot and a shared farewell

Layered on top of all this is another goodbye, one that cuts even deeper. Mohamed Salah is expected to play his final game for Liverpool. The “Egyptian King” has already made his feelings on Slot clear, publicly backing the manager and his direction.

When a figure of Salah’s stature speaks, it carries weight. He has earned that right. His view of Slot will not decide the Dutchman’s fate, but it does colour the atmosphere around him. If a modern legend is prepared to stand beside the coach, many in the stands will take note.

Anfield knows how to say farewell to its greats. The club owes Salah a send-off befitting his years of goals and glory. That emotion can sit alongside something else: a quieter, less dramatic show of faith in the man who must now build a team without him.

On Sunday, the stadium can do both. It can raise one of its greatest modern players onto its shoulders, and at the same time grant its manager the space and backing to start again.

Slot once walked around De Kuip to the sound of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, a departing hero heading for a new world. Now he stands in that world, battle-scarred but still in place, waiting to hear whether Anfield will answer with the same conviction.

The song will ring out. The question is what comes after the final note next season.