With Liverpool spending big last summer only to find their Premier League title defence over by October, the later stages of the 2025-26 campaign have turned into something of a post-mortem as fans and pundits cast about for answers. Nobody around the club wants to see a repeat next season, but the question is how to fix it.
Few are better placed to offer insight into the situation and problems than former Liverpool star Markus Babbel. Babbel was a mainstay right back for 2000-01’s cup treble winning
side, playing 60 games and scoring six goals and eight assists after joining from Bayern Munich, where he was key to winning three Bundesliga titles.
That Liverpool side weren’t always favourites, but led by legends like Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher, they always had outstanding leadership. It’s that which Babbel identifies as one of the biggest issues for the current group, with last summer’s changes leaving only captain Virgil van Dijk to provide on-pitch leadership for a struggling side.
Babbel also sees a squad that was perhaps left too thin by last summer’s transfer business, where the headline signings were certainly exciting but departures left a squad too thin to compete over a long and gruelling season for a team expected to play two games a week almost every week.
“For me, leadership is not if everything is going well,” Babbel exclusively told The Liverpool Offside when asked what this group lacks compared to the teams he played in for BetWright’s Premier League Betting. “Leadership shows when a team is struggling, if players are struggling. Then you need leadership, you know. Carra was the perfect person for it because he was a leader. Stevie G, he was a leader.
“They are legends, you know. They are talented, they have mentality, they know how Liverpool works. So they would help Liverpool and any other team as well because there were outstanding top class players and top class players can play everywhere and especially this season, this squad is not big enough.
“So if you had more of these kind of players on the bench or on the pitch you would not be struggling so much like Liverpool this season. These two guys, they were there if you were struggling, and this what leadership is. If things are going well I can be a leader, you can be a leader, everyone can be a leader—but especially in difficult periods this is why I say I hope that Van Dijk will stay because he’s a leader.
“He was there if the team was struggling, but he was the only one. In periods like this, you need guys who can say, hey, come on boys this is not good enough. We play for Liverpool, we have to bring more. We have to do it in training more. We have to outside the pitch do more. That was not Mo Salah. That was not other players. This is so important when it’s not going the right way.”
That lack of on-pitch leadership beyond Van Dijk has been especially telling in difficult moments in matches and when defensive breakdowns have led to goals against. In the past, Liverpool were always a side that seemed built to withstand setbacks. In the present, Liverpool are a side that crumble when they suffer a blow.
Too often, too, it’s poor defensive structure and individual errors leading to those breakdowns, and then those individual bad moments lead to the entire side breaking down. It has been, put simply, too easy to score against the Reds this season, even in games where they have been playing well—and when opponents do score, this side then struggles to pick themselves up from it.
“This is the issue in so many games this season for Liverpool,” Babbel said of this side’s ability to throw away strong performances by making silly errors and falling apart. “I can’t remember that it was ever so easy to score goals against Liverpool. This is unbelievable, that the team isn’t ready to work hard enough off the ball.
“Even [on Sunday], the goal from Everton is too easy—this is not Liverpool. If you if you lose a header, okay, I can accept it. If someone shoots from 25 metres in the top corner, okay. But so many goals they’ve conceded it was so easy. Then it’s a problem for Van Dijk, because you’re the leader but your teammates are making stupid mistakes.
“Then you are angry and you’re not focussed on your own game. He’s alone, you know, and this is what Liverpool have to look for, to identify guys who are there if you are struggling and you have to push. You need players who will push [the team], and then you will see a different Liverpool next season.”
Some of the problems are down to players and individual errors, and there does seem a clear lack of leadership on the pitch. But at its root, it all also ties back to what the players are being asked to do and what they’re being coached on in training, though those issues are far harder to diagnose when you’re a fan or ex-player and don’t see what goes on in training.
“You see standard situations where other teams score many, many goals,” Babbel added of what appear to be deeper structural issues. “So while we’re not scoring enough goals, we’ve also conceded too many goals against. And this is the challenge. It’s about do I want to win this challenge and why we don’t have this attitude? Why we are not defending well?
“We all want to have the ball, we all want to play forward. It looks good, but if we lose the ball, what happens then? The reaction if we lose the ball this season, Liverpool is awful. That’s what you said, you know, they look good, they dominate the opposition, but then with two or three transitions you lose the game.
“So why is the rest defence not good? All these things, once the season is finished you have to analyze and make the right decisions and even maybe one of the coaches has to go, maybe—but I’m not in training, you know? But this is the most important thing. These are all top guys. We have to work harder next season.”
