Liverpool have failed to live up to expectation throughout the 2025-26 season, with last season’s Premier League title winners given a £450M transfer market glow up last summer and expected to be in the title mix but instead now on the fringes of Champions League qualification with play best described as dull, uninspired, ineffective.
Everyone agrees is isn’t good. That this side lacks a tactical identity. That these former mentality monsters are prone to late-game collapses and are regularly outworked
by their opponents. And most agree this situation has roots that reach back into last season. One thing people don’t quite agree on is where to mark the starting point.
A popular one for many, though, is the 2025 League Cup final. There, a Liverpool side that had flown through the autumn and was widely considered to be both the best team in England and Europe on the strength of that were outworked by a Newcastle group that ran further, fought harder, and left as deserved 2-1 League Cup winners.
Before that, there had been other stumbles, with an early January 2025 stretch that saw Arne Slot’s Reds draw with Manchester United and Nottingham Forest in the Premier League around a first leg League Cup semi defeat to Tottenham—though they would later fight back to win the tie in leg two—much cited as a start to their decline.
Most, though, at the time wrote it off as an understandable dip for a side that had all but won the league. Most expected when the games mattered they would click into gear. On March 11th they faced Paris Saint-Germain at Anfield in the second leg of their Round of 16 Champions League tie. Liverpool lost. PSG were the better side.
In their next match, they headed to Wembley to face Newcastle United in the final of the League Cup on the 16th of March. Liverpool lost. Newcastle were by far the better side. Since then, such underwhelming performances have become the norm. Games in which Liverpool impose themselves on their opponents are now the exception.
If one is inclined to trace the roots of Liverpool’s current problems—or at least the on pitch manifestations of said problems—back to the start of January, 2025, it’s been nearly 15 months of heading in the wrong direction. If one is inclined to pick the week where they were beaten by PSG and Newcastle, it’s now been a full calendar year.
Happy anniversary.
