Liverpool’s 2025-26 season hasn’t gone to plan, and seeing head coach Arne Slot look for answers in another defeat has become all too common this season—as has a tendency by the manager to complain that opponents simply aren’t giving his side space to play this season. Which may be true, but it’s really nothing new.
Deep blocks and finding ways to unpack structured defences have been a common conundrum down the years, for Liverpool and also any other top club, really. Which makes it eyebrow-raising
that we’re into March now and Slot’s Reds still appear to have no solutions when it comes to breaking down stubborn opponents.
According to former Red Greame Souness, at least, every Liverpool manager that has become before him has had to try to face similar problems, and the first step to overcoming them is to embrace the struggle. To know that this is what you are going to face if you’re at a club like Liverpool and to embrace the battle of it.
“Teams are not saying to Liverpool let’s give them a nice game of football and play the way they want us to,” Souness told TalkSport this week. “They’ve come up with obstacles but it’s not new. When I was at Liverpool, people sat deep. Did they try to play football against us? No, they would launch everything into the box.
“They would put a few of us on our backsides to see if we really fancied it. If you play for Liverpool that is the price on the ticket. You’re going to be confronted by aggression and you’re gonna be confronted by people wasting time. You’re gonna be confronted by people launching into the box. Deal with it, embrace it.”
All of which hits on a point that’s been frustrating for fans this season regarding the head coach’s struggles so far to find answers. It would be nice, perhaps, if opponents regularly came to Anfield in a naive mood and gave the Reds space. Complaining about them not doing that, though, comes across as naive on Slot’s part.
Despite that, Souness isn’t willing to call for Slot’s outster, insisting he “won’t answer that.” His advice, though, would be to embrace the battles and respond to opponents with a similar level of determination and aggression—something that was part of this side’s identity back when they were known as mentality monsters.
“They’re not aggressive when they don’t have the ball,” Souness said of the approach this season. “When you close down you have to do it collectively. That’s a big problem for them. But they have to stick together and it wouldn’t be beyond them to win the Champions League—they’ve still got 90 minutes of greatness in them.”
