Liverpool's Season Ends with Warning from Salah and Reflection
The Kop tried to sing away the dread. “Every little thing is gonna be alright,” rolled around Anfield as the final whistle blew on Liverpool’s 2025/26 season. It felt less like a promise, more like a plea.
This was not a lap of honour. It was a wake.
Two pillars of the club’s modern renaissance have already walked out of the door. More are expected to follow. The team that, over the last nine years, hoovered up every major trophy available is being dismantled piece by piece. Half the squad Arne Slot inherited just two summers ago has gone. The rest looks like it’s standing in a departure lounge.
On the pitch, Liverpool closed the season with a 1-1 draw against Brentford. The point secured Champions League football. It did nothing to calm the anxiety.
Fourteen games across all competitions to finish the campaign. Just four wins. No victories in the final four league matches. Sixty points, fifth place, and a lingering sense of something unravelling.
Call it what it is: this season has been a failure.
Numbers That Tell An Uncomfortable Truth
Sixty points and a Champions League spot sounds respectable until you scratch the surface. Last season, that total would have left Liverpool ninth, miles from Europe. The year before, seventh and out of the Champions League. Three seasons back, ninth again.
This 60-point haul is the lowest total to secure Champions League qualification since 2003/04, the year Gerard Houllier’s reign ended with a polite handshake and a photo call on the Anfield turf. Back then, the club knew it needed to reset.
The parallels are hard to ignore for those who remember the early 1990s. Graeme Souness ripped through Kenny Dalglish’s ageing, title-winning squad at speed. The trophies stopped. Mediocrity moved in. Now, with key figures leaving and standards slipping, the fear is that Liverpool are stepping back into that shadow.
Mo Salah clearly feels it. As his extraordinary nine-year spell came to a close, he chose not to bite his tongue. He has spoken openly about his concerns, about standards, about direction. His words have carried more weight than any of Slot’s post-match explanations.
Liverpool finished this league season with just 17 wins, their lowest win percentage in a decade. That’s not transition. That’s regression.
Slot On The Bench, Salah In The Middle
As the players walked the post-match lap of appreciation, Slot stayed rooted to the bench. Arms folded. Expression hard to read. Perhaps he was lost in thought, contemplating the scale of the rebuild. Maybe it was a simple misjudgment of the moment.
Whatever the reason, supporters noticed. This is a fanbase that lives on connection, on the idea that players and manager walk “through a storm” with them, not apart from them. The lap is a ritual of mutual thanks. The head coach wasn’t part of it.
Salah, by contrast, went straight to the heart of what Liverpool demands. Speaking to Sky Sports, he said: “They [the fans] don’t care that much about the result as long as you sweat and give your blood here, they’ll love you forever.”
That line cut through the noise. It wasn’t about tactics or xG or fixture congestion. It was about effort, about showing up when the club is hurting. About understanding what Anfield asks of those who wear the shirt.
Liverpool have had to walk through a storm this season, including the trauma of Diogo Jota’s death in pre-season. The club has been shaken. But the expectation remains: you stay together, you fight, you compete. Too often, this team shrank instead.
Injuries, A Small Squad – And A Manager Who Can’t Have It Both Ways
In his final press conference of the campaign, Slot didn’t hesitate when asked to sum up the season in one word: “Injury.”
On one level, he’s right. Liverpool have been hit hard. Key players missed chunks of the year. The starting XI changed constantly. But this is the same coach who, back in October, defended the decision to keep the squad small.
“This is a decision we have made together,” he said then. “I completely believe in this, because if you have 25 [players] it’s very hard to manage your squad.”
You can’t champion a lean group in autumn and then spend the rest of the season lamenting the lack of options, the inability to rotate, and the tired legs that contributed to late goals and limp endings. The Champions League is expanding, the Premier League is relentless. Bigger squads are no luxury now; they’re a necessity.
Slot even admitted the risk. “We don’t have 25 or 26 [players],” he said in October. “So if we end up with two, three or four injuries, 15 or 16 players, where Rio and Trey are two of these 15 or 16, then need to play almost all the minutes and then things can become complicated.”
Complicated is one word for it. Self-inflicted is another.
Trey Nyoni, the 18-year-old midfielder who debuted under Jurgen Klopp at 16, finished the league season with just 21 minutes. Federico Chiesa, marginalised yet again, played 318 league minutes. Wataru Endo managed only 170.
Kieran Morrison, captain and standout for the Under-21s, made the bench 13 times. He was used once, for five minutes in an FA Cup tie at Wolves.
On paper, Liverpool had depth. In reality, Slot barely trusted it. The squad was smaller by choice as much as by circumstance. And that’s before you even reach the baffling decision not to secure a January return for Harvey Elliott, while the bench cried out for quality for months.
Injuries hurt Liverpool. So did the way the season was built around a thin, underused group.
Heavy Defeats, Higher Standards
When the conversation turns to the cups, Slot has been keen to stress context. The FA Cup exit? A 4-0 defeat to eventual winners Manchester City. The Champions League humiliation? A 4-0 loss to PSG, a side that hasn’t lost a two-legged European tie in two seasons.
Those facts are accurate. They don’t make the performances any easier to swallow.
This is a club that has been conditioned to compete for the biggest prizes, not to nod along while explaining away heavy defeats because the opposition went on to lift the trophy. Losing 4-0 in each of those competitions, as part of a run of four defeats in five games, does not align with the standards that Virgil van Dijk, Robertson, Salah and Curtis Jones have all publicly referenced.
Salah’s parting message to his teammates at the AXA Training Centre was blunt: “Being in Liverpool, winning something for Liverpool and winning games is the best thing that could happen to you all.” That isn’t nostalgia. It’s a challenge.
Slot described Champions League qualification as “our lowest base,” then pointed to Chelsea and Tottenham missing out on Europe as evidence of how difficult the landscape is for “big clubs.”
Many supporters will hear something different: a softening of ambition. Liverpool do not measure themselves against who failed. They measure themselves against who won.
Yes, there was a 13-game unbeaten run after the 4-1 home defeat to PSV, a result that felt like the season’s nadir. But even that spell flattered to deceive. Draws with Leeds (twice), Burnley and Fulham. Wins padded by Barnsley in the FA Cup and a West Ham side that would go on to be relegated.
The streak looked good in isolation. It didn’t fix the flaws.
A Summer of Surgery, Not Tweaks
The word around the club is “transition.” Again. Slot has already warned that this summer will bring more change, though he insists it won’t be as “drastic” as last year.
The reality may say otherwise.
His own future is not nailed down, with only a year left on his contract. The same is true of key decision-makers Richard Hughes and Michael Edwards. The men tasked with rebuilding the squad might not be here long enough to see the project through.
On the pitch, the list of potential departures is long and loaded with experience. Salah and Robertson are already heading out. Ibrahima Konate is out of contract. Chiesa and Endo could go. Curtis Jones, with just a year remaining and strong interest from Inter Milan, is widely expected to move on. Juventus want Alisson. Joe Gomez, another with one year left, could be sold. Alexis Mac Allister may be sacrificed if the right offer lands.
Strip that out of any squad and you’re not tinkering. You’re operating.
As it stands, Liverpool are set to start next season with Cody Gakpo as the club’s top scorer in the squad. Behind him? Centre-back Virgil van Dijk. That is not the profile of a side ready to chase titles on multiple fronts.
This is not a minor tune-up. It’s a rebuild that demands clarity, conviction and a manager fully in sync with the supporters. Right now, those elements do not look aligned.
The Kop tried to drown out the doubts with Bob Marley. The song floated into the night, defiant, hopeful, almost stubborn. But as fans filtered out into the streets around Anfield, one thought lingered:
If this is the “lowest base,” how quickly – and how bravely – will Liverpool climb from it?
