Liverpool’s collapse is shocking but also a sign of champions

Chelsea, Leicester and the Reds five years ago suffered big points drops the season after winning the title

In a plot twist no one saw coming the £450m spree seems to have backfired spectacularly

28 Nov 2025 - The Guardian

Harry Paterson

Six defeats in 12 top-flight games is not just a wobble for Liverpool. It’s one of the worst starts ever made by defending Premier League champions. The last team to begin their title defence this badly were Leicester City in 2016-17. They finished 12th that season – where Liverpool are now – with Claudio Ranieri sacked midway through the campaign. The same fate befell José Mourinho at Chelsea in the 2015-16 season. They started with seven defeats in 12 games, a collapse so severe that Mourinho was shown the door a week before Christmas. For Liverpool and Arne Slot, the warning signs could not be clearer.

The transformation from champions to chaos has been stark. Just six months ago, Slot was heralded as a record breaker, the man who had taken on the unenviable task of replacing club legend Jürgen Klopp and done it with apparent ease. Under his guidance, Liverpool clinched the title with four games to spare, an achievement only three other teams have managed. Slot became the third-youngest manager to win the Premier League, the fifth to win it in his first season in England and, most importantly, he brought the title to Anfield for just the second time in 35 years.

Liverpool fans must have thought things could not get any better. But, as soon as the bunting from the trophy parade had been folded away, the club unleashed a record-breaking £450m summer spending spree. Gone were the days of speculating about whether Mario Balotelli or Rickie Lambert would lead the line. Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitiké, Milos Kerkez, Jeremie Frimpong, Giovanni Leoni and Giorgi Mamardashvili came through the door at Anfield and expectations rose. The question was no longer whether they would win a trophy this season but how many. Could they do the Treble? Who could compete with such a potent attack?

Yet, in a plot twist no one saw coming, the £450m shopping spree appears to have backfired spectacularly. Liverpool were expected to break records this season, but no one saw them becoming just the third Premier League champions to lose six of their first 12 games. Their defensive frailties have been brutally exposed: they have conceded two or more goals in seven matches already and have made their worst start at the back in 33 years, conceding 20 goals in 12 league games. Arsenal have conceded six.

To put in perspective just how poor Liverpool have been, their 3-0 home defeat by Nottingham Forest on Saturday – coming after a 3-0 defeat at Manchester City – was the first time they had lost successive league games by three goals since 1965. And their 4-1 thrashing at home to PSV in the Champions League made it the first time in 77 years that they have lost three in succession by three or more. It’s hard to believe this team won their first five league games of the season.

Their new signings have struggled to settle, with the starstudded attack misfiring. Isak and Wirtz cost £241m; neither has scored a goal in the league. Confidence is shattered, points are being dropped where they should be won, they have a negative goal difference and supporters, who spent the summer counting potential trophies, are now counting defeats.

Liverpool’s fall has been spectacular, but it is not without precedent. The history books are littered with title holders who failed to repeat the brilliance of the season before. In fact, nine of the last 15 champions have dropped by 10 points or more the following season, with Manchester City the exception, five of the six times.

Some fans would like to see Klopp return but it’s worth remembering that the side he led to the title in the 2019-20 season put in one of the Premier League’s worst title defences in the campaign that followed. Liverpool plummeted to 69 points, 30 fewer than the club-record 99 they achieved when they steamrollered City by 18 points the season before. Klopp broke all the wrong records that season, notably suffering six consecutive home defeats – their worst ever run at Anfield.

It might be harsh to brand it one of the league’s worst title defences, even if Roy Keane dismissively called them “bad champions”. Their backline was ravaged with injury that season, with Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joël Matip out for extended periods, forcing them to field a centre-back partnership of Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams – the latter of whom recently returned from a loan spell with non-league side Kidderminster. Liverpool fans should take solace from that season though. They went unbeaten in their last 10 games of the campaign and dragged themselves into the Champions League places.

Believe it or not, Liverpool’s 30-point slide is not the worst in Premier League history. Leicester, who defied odds of 5,000-1 to win the Premier League title in 2016, picked up 37 fewer points the following season. “Jamie Vardy is having a party,” was the chant when they won the league but the party didn’t last long and the hangover came in the form of a humbling 12th-placed finish the next season. Five wins in 25 league games cost Ranieri his job, with Craig Shakespeare having to guide them out of the relegation mix.

While Leicester were living the dream in the 2015-16 season, Chelsea were delivering a shambolic title defence. Mourinho won his third Premier League crown in 2014-15, losing just three games and racking up 87 points. John Terry marshalled the defence; Cesc Fàbregas controlled the midfield; Eden Hazard dazzled; and, when not arguing with anyone who crossed his path, Diego Costa scored 20 goals. Chelsea made it look easy, wrapping up the title with three games to spare.

But it took only seven months to unravel. An opening-day draw with Swansea cost more than dropped points; a red card for Thibaut Courtois and a public spat between Mourinho and club doctor Eva Carneiro foreshadowed a season of turmoil. Chelsea went on to lose nine of their first 16 league matches, leaving them a point above the relegation zone.

“I’ve never known a capitulation like it from a football club,” said Alan Shearer when Mourinho was sacked in mid-December. The final league table, with Chelsea 37 points worse off than the previous campaign, proved his assessment was spot on. And Shearer should know – he was part of the Blackburn team that won the title in the 1994-95 season and then finished seventh the following year. Of course, Shearer scored 31 goals in 35 games that season so we can’t really blame him.

Six teams in the past 15 years have suffered a drop of at least 20 points from the previous season. The history books serve as a stark reminder that, unless your name is Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola, then glory in one season is no guarantee of dominance in the next. Despite their record-breaking summer outlay, Liverpool are flirting with the same peril many others suffered before them.

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Defiant Slot insists Liverpool back him despite record slump 1

28 Nov 2025 - The Guardian

Andy Hunter

Arne Slot has vowed to “fight on” at Liverpool and insisted support from the club’s hierarchy has not wavered following the alarming Anfield defeats by Nottingham Forest and PSV Eindhoven.

The Liverpool head coach met the club’s sporting director, Richard Hughes, yesterday to dissect the Champions League defeat by PSV that extended his team’s dire run to nine losses in 12 games. It is Liverpool’s worst sequence of results since an identical run in 1953-54 and has heightened the pressure on Slot before Sunday’s Premier League trip to West Ham.

Slot admitted after Wednesday’s home reverse that he would have to see how his employers assessed the situation in their next conversation. At a press conference to preview the West Ham game yesterday, scheduled before the PSV defeat, he claimed their stance remained unchanged. “We’ve had the same conversations as we’ve had since I’m here,” he said. “Not sure if I said it last night, but we fight on. We try to improve, that’s what we all try, but the conversations have been the same as they’ve been for the past one and a half years.”

Slot conceded that the pressure is rising amid Liverpool’s worst run for 71 years, yet denied being let down by his players or that morale has deserted them.

“I didn’t see morale being low at the start of the game or at 1-0 yesterday but after the third, fourth or fifth knock I saw a very difficult five to 10 minutes,” he said.

“We were able to generate enough chances at 2-1, after more knocks, to make it 2-2 but at 3-1 I could see it hurt the players and it wasn’t a period where our fighting spirit was at its best, and that’s putting it mildly.”

Despite that admission, and some poor body language at the end of both defeats, the head coach believes the Premier League champions have not lost their fighting spirit and remain committed.

Slot, who expects to have Alisson back from illness on Sunday and could have Hugo Ekitiké and Florian Wirtz available, said: “In the first 85 minutes, or for large parts of the [PSV] game, I saw a team that have had a lot of setbacks recently and were still able to fight against that.

“Not always with the end product you would like because fighting is of course part of what you should do but if fight was enough to win a game of football then it would be quite easy. You need a little bit of something extra as well, you need quality playing one-v-ones, getting crosses in the box and arriving with the right timing.

“But I see a team that never gives up. I see the running stats, I see it in the chances we create after we go down, but I agree the last five or 10 minutes against Forest and the last five or 10 minutes of yesterday’s game were not the same as the other minutes we played.

“For me that is not that this team lacks fighting spirit, no. Maybe in the last few minutes but not in the rest of the game.”

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Reds’ miserable run

• Liverpool’s loss to PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League on Wednesday left them on their worst run of form in more than 70 years.

• Starting with their 2-1 loss to Crystal Palace on 27 September, Liverpool have lost nine and won three of their last 12 games.

• They are the first defending champions since Leicester in 2016-17 to lose six of their first 12 Premier League games.

• Defeat to PSV was a third successive defeat by three goals or more, following 3-0 league losses to Manchester City and Nottingham Forest. Both that and the overall run of nine defeats in 12 are the club’s worst since the 1953-54 season.