Liverpool’s captain walked up the makeshift stairs at Anfield.
Well, he didn’t really walk. He sauntered, he swaggered, he moved with the loose cool of someone who just accomplished something that no one else had ever done. First, he looked over at his teammates — a collective coiled spring, ready to let it all out.
Then, he hugged one of the local club legends before walking over to receive his medal. He slipped it over his head, then picked up the trophy and kissed it, as if he were passing by his mother on the way out the door. The teammates all scurried over; the captain jittered his feet along the ground, spun around in a circle, and thrust the trophy into the air. Screaming, shouting, limbs, dancing, iPhones everywhere.
Now that they’d taken part in the same ritual as the 27 winners before them, Liverpool had officially won the Premier League. But something was off. Yes, the other people up on the temporarily constructed podium were wearing face masks. And sure, the stands at Anfield were completely empty. This was five months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beyond the state of the wider world and what it meant for Liverpool’s celebrations at the end of the 2019-20 season, though, there was another thing missing. Rather, a person missing. The person just about everyone would’ve credited for Liverpool’s revival into arguably the best soccer team in the world: their manager, Jurgen Klopp. He was somewhere offscreen — but not for long. He eventually appeared, backward hat on his head, scarf wrapped around his neck, veneers brighter than ever.
However, when Liverpool do it all again in a few weeks, after already clinching the 2024-25 Premier League title, a lot of things will be different. It’ll be Virgil van Dijk lifting the trophy, not Jordan Henderson. A couple of the same players will be there, but the majority of the roster has turned over. And this time, the fans will be there — inside and outside of Anfield.
Klopp, though, won’t be. Go read back season predictions from any major publication, and you’ll find plenty of experts saying that Liverpool were going to disappoint this season under new boss Arne Slot. And, well, how could they not? What club wouldn’t suffer in their first season without Jurgen Klopp?
Instead, they won the league, had it clinched before the end of April. Liverpool’s second Premier League title represents many things, and it’s certainly a confirmation of this: When we talk about managers, we still don’t really know what we’re talking about.
Toward a cohesive theory of managers
Despite what managers tell us, we don’t listen. We read into tactical ideas that randomly occur. We blame coaches for losses, and call them masterminds when their teams win. Despite soccer being a sport with almost no stoppages, no breaks in play, no structure, we act as if these coaches are orchestrating the complex and dynamic interplay between all 11 of their players in real time.
In reality, the screaming, gesticulating sideline manager is something of a pathetic, hopeless figure — blurting out ideas that have little to no effect on what’s happening between the lines. The players decide what happens out there.
Johan Cruyff is essentially the father of modern soccer and arguably the single most influential figure in the game’s history. He once said, “If your players are better than your opponents, 90% of the time you will win.”
So many words have been written about the complex tactical ideas of Cruyff’s protege, Pep Guardiola. And yet, he once said this about breaking down match film: “I said many times when we make videos, ‘This is fake.'” How you have to make the decision, how many times you do it: it only belongs to the players. I’ve said it many times: we, the managers, are overrated in our influence.”
So, how much influence do they have? Here’s Carlo Ancelotti, who has won more Champions League titles than any other manager: “I am very clear that there are two types of coaches: those who do nothing, and those who do a lot of damage. I try to be the first. The game is for the players and you can tell them a certain strategy, convince them, but then the decisive thing is their quality and commitment.”
This echoes the idea established by his compatriot Giovanni Trappatoni, one of only three coaches to win all three of Europe’s major continental trophies: “A good manager makes a team 10% better, and a bad manager makes it 30% worse.”
These ideas all align with most of the research done on managerial effects.
Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former head of research, played a large role in the club ultimately deciding to hire Klopp and signing all of the players that won everything under Klopp. The appointment seems so obvious in hindsight, but Klopp was coming off of a final season at Borussia Dortmund where the club finished in seventh. Back in 2015, there were real questions about the sustainability of his high-intensity approach and whether it would ever work again, especially outside of Germany.
However, the underlying numbers Graham looked at showed that Dortmund had really just been unlucky to win as few points as they did in the 2014-15 season. Their expected goal differential was the second-best in the league after Bayern Munich.
Liverpool hired Klopp and eventually won every trophy possible over the next half-decade.
But as Graham puts it in his book, “How to Win the Premier League”: “There is some evidence that on the pitch, controlling for the players at his disposal, a good manager can add a few points per season.” This is the same amount of value that a single good player provides, and that’s how the market treats them, too: the best managers and best players get paid similar salaries.
A recent study from this year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, written by George Ferridge, attempted to control for player talent and the randomness of goalscoring in order to isolate managerial impact. The paper found that most managers cluster around the middle: providing no notable effect on performance, positive or negative.
The number of managers who actively make their teams worse isn’t too big in the study, either, but that’s because the truly bad managers don’t keep getting hired. In theory, there’s a near-endless pool of actively bad managers out there.
Then there are a few positive outliers, too. Just two at the absolute top, in fact: Guardiola and Klopp. So, even if we accept that managers really don’t matter as much as conventional coverage suggests, Klopp really does seem like one of the managers who would fall into Trappatoni’s 10% improvement zone or Graham’s “couple points” club.
So, why, in the first season without Klopp, did Liverpool immediately get better?
How Liverpool and Arne Slot won the Premier League
Although he was born in the Netherlands, Robert Eenhoorn played for the New York Yankees for a couple years, bounced over to the then-California Angels, and then worked in baseball for another 10 years or so. Eventually, though, he wound his way back into his native country’s national sport, where he worked as the general manager at AZ Alkmaar for a decade.
AZ are one of the early success stories of soccer’s “Moneyball” movement — rarely talked about as much because they didn’t win a bunch of trophies and they don’t play in one of Europe’s biggest leagues. But they perform well above their financial level most seasons. Among the nerds, they’re the team you know if you really know. Eenhoorn brought the actual star of “Moneyball” Billy Beane, on as an advisor to the club in 2015.
He also gave Arne Slot his first top-division coaching job.
“He gave an interview in a Dutch football coach magazine,” Eenhoorn told me. “And Max [Huiberts], who still is the technical director, read the article and said, ‘Listen Robert, he’s an interesting guy, maybe we should?’ I read it, and we invited him in. He showed us his vision of football and how he used video. Here was an intelligent guy, being able to process a lot of information and make it trainable and coachable”.
AZ first hired Slot as an assistant and then promoted him to head coach. Slot’s first season as head coach ended without a trophy. But that’s because there was a global pandemic and the Eredivisie decided to cancel the remainder of the 2019-20 season after lockdown began. At the time, AZ were tied atop the table with the much richer Ajax team that had just made the Champions League final the season before. Then following season, AZ fired Slot in December after they found out he’d begun negotiating with Feyenoord to take over as their manager.
“It had nothing to do with his qualities as a head coach,” Eenhoorn said. “There was never any doubt there.”
All of Slot’s success at Feyenoord ultimately led him to Liverpool, where he’s now won 100% of the Premier League titles he’s contested.
The trickiest part about talking about managers is that no one can really know what kind of effect they have. Outsiders don’t have enough information about what the manager does on a daily basis. Even insiders don’t see everything the coach does. Even the coach himself can’t actually measure the impact of everything he’s doing. And then, even if we could know all of those things, we still wouldn’t be able to confidently predict how successful it all would be in the future.
But with the benefit of hindsight, Slot really does seem like the near-exact prototype of the coach you’d want to hire if you wanted to win right after Jurgen Klopp left your club.
There were a number of problems with Liverpool at the end of Klopp’s tenure. These are the kinds of problems that crop up when anyone works anywhere as long as Klopp did at Liverpool. Minor oversights grow when they’re overlooked year after year, blind spots stay blind, and power dynamics calcify in unintended ways.
At the highest level, he’d mainly stopped working within the team’s top-down decision-making structure. The club’s transfer decisions had shifted away from undervalued data-driven signings such as Andy Robertson and Mohamed Salah and more toward athletic, expensive, “I can fix him” types like Darwin Núñez or high-profile names like Cody Gakpo, who arrived right after a breakout performance at the 2022 World Cup.
One step below that: all the injuries. Klopp’s physically demanding style of play and approach to daily training frequently left the team without its best players. They’d hit great heights during the couple seasons when the best players were always on the field, but then suffered a number of sudden drop-offs that were mainly driven by injuries.
And then, more vaguely, it seemed like some of the players were ready for something new, something slightly different than Klopp’s more emotional, we’re-all-in-this-together approach. Even dating back to preseason, Liverpool players talked about how much they liked Slot’s clear plans and attention to detail. Back in September, Trent Alexander-Arnold mentioned how much he appreciated Slot’s detailed 1-on-1 video analysis, as if it were something he hadn’t experienced before.
Not only did Slot fill the managerial-style void, but his different approach to training and game management seems like it helped keep an injury crisis at bay. Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah played almost every minute of every game, while a further eight featured at least 70% of the time in the league: Ryan Gravenberch, Alexis Mac Allister, Ibrahima Konaté, Alexander-Arnold, Robertson, Luis DÃaz, and Alisson Becker.
The season prior, only five Liverpool players broke the 70% mark — and that’s without Liverpool facing the competitive demands of the Champions League, like they did this year. There’s some luck involved there, but Slot’s management account for the fragility of the human body more than Klopp’s ever did.
And beyond all of that, Slot fits into the club’s decision-making structure.
When Liverpool were ripping off 10-out-of-10 signings summer after summer in the late 2010s, they had a trio at the top of the player-acquisition tree: Klopp represented the coaching staff, director of football Michael Edwards represented the front office, and Fenway Sports Group’s Mike Gordon represented ownership.
That all fell apart when Edwards left and FSG briefly became preoccupied with selling the club in 2022. Klopp filled the vacuum. Today, Edwards is back at the club, but now he’s the CEO for all of football at FSG. So, he’ll essentially be in the Gordon role, while the guy Edwards hired, Richard Hughes, is now in his position.
Sources in the Netherlands have told me that Slot expressed an early interest in the concept of expected goals — before it became somewhat mainstream and before he became an established coach. Among the many reasons Liverpool hired him, there’s no doubt that one of them was that he’d be willing to be a part of this top-down structure and that he’d be open to the club’s use of data and somewhat alternative techniques in identifying new players to acquire. Slot won’t be signing anyone this summer; Liverpool, though, will likely be signing a bunch of players.
At this point in time, Slot just is a better fit for the club than Klopp. But the club also wouldn’t be where it is right now — coasting through the remainder of the season as champions, heading into the summer as one of the richest teams in the world — if it weren’t for Klopp. Outside of the injury issues, he did the most important thing a coach can do: get his best players on the field and put them in positions to succeed.
He played in a brave, aggressive way that embraced variance and captivated fans. And his personality and emotional intelligence enabled Liverpool to sign some of the stars, like Alisson, van Dijk, and Salah, who created the foundation for success and are still winning trophies today.
Plus, well, we don’t know that Liverpool wouldn’t have also won the title if Klopp had stuck around for another season. They won 82 points in 38 games last season, and while it only took them 34 to get there this year, teams can fluctuate by about eight points in either direction from season to season for no reason other than random chance.
But in a way, Liverpool themselves have already answered the question of how much managers actually matter. And they didn’t do it by winning the league again, re-signing Salah or Van Dijk, or anything like that. No, they answered the question almost a full year ago, just a couple days after Klopp bid the club farewell. When they hired Slot, they didn’t announce a new “manager.” No, he was — and still is — the “head coach.”
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