Liverpool 2024/25: Arne Slot's worthy Premier League champions keep the Klopp flame burning

Liverpool cantering to a probable double-digit Premier League win with four games to spare makes them a problem for their era.

Not their era of Premier League football. From back to front, Arne Slot's team are the best around. The league table's reputation for truth-telling is unblemished.

However, as challengers have variously fallen away or failed to ignite, Liverpool's serene path to a record-equaling 20th English title has stood at odds with the backdrop to the modern game.

The 24-hour cycle of fan debate and outrage, where most players are overrated frauds, doesn't sit too comfortably alongside a team that has made 2-0 wins as routine as a bowl of Cornflakes for breakfast. Mohamed Salah, one of the indisputably greats of the modern era, has produced one of the great individual Premier League seasons.

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Sure, Liverpool are incredibly reliant on their Egyptian King with the freshly penned contract. Heading into the matchweek 34 encounter with Tottenham, Salah's goals and assists accounted for 45 of their 75 top-flight goals. Stop Salah; stop Liverpool? It's a handy equation and one that worked for Paris Saint-Germain in the UEFA Champions League. However, so long as most teams continue to fail in terms of shackling the formidable Salah, it remains a tomorrow problem.

There are a few of those coming down the tracks for Slot, but it's worth taking a moment to dwell upon what he's achieved. Amid the current rush to compare this Liverpool team with others, most notably those led by Jurgen Klopp through more thrilling moments and to greater points totals, and previous champions, it's worth remembering what the conversations were last August and September.

The common consensus, not unreasonably, was that the end of the Klopp era would bring a similar jolt to the Anfield ecosystem as those felt at Old Trafford and the Emirates Stadium when Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger walked away. In new money, Klopp's nine-year stint on Merseyside was a huge period of time.

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After Arsenal finished as runners-up to Manchester City in each of the past two season, there was much lip-licking over how that rivalry might emerge from the ashes of Klopp and Pep Guardiola's unforgettable duels. By the time City and Arsenal shared an ill-tempered 2-2 draw on September 22, Liverpool still barely merited a title-race mention. After all, they'd lost at home to Nottingham Forest a week earlier. What could you expect either of those sides to amount to this season?

Ultimately, the key moment in City 2-2 Arsenal was not John Stones' equaliser deep into stoppage time but the ACL injury suffered by Rodri before halftime. The champions did not collapse straight away but, in a sequence that echoed Liverpool's 2020/21 experience after Virgil van Dijk's serious knee injury, further fitness problems mounted and they buckled decisively under the winter strain.

Arsenal remained hard to beat but found it too hard to win with the required regularity. They were also bitten by injuries and lacked a reliable centre-forward. That's not a unique predicament. Just ask Darwin Nunez.

City's shelved title defence and Arsenal failing to hit the heights are not the most severe examples of the so-called 'big six' struggling this season. Manchester United and Tottenham are marooned comedically close to the relegation zone as they each attempt Europa League salvage jobs. Chelsea very briefly looked like being Liverpool's main contenders around December before reverting to their inconsistent type.

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*Liverpool still need one more point to be confirmed as champions

With no one to truly hold Liverpool's feet to the title race fire, they've been doomed to compete with people's imaginations. Nostalgia is undefeated. We're also a year on from Manchester City's record fourth title in a row being perceived to have lacked jeopardy despite it arriving on the final day of the season after one of the best finishers in the Premier League botched a one-on-one opportunity to derail them in the preceding midweek.

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If there was no jeopardy there, what chance do Slot and his team have for a fair hearing after going 26 games unbeaten from September 14 to April 6? Sure, they will not achieve the 99-point haul Klopp's side did when they won the championship in 2019/20, or the 97 they amassed when coming second to City 12 months earlier.

But these are statistically two of the greatest seasons ever in the history of English football. If you're only given credit for meeting such marks, then this will become a thankless pursuit for everyone involved, from players as brilliant as Salah, coaches as coolly astute as Slot and idiots like you and me.

Also, there's the curiously nonsensical idea that champions have to somehow be teams for everyone, to be toasted across the land. Even allowing for some quaint English notion of sportsmanship, this has never really been the case. "Hurrah for Alex Ferguson and his Manchester United players," said no one on Merseryside. Ever.

This Liverpool title win is for Liverpool supporters. Fans who – and the celebration police readying themselves for overtime this weekend would do well to remember this — were denied the chance to properly enjoy a first top-flight crown in 30 years because of the coronavirus pandemic. The same applies to Salah, Van Dijk, Alisson, Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, those pillars of the Klopp team whose list of honours will now correspond more fittingly to what they have given. 

We'll find out more about Slot the transfer market operator, as he shapes the fine squad bequeathed to him by Klopp for the years to come. For now, his lightness of touch should not prevent due weight being leant to a fine achievement that no one outside of Anfield expected.