Paul Merson has named one current Premier League coach who wouldn’t ‘even get an interview’ at Liverpool if Arne Slot were to be removed from his position at Anfield.
The scrutiny on the Dutchman has intensified even further after the Reds’ insipid defeat to Brighton on Saturday, with former Everton CEO Keith Wyness the latest to declare that the 47-year-old wouldn’t survive failure to qualify for the Champions League.
The LFC head coach isn’t the only one of his top five-chasing peers who’s enduring a tough time at present – his Chelsea counterpart Liam Rosenior has even had former teammates castigating him publicly after a run of four straight defeats by an aggregate scoreline of 12-2.
In his column for Sky Sports on Monday morning, Merson claimed that the Stamford Bridge boss – who left Strasbourg in January to replace Enzo Maresca in west London – wouldn’t even register in FSG’s thinking if a managerial vacancy were to arise at Liverpool.
The pundit wrote: ‘It’s been a bad month for Liam Rosenior at Chelsea. That’s four games on the trot where they’ve been smacked. They can’t win one game.
‘There are ways of losing football matches and that was a horrible, horrible watch at Everton [3-0 defeat]. It didn’t look to me that the players were really on the same page as the manager.
‘If Arne Slot got the sack at Liverpool this week, or if Eddie Howe left Newcastle, would Strasbourg boss Liam Rosenior have got one of those two jobs? I’ll go one further: would he even get an interview? It’s madness.’
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Such is the contrasting nature of how things are done at Chelsea and Liverpool that, despite Rosenior being in the job for less than three months – compared to nearly two years for Slot – we wouldn’t be surprised if the ex-Hull City defender were first to be sacked.
It seems likely that neither of them would survive the summer if they were to miss out on Champions League qualification, which is seen as the bare minimum requirement at both clubs, and the Reds boss has already more than doubled the average tenure of a head coach in men’s football, which data revealed to be a mere eight months.
If FSG pull the trigger on the Dutchman in the foreseeable future, to whom are they likeliest to turn as a replacement?
Xabi Alonso’s name will inevitably do the rounds for as long as he’s available, particularly amid informed reports that he’d probably take the Liverpool job if offered it. Julian Nagelsmann has also been touted as a viable candidate, although he’s contracted to the Germany national team for two more years.
In the immediate term, Slot remains the man at the helm, but he’ll know that a rapid improvement is needed in the final two months of this season if he’s to quell the deafening criticism which surrounds him. Tellingly, the brickbats are no longer exclusively from the more reactionary corners of social media.
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