Emile Heskey has given an early prediction as to where Liverpool will finish in the Premier League next season, most likely with Andoni Iraola in charge.
Champions a year ago, the Reds then slumped to fifth place in 2025/26 and scraped into the Champions League, declining to such an extent that it cost Arne Slot his job as head coach.
The Dutchman’s impending replacement guided Bournemouth to an unprecedented sixth in that campaign, a feat which now sees him on the brink of landing the Anfield gig and being tasked with instigating a significant improvement over the next 12 months.
Speaking to Hajper (via Metro), Heskey has backed Iraola to improve Liverpool’s finishing position next season, but stopped short of predicting them to win a 21st top-flight title, instead believing that the main prize will be a Manchester shootout, with champions Arsenal suffering a significant slump.
The former Reds striker proclaimed: “Top four I’ll say Man City, Man United, Liverpool and Arsenal. Then Aston Villa fifth and Newcastle United in sixth.”
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Liverpool should always be aspiring to win major trophies – the great Bill Shankly once said: ‘If you are first you are first. If you are second you are nothing.’ – but considering the season we’ve just endured, finsihing third next term wouldn’t be a dismal failure.
Obviously a lot can happen in terms of transfer activity between now and the start of the 2026/27 campaign, which will inevitably contain an abundance of twists and turns during the subsequent nine months of football.
As things stand, the Reds would need to pull off several new signings throughout the squad to improve the depth of options available to Iraola, and to replace the starting XI vacancies created by the exits of Mo Salah and Ibrahima Konate.
Such is the intensity of competition at the top end of the Premier League that no team has a procession to the title akin to Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich in most seasons in France and Germany, but hopefully the new head coach can at least guide Liverpool into the conversation of potential winners next term.
What we can say without fear of contradiction is that Kopites will be expecting a discernible improvement on a torrid 2025/26 campaign in which we were fortunate to sneak into a Champions League berth.
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There will be transitioning and I would not be very optimistic he can do it quickly with the current morale of the squad rock bottom. He also needs to instill his type of football into these players. I just hope we get ucl spot end of next season and have a good run in epl and ucl this coming season.
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