Arne Slot reflects on his Liverpool regrets this season as the Reds boss outlines his Champions League hunger for next season
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While Liverpool’s fans celebrated their status as supporters of the new Premier League champions outside Anfield last month, the gaze of some inside the squad itself had already been trained towards the Champions League.
It’s fair to suggest the manner of Liverpool’s penalty-shootout defeat at home to finalists Paris Saint-Germain has led to at least a number of players in the squad thinking about what might have been, had a better set of penalties been taken down the Anfield Road end on the night of March 11.
Having wrapped up a second Premier League title with four games to spare to facilitate a couple of end-of-season holidays before lifting the trophy itself ahead of one of the most famous parades in club history on May 26, lamenting the European fortunes might be a futile use of time for the Reds players, but reflecting on those sorts of setbacks is often what sets the elite apart.
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Mohamed Salah has already spoken this week to Gary Neville about how his overriding aim for next term is a seventh European Cup for the Reds and as Arne Slot previewed Monday’s trip to Brighton & Hove Albion, it’s clear the PSG exit still rankles with him also.
“Do I have any regrets this season? Oh, yeah, I have to make decisions 20 in a row, I have to answer all these questions from you every single time,” Slot says.
“One time I give maybe a little bit better answer than the other time, it’s the same with the 20 decisions I have to make, so I’m 100% sure I haven’t made all the decisions right. But not all of them will see daylight, if that’s the way you say it.
“One of the things Mikel [Arteta, Arsenal boss] said which I agree with him completely, is sometimes you have to be in the right place, in the right moment. As a general thing, I agree with him, and one of these things is if you win the league table, you’re number one, in a season where you play from November to March here in England, it would be nice if you then have a team where you can win against, if you play on 70%.
“But we were in the wrong place in the wrong time, facing Paris Saint-Germain. I think at that moment of time, although the home game we played really well, but that wasn’t our best part of the season.
“So you could argue, if I needed to have rotated a bit more between November and March to be even fresher in that game. But normally if we would have ended number one, we would have played in Benfica, I think, like Barcelona had to do.
“I don’t want to be disrespectful to them, but there’s a difference between Benfica and Paris Saint-Germain. So that is something I [regret]. But maybe because I didn’t rotate, we are there where we are in the league?
“So it’s so difficult to look back at the decisions you’ve made and say it could have done better or worse. We will never know. Maybe if we did it differently, we would have won the league and the Champions League, but maybe we would have lost both.
“All the times I’ve rotated a bit too much, that didn’t lead to us being successful. As we all know, we went out of the cup in Plymouth, and against PSV we lost, which wasn’t an important game anymore.
“And I think I made six substitutions against Paris Saint-Germain, where the extra time wasn’t our best period of the game. So yeah, these are things you take into account. So, yeah, time to reflect even more is when I’m going on holiday again. Again! (laughs).”
Slot adds: “What I don’t like about the [Champions League] format is that I think PSG will always be 15 or 16 [in the standings], because next year we’ve got six Premier League teams and we can’t play each other. So you know one thing, PSG always has to play two very difficult ones, maybe even more from England.
“So the teams that are not from England are always like: ‘S***!’ We are a bit more lucky if you want to call it like this, because I think Real Madrid, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, Inter come close to the levels we have in the Champions League. Bayern Munich of course.
“So this whole setup is also changed. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the upcoming years the Conference League and the Europa League finals will be dominated by English teams. Because in the past you could go as the number two of Italy or the number two of Spain and you could go back to the Europa League or to the Conference League level.
“But now it’s always the number four of Spain or the number five of Spain that has to play the number four or five or six of England. And I think England has, money-wise, a big, big, big difference between the number five of Spain and the number five or six of England.
“You could, if you are unlucky, face Paris Saint-Germain again or Bayern Munich again. So that is one of the things I do think about now. How useful, how smart was it to play seven times in a row, almost my best team? But if we would have been lucky enough to go to Barcelona’s side, we would have played Benfica and Dortmund.
“And then we would have gotten what we deserved, in my opinion. So you cannot say, let’s change it next season, because if you were the lucky one, like Barcelona, you could have reached the semi-finals by beating two good teams. But Dortmund is now eight, nine in the league, I don’t know. And the Portuguese league is not as strong as some of the leagues in the world.”