Liverpool’s vision revealed by Arne Slot and Ruben Amorim’s key difference | OneFootball

Jurgen Klopp dropped his bombshell, he later revealed, in November 2023. In January 2024, he went public. Liverpool’s search for a manager could begin; not publicly, given their preference for doing their business as quietly as possible, but at least with one layer of secrecy removed.

They were soon informed that Xabi Alonso was minded to stay at Bayer Leverkusen for another year. To many in the wider world, Sporting CP’s Ruben Amorim assumed a status as the frontrunner after that. Not so, Liverpool would say; he was merely one of several they looked into. There was no preferred choice, they insist, until they alighted on Feyenoord’s Arne Slot. But he seemed to emerge from the shadows. The high-profile nature of the Portuguese’s candidacy contrasted with the low-key approach adopted by Slot. He got the job by stealth, almost without warning.

Five months after he might have done, Amorim will make it to Anfield on Sunday; but in charge of Manchester United. A meeting of managerial opposites has given them very different experiences in charge of England’s two biggest clubs. Slot has had the smoothest of starts at Liverpool, Amorim the rockiest of beginnings at United. Slot has taken his team to the top of the Premier League and Champions League tables. Amorim has warned his new employers are at risk of dropping into the Championship. “This club needs a shock,” he said on Monday.

Which it is getting. United lost six times in December, their most defeats in a month since 1930. Amorim has become their first manager – or head coach, the title afforded to both him and Slot – to lose six of his first 11 games at the helm since Walter Crickmer in the 1930s. Slot has only been beaten once in half a season.

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Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim has several issues to resolve in the new year (PA Wire)

Their records are dramatically different so far. Amorim has lost 54 per cent of his games in charge, Slot just four per cent. Amorim’s win percentage is 36, Slot’s a ludicrous 81. All of which reflects their respective inheritances. As Slot has acknowledged, managerial change often comes because a club is in difficulties; that is certainly Amorim’s recent experience. But it was apparent Klopp left Liverpool in a fine position. His legacy appears even better now, aided by Slot’s excellence with the squad he was bequeathed.

And a common denominator is that each is working with his predecessor’s players. Slot has had a transfer window and yet the sum total of the Premier League minutes played by debutants in his reign is 18: Federico Chiesa, Liverpool’s forgotten man, made a September substitute appearance against Bournemouth. The Italian is the lone signing of the Slot era to arrive, with goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili promptly loaned back to Valencia.

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Arne Slot’s Liverpool side have opened up an advantage at the top of the Premier League (PA Wire)

Amorim, meanwhile, enters his first window with United short of funds and Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) leeway and yet looking in need of vast numbers of reinforcements. He may rue the fact that some £200m was instead spent in the last few months of Erik ten Hag’s reign; if the Liverpool powerbrokers’ decision-making showed a sure touch last summer, the same cannot be said of their United counterparts, who extended Ten Hag’s contract after speaking to a host of managers but not, seemingly, Amorim, who they then pursued months later. It is notable that Liverpool’s new sporting director, Richard Hughes, already appears entrenched at Anfield while United headhunted Dan Ashworth only to fire him five months after his arrival and a few weeks after Amorim’s appointment.

But it is worth revisiting part of the rationale Liverpool – and Hughes and Michael Edwards – had for overlooking Amorim last summer: his insistence on a 3-4-3 formation. “I have to sell my idea,” he said. “I don’t have another one.” Liverpool did not want that managerial dogmatism. Slot has said he had no “reason to change lots of things”. His changes have been subtler: he prefers more control after the chaos of the late-era Klopp side, though even that difference can be exaggerated. There are, as he often says, similarities in their style of play. Slot has tinkered, often using two deeper midfielders, instead of one. He has had different interpretations of some players, reinventing Ryan Gravenberch as a holding midfielder, using Cody Gakpo exclusively on the left, deploying Luis Diaz as a striker at times, each with great effect. Yet this has been a manager adapting to his team, rather than vice-versa.

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Ryan Gravenberch of Liverpool has been reinvented under Arne Slot (Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

Amorim, meanwhile, inherited a squad without a single natural wing-back and insisted on playing wing-backs (Liverpool arguably have four players well-equipped to play as such but still felt the squad as a whole suited a back four). With a perverse illogicality, Amorim argued this week that the players were losing in the formation they were bought for; in itself, that was not a justification for using them in a very different shape.

In his defence, Amorim had initially told United he did not want to take over mid-season. A manager who warned “the storm will come” when he was still unbeaten perhaps predicted some of the problems that have since followed. Some, undeniably, are caused by the managers who came before him and the executives who fashioned this squad; if Liverpool’s seems to be overflowing with astute signings, United’s is sadly short of them. Yet Amorim’s choices are reflected, too: there has been no Anfield equivalent of the Marcus Rashford situation, which in turn may show that Slot was gifted a more harmonious club with a better culture. But, if Slot’s selection could be questioned in his lone loss, to Nottingham Forest, there has been nothing as misguided as Amorim’s team against Newcastle on Monday. Which, in turn, could be because the Dutchman has the more enticing options.

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Ruben Amorim has been tasked with dealing with a Marcus Rashford problem (Martin Rickett/PA Wire)

He used them to help finish off Ten Hag: Slot’s first flagship win in charge of Liverpool was 3-0 at Old Trafford in August. It was an early indication that United erred in keeping Ten Hag last summer and that Liverpool were justified in opting for Slot. United have yet to make a truly successful appointment since Sir Alex Ferguson: Liverpool seem to have found one as Klopp’s immediate successor. It has left Amorim intent on change. So they meet as United’s disruptor and Liverpool’s continuity candidate, with every indication they were correct at Anfield to plump for Slot ahead of Amorim, with every setback making it harder for the Portuguese to prove he is the right man for Old Trafford.