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To make an end is to make a beginning: the end is where we start. Wise words there from TS Eliot, who, to be fair, never had to rebuild a high-end Premier League team while also dealing with closing out a title race, natural era-wastage, and losing your most successful homegrown player since the glory days of Phil Thompson waving the European Cup around in the pub and all that.
For Liverpool supporters it seems likely the next month will bring a wildly varying emotional register. Departures and farewells. Winning the league in front of actual non-quarantined humans. The sense, even through the veil of commemorative red smoke, that the team that got you here is finally starting to become something else. Spring is always a time of reckoning up in football, April the cruellest month, all new shoots and final blooms, memories and desires, cheers but also sometimes jeers. So yeah. Let’s see how that pans out for the lads.
This is the real point about the news that Trent Alexander-Arnold’s move to Real Madrid is all but done. It is, of course, simply confirmation by now. Leaving on a free transfer is entirely on the club not the player, just as it is a bit nuts to suggest Alexander-Arnold should have signed an unwanted new contract in the hope this might winkle out more money for his soon to be ex-employers.
But it is still a shock for supporters to see this finally come to pass. It is also logical and reassuring that this will draw a powerful emotional response. Football is not supposed to be a forgiving place when it comes to this kind of stuff. There is simply no point having a reasoned counterpoint, or suggesting, well, people leave jobs all the time. Football is not hotel management.
The emotional response, the tribal element; this is why football has survived more or less in the same form to this day. These are the roots that clutch. This is why it is pointless telling anyone how to feel about things like this. This isn’t a reasoned discussion. It’s a passion play of ownership and familial bonds, dreams and madness. This quality is also a vital economic asset. The day everyone is just fine with this and says, ‘Good luck, what’s your new Insta, I’m a Madrid fan now’ is the day football dies as a spectacle worth following.
Grief and rage then: these are a necessary corollary. But we will get past them. At which point there is a note of clarity here. For Arne Slot the departure of Alexander-Arnold is also an opportunity, and a necessary piece of sign-posting. Sport always moves forward. What is actually happening here, and will now perhaps happen more clearly, is the end of a very distinct era. Who knows, it could be the making of the new one, too.
First up, it is necessary to pay tribute to Alexander-Arnold, and in a way that speaks to this dynamic. The Premier League will miss him almost as much as Liverpool, because he is a non-standard footballer, extravagantly skilled and also brittle, encouraged by Jürgen Klopp not to compromise on his outstanding gifts and to become a super-strength player, in a way that has created so many unforgettable moments.
Alexander-Arnold has more assists and more shots than any other career defender in Premier League history. At the same time, while he isn’t exactly a bad defender, he can be a disastrous one. We remember the inadvertent comedy of the 2022 Champions League final-winning goal, the he’s-behind-you pantomime dynamic of Vinícius Júnior sneaking a full 60 yards on Alexander Arnold’s blindside to score from a cross, as maddening as it was also comically sigma male, the A-list defender who just will not defend.
On the other side, we have the genuinely sublime and original passing, the full range of angles, vision, cut, fade, variations of pace; always effective but also just so much fun to watch in a homogenised game. Alexander-Arnold is one of the few remaining elite maverick talents, out there making the game interesting, moving about with that familiar mooching grace, so casual you half expect to look down and notice he’s wearing flip-flops.
This is how good he is: Madrid don’t want him to replace Dani Carvajal, or not completely. They want him to replace Toni Kroos too, to restore some of his range of passing. Meanwhile Alexander-Arnold wants to win a Ballon d’or. Good luck with both of those. Time will be short. The noises off are unforgiving. And Madrid have to win.
So much for the departed. This is above all a moment for the team that remains, and in essence the real end of the Klopp era. To date Slot has been able to show only his best side, repurposing inherited parts, adding new gears and altering the tempo, always sure-footed in public, striding his touchline looking like the owner of a successful chain of provincial bakers here to receive a regional business award from the Duchess of Sandwich.
It is still best to see the new era as a hybrid to this point, an extended Viking funeral for the age of Klopp. This has been a high-grade first fix, but Liverpool have looked tired as the season has narrowed, and in a way that feels like more than just a physical thing. This is a team reaching its tipping point. And this summer could yet bring a genuine tectonic shift.
Alexander-Arnold may or may not be followed by Mohamed Salah and/or Virgil van Dijk. But the latter two will 33 and 34 years old by the start of next season. For all the hopeful talk about science and conditioning, nobody outruns the clock. The influence of both will necessarily diminish from this point. In the process Liverpool are close to losing not just their three best players but their three best players by a mile and the defining architecture of an era.
It will be incredibly hard to navigate this. The game is never about individuals. Except sometimes when it actually is. For the last seven years Liverpool have basically lost two or three games a season when all three of these players start. Even when they have bad day Liverpool can always lean on their right side, or the cold still centre in defence. And while Slot has been rightly praised for his excellent choices, it does help to have a fearless dead-eye super-ripped machine-genius finisher in the team who just keeps validating every single one of them by scoring the winning goal.
Again, uncertainty and departures also present an opportunity. Alexander-Arnold in particular is a handy star player to lose, if only because he is so unusual in his style and impact that there is no real idea of replacing him directly. This is a good thing. It leaves room for different strengths and patterns, a way of playing that Slot himself can wholeheartedly engineer. At the same time, every end-of-contract exit removes the need for Slot to manage that change himself, to placate or defenestrate basking stars. Not leaving can also be a problem. May we direct the jury at this point to exhibit A: the wasteland previously known as football overlords Manchester United. Every major departure also brings with it a note of freedom, all the more so for Slot, with a league title all but under his belt.
For all the serene progress to this point, this team doesn’t really look finished. Is the midfield really settled? Is Salah-dependence, the sheer weight of his goals and assists, really a long-term recipe for success? Either way it seems clear this will not become another Souness-style nightmare, an act of precision rebalancing carried out with all the delicacy of a man repointing a ginger bread house with a sledgehammer.
But the rebuild was always waiting. And while Alexander-Arnold may not have left an envelope of cash on the mantelpiece to help that process he is at least speeding it along, giving information, flagging the task to come.
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