Come back to us Hermano!
This has been an awful season for Liverpool. It has been terrible in every imaginable aspect. Losing 3-0 to Forest, 4-1 to PSV, 2-1 to United, 2-1 to City, 2-0 to PSG. Then drawing 1-1 with Spurs, 1-1 with Burnley, 0-0 with Leeds, 1-1 with Sunderland. All of these have been at Anfield.
The worst part of this season is just how boring everything is. Liverpool play slow, measured and controlled football. Well, they try to anyway. They definitely play slow football.
I miss the chaos, the violence, the aggression, the pressure, the pace. I miss Darwin Nunez.
Don’t get me wrong, Liverpool bought some absolute ballers last summer. Isak, Ekitike and Wirtz are all brilliant players. Most people would say that Liverpool massively improved their attack when they brought those three in.
But none of them excite me the way Nunez did. They don’t sprint fifty yards back to tackle someone and get the crowd going. They don’t press the opposition’s defence into making mistakes. They don’t play the game at a million miles an hour.
This is what Arne Slot wants. Control not chaos. Fair enough. But it’s boring. Get me off my seat, get me off my phone at least.
Unfortunately for Slot, the game is chaos. In fact, lack of preparation for the inevitable chaos may be one of the reasons Liverpool have been so bad this year.
To bring it back to Nunez, it is clear that he did not have a good season last year. I would argue however, that apart from Mo Salah, who had the most goals and assists in a Premier League season EVER, none of Liverpool’s attackers had a good season.
To be fair to Nunez, he played 914 fewer minutes under Slot than he did in Klopp’s last season. You can’t expect a player to score and create more in less time.
The same goes for the others on this list who have left the club. I don’t think that they’re bad players. In fact, I know Luis Diaz and Harvey Elliott are good players. Diaz just scored a Champions League quarter final goal to knock out Real Madrid this Wednesday.
Harvey Elliott scored a last minute winner against PSG last season (a game Arne Slot is obsessed with) before he was shipped out unceremoniously to Aston Villa in the summer. I wonder who got the assist for that goal…
Look, I know Nunez missed too many sitters. I know that ultimately, it didn’t work out because his finishing was too erratic, but I still think he was a brilliant player and that he will flourish again in the right system.
Nunez hasn’t suceeded at Al-Hilal either, as he was unregistered by the Saudi club upon Karim Benzema’s arrival in January.
But replacing him (and everyone else who left) also hasn’t worked this season. In my humble opinion, Richard Hughes, Michael Edwards and Arne Slot got it completely wrong in the summer of 2025. There was just too much going on. I think a million players left and seven came in.
And those seven are good players:
- Mamardashvili – good in goal, very big
- Frimpong – very fast, being played out of position
- Leoni – ACL in his first game, looked good
- Kerkez – actually very good, no on passes him the ball
- Wirtz – unbelievably talented, slightly too nice
- Ekitike – plays like Henry, can’t last 90 minutes, good instagram
- Isak – didn’t realise upon signing that Slotball doesn’t pass to strikers, broke his leg in December
Hugo Ekitike has just broken down. His achilles was ruptured in the first half against PSG on Tuesday. He’s going to be out for months, and will probably miss the World Cup for France. I feel sorry for him. He has played very well in patches this season and looks to be a really exciting prospect.
If he’s not going to be available next season, I know a guy.
