Liverpool’s brilliance throughout the Premier League season is set to be rewarded with a coronation against Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday.
The Reds have been incredibly consistent throughout the campaign, with Arne Slot proving himself to be one of Europe’s top managers.
Slot was not supposed to be this good. The Dutchman had a proven track record having won the Eredivisie and Dutch Cup with Feyenoord, but Liverpool still looked like a big step up.
But over the season, Slot has shown just how tactically sound he is. The foundations were already there in the Liverpool squad, but he has built on them again and again.
One of the most impressive things about the 46-year-old’s reign so far has been his ability to improve the players at his disposal.
Trent Alexander-Arnold has benefitted from this, having developed his defensive game and gone back to basics as a full-back. As the campaign has progressed, Alexander-Arnold has not been seen in his previous midfield role at all. Now, Slot has explained exactly why that is.
Why Trent Alexander-Arnold stopped playing in midfield
Rewind to the start of Slot’s time at Liverpool, and there was a big question over whether Alexander-Arnold would be used as a midfielder.
The Scouser had just come off the back of an unsuccessful Euro 2024 with England where Gareth Southgate tried and failed to get the best out of him in the middle of the pitch.
Jurgen Klopp had often used Alexander-Arnold in midfield as well. The right-back drifting in to play centrally had become one of the real features of Klopp’s last 18 months at Liverpool.
However, Slot clearly sees Alexander-Arnold as a full-back. Speaking to Men In Blazers this week, he has claimed that employing the 26-year-old in midfield this season was his biggest mistake at Liverpool so far.
“I do remember when we lost against Forest at home, in the last 20 or 25 minutes I played Trent in the midfield,” said the Liverpool head coach when asked if he’d have done anything differently this season.
“At that moment in time I felt he could maybe be an attacking midfielder, one of the two eights, which wasn’t a big success in that moment and I never did it afterwards again. Is that a mistake? I don’t know.
“It took me a bit of time to get to know the players really well, you don’t do that after a week,” he added.
“I had 14 or 15 of them only for two weeks before the season started. Sometimes you try things, sometimes they work out well, sometimes they don’t work out that well. Us losing against Forest did not have that much to do with Trent playing in midfield but it was not something I did too frequently afterwards.”
Alexander-Arnold no longer Liverpool’s problem
It says so much about how successful Slot’s tactics have been at Liverpool that this is barely mentioned at all anymore.
For plenty of the two years before Slot’s arrival, the topic of where Alexander-Arnold should be playing had never been too far away.
Since the former Feyenoord boss rocked up, though, he has made it a moot point. Liverpool’s midfield have been brilliant and Alexander-Arnold has done well as a more orthodox right-back.
With Alexander-Arnold set to join Real Madrid and take over long-term duties from Dani Carvajal, it seems that the Spanish giants will take Slot’s lead and use him as a right-back, too.
That, though, is no longer Liverpool’s problem.
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