By Opta Analyst | Created at 2026-08-19 12:21:56 | Updated at 2026-08-20 05:21:09
19 hours ago
Arne Slot is out and Andoni Iraola is in at Anfield. Can the former Bournemouth man succeed in his first season on Merseyside? We look at five key questions for Liverpool heading into the 2026-27 season.
This time last year, you would have needed quite the imagination to picture anyone but Arne Slot in the Liverpool dugout heading into the 2026-27 season.
However, having won the Premier League in Slot’s first campaign in 2024-25, the Reds’ title defence did not go according to plan. They ultimately finished fifth last season, 25 points behind champions Arsenal, and 24 points behind their own total from the previous campaign.
That drop off despite heavy investment in the squad last summer, coupled with general dissatisfaction from the fans about what they deemed to be a fairly uninspiring style of football, led to Slot’s removal. He has been replaced by the highly-respected Andoni Iraola.
The Spaniard excelled at Bournemouth, breaking their top-flight points record in each of his three seasons on the south coast, and almost pipping Liverpool to UEFA Champions League qualification last term.
Will Iraola be able to get the Reds back to competing for the Premier League title, though, while also navigating the Champions League for the first time in his managerial career?
On top of that, experienced trio Mohamed Salah, Andy Robertson and Ibrahima Konaté have left, and while some new arrivals have been secured, Liverpool are yet to make a statement signing to replace the Egyptian King.
Reports suggest it could be Paris Saint-Germain’s Bradley Barcola, but with two weeks left of the transfer window, will they be able to get their business done?
We’ve asked five questions of Liverpool ahead of the 2026-27 campaign.
Will Iraola’s Style Work at Top Level?
It seems a silly question to ask as his style of play is reportedly a big reason why Iraola was brought to Liverpool. But there is a difference between doing enough to impress at Bournemouth and doing enough for one of the biggest clubs on the planet.
The Basque boss likes his teams to press high and be fast and direct on the ball. It is an approach that six-time Premier League winner Pep Guardiola previously suggested was the direction football is heading.
“Today, modern football is the way that Bournemouth play, that Newcastle play, Brighton play, Liverpool have always been like that,” the former Manchester City manager said last year.
Iraola likes his team to break forward quickly, which has indeed been a growing theme in the Premier League in recent years. The 2024-25 season is the only one on record (since 2006-07) to have seen more shots from fast breaks (1.79 per game) than last season (1.75). That rate increased from 0.78 per game in 2020-21 to more than twice as many in each of the last two seasons.
In his time at the Vitality Stadium, only one team had more shots from fast breaks in Premier League games than Iraola’s Bournemouth (128), and you’ll never guess who it was. Yes, Liverpool (155), so on paper, it seems like a match made in heaven.
During Iraola’s reign, Bournemouth attacked the quickest of every Premier League team, with the average speed of their moves upfield averaging 1.95 metres per second, while only one ever-present team in that time (Everton) averaged fewer passes per sequence than Bournemouth (2.98).
The new Liverpool boss wants to get the ball forward as quickly as possible, which should bode well for two certain superstars who need a big season at Anfield…
Can Wirtz and Isak Live Up to their Price Tags?
It was a level of spending we’d never previously seen from Liverpool. Last summer, two statement signings arrived in Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak for a combined fee of £225 million (rising to around £245m with add ons).
However, Wirtz took a while to find his feet at Anfield, while the messy way Isak left Newcastle United meant several months of trying to catch up, fitness-wise. Then, just as he seemingly got up to speed, he broke his leg in the win at Tottenham in December.
Wirtz managed seven goals and eight assists in 49 games in all competitions, while Isak had to settle for four goals and one assist in 22 outings. Both are capable of so much more, and Liverpool will need to see that this season.
In the 2024-25 season just before they joined Liverpool, Wirtz recorded 16 goals and 14 assists in 45 games for Bayer Leverkusen, while Isak posted 27 goals and six assists in 42 games for Newcastle.
The assumption was that they could improve on those numbers playing in a stronger team, but at this stage, if you offered Liverpool those same totals – a combined 63 goal involvements – this season, they would surely take it.
With superhuman output machine Salah gone, it seems clear that the plan was for Wirtz to replace his creativity and Isak to replace his goals in the long-term. Perhaps with Liverpool’s talisman no longer around, they can take on that responsibility a bit more emphatically.
There have been shoots of promise from both in pre-season. Wirtz scored in friendlies against Leeds and Monaco, while Isak looked sharp in the latter game as he also got on the scoresheet.
It might still take some time for them to click on a weekly basis like the famous Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres partnership from the late 2000s at Anfield, but with Salah gone, Wirtz and Isak will surely have to get back to at least close to their best this season for Liverpool to challenge for major trophies again.
Will they Suffer from Set-Pieces Again?
There was an overwhelming feeling that Liverpool had a soft underbelly last season, and that was rarely more apparent than when they were facing set-pieces.
We all know how such situations dominated the Premier League in 2025-26, and so it was a particularly bad time to be poor at defending them.
Only West Ham (15) and Leeds United (12) conceded more goals from corners in the Premier League than Liverpool (11) last season, but when you factor in all other non-penalty set-pieces (free-kicks and throw-ins), the Reds conceded 20 times. That was the joint-most along with Crystal Palace and, erm, Iraola’s Bournemouth.
Could that be a problem, then, especially as Iraola has brought his backroom staff over with him from the south coast? They weren’t able to solve Bournemouth’s leaky record from set-pieces, so how likely are they to do so for Liverpool?
Iraola has confirmed that Tommy Elphick will be in charge of overseeing defensive set-pieces, while Shaun Cooper will have responsibility for attacking ones. Both will work with set-piece analyst Lewis Mahoney, who took charge of them after former set-play coach Aaron Briggs left the club in December 2025.
Liverpool did improve offensively from set-pieces in the second half of last season. Up to 1 January 2026, they only scored three times from non-penalty set-pieces, the joint fewest in the Premier League, but between then and the end of the season, they scored 15, at least three more than any other team.
Only four teams conceded more than their eight in that time, though, and they have also conceded a few times from set-pieces in pre-season. Defensively, there’s work for Iraola, or Elphick, to do.
One thing that Iraola should cure is the general soft underbelly, though. He made his Bournemouth team exceptionally hard to beat at times, especially more recently. The Cherries are technically still on an 18-game unbeaten streak in the Premier League, comfortably the longest of any team last season.
Can Iraola Cope with European Football?
It is one of the biggest questions being asked about Iraola’s appointment. For all his exciting football, his high-energy pressing and directness, has it only worked so well because his Bournemouth team rarely had more than one game a week?
In his two seasons in the top flight at Rayo Vallecano and across his three seasons at Bournemouth, his teams never played more than 45 games in all competitions in a campaign. In the last 22 years, Liverpool have only played fewer than 50 games twice (43 in 2013-14, 47 in 2016-17). They are already guaranteed to play at least 48 this season.
Iraola is going to have to adapt, particularly as it doesn’t look like he’s going to be blessed with a massive squad (which we’ll come to shortly).
Even with fewer games, he often struggled to keep players fit at Bournemouth. You may remember the famous images in early 2025 of a cavalcade of Cherries players watching games from an executive box, with seemingly more crammed in there than there were on the pitch.
Photo by Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth/AFC Bournemouth via Getty ImagesNot only is he going to have to keep his players fit, but Liverpool are expected to be competitive in every competition they’re in. Slot came in for plenty of criticism last season, but he did guide Liverpool comfortably into the knockout stages of the Champions League for a second successive campaign. In fact, the only team able to stop his team in the competition on both occasions were eventual winners PSG.
Iraola will be relishing managing in the Champions League, but keeping his team fresh and ready for eight midweek games in the league phase before the end of January will be a big ask for a coach who has only one previous experience in European competition – six Europa League group games with AEK Larnaca in 2018-19, and Iraola was sacked in the January.
It can’t go as badly this time, can it? (looks around for Mick McCarthy…)
Do They Have Enough Depth to Challenge on Four Fronts?
A club the size of Liverpool should aim to get to the final of every competition they’re in. That means assuming they’ll be playing at least 65 matches in a season, and therefore building a squad capable of getting through that much work. That’s not to say they will play that many, but as the old adage goes, ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’.
We recently did a squad audit of Iraola’s options, and concluded that there is still quite a bit of business Liverpool should consider doing in the final two weeks of the transfer window.
They’ve addressed their centre-back hole with the loan move for Ronald Araujo, but midfield and attack still look light.
If Curtis Jones leaves for Inter, as is seemingly likely, the expectation is that teenager Trey Nyoni will step up to take his place. He has impressed in pre-season and looks ready for more responsibility, but it would also be a big ask to make such a leap. Nyoni played 237 minutes for Liverpool in all competitions last season (excluding stoppage time), with just two starts (14 overall appearances). Jones played 2,849 minutes, with 28 starts (49 overall appearances).
They were also quite fortunate with injuries in midfield last season. Wirtz, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai made at least 40 starts each, though the Hungarian sometimes played at right-back. If any of those four are sidelined for any significant period this season, there isn’t much below them to come in and cover. Wataru Endo is still around, but made even fewer appearances than Nyoni last season (12).
The wide forward areas remain sparse. Reports suggest the club are trying to address that with potentially two more incomings, but the centre-forward position is another matter.
With Hugo Ekitiké out injured for several more months, Liverpool currently only have one recognised senior striker in Isak, and he was only able to play 22 games last season. As things stand, Cody Gakpo and Federico Chiesa are the likeliest next options, but neither are natural strikers, and there’s a chance one or both will be sold by the end of the window anyway.
Giving opportunities to young prospects Lewis Koumas, Will Wright or Jayden Danns (when fit) would be nice to see, but it currently feels like the drop-off from Isak to anyone else is absolutely cavernous.
Knowing that Iraola’s football asks a lot of his players and with ambitions to be playing over 60 games this season, it would be a risky move from the club to leave their new head coach short.
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