Arne Slot has suggested he will make some tweaks to his Liverpool team against Chelsea and in the Reds’ final four games of the Premier League season. Slot took only a brief respite to celebrate Liverpool’s Premier League title victory and his wife’s birthday before returning to football duties. Despite the monumental achievement of leading Liverpool to the title in his debut season, Slot was very quickly back to work.
“Monday was my wife’s birthday, so she was here together with the children and some friends, so we had lunch together,” he shared. “Tuesday they left, so Tuesday was, I would almost say, going back to normal. I don’t know what it was, Tuesday actually. So it’s not like the whole world has changed by winning this league title. Sometimes you think before you win, like, oh, probably everything is going to change, but when I woke up Monday morning, I still felt the same person.”
However, he immediately began planning training for their final four games once his family returned to Holland. Slot was already strategising for the upcoming matches against Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton, and Crystal Palace. He said: “Thinking about, OK, how are we going to do the upcoming weeks? Because Wednesday was the first time we were back together again.”
“So Tuesday was the first time when I started calling staff members to see how we were going to go through the upcoming weeks, and maybe Wednesday, when we were together with the staff, was the first time you start to think about the Chelsea game.”
Liverpool currently have a comfortable 15-point lead over Arsenal, but they’re still short of the record 19-point winning margin set by Manchester City in 2018. Individual players will also be setting personal targets, such as Mo Salah who is just four goals shy of his best Premier League tally.
Slot plans to make some adjustments to his team, giving certain players opportunities to impress, but don’t expect a complete overhaul in the final few games. He explained: “We could maybe see a player in a certain position, what he does in that position combined with someone else.
“But like I said it is not going to be a big change, there’s not going to be seven or eight new starters. It’s going to most of it be the same and to see how a few players do in a difficult game like Chelsea away and where they are in their development.”
However, Slot’s attention is already shifting towards next season, with work underway to bring in new players alongside sporting director Richard Hughes. He added: “In the background, of course I did this already a little bit, because it’s not like after we won the league, that’s the first time Richard [Hughes] called me and said, ‘OK, these are the players we are interested in!’
“But I think there’s a bit more time for that now than there would have been if we still needed three points or a win or whatever. So there’s a bit more time now to have these conversations.”
