Liverpool Football Club has done it again. Two seasons into Arne Slot’s tenure, the club has decided that the toy in their hand is no longer interesting enough and have hurled it across the room in search of something shinier. Enter Andoni Iraola, the new object of desire, the fresh plaything that surely—surely—will finally bring satisfaction to Anfield’s increasingly impatient toddler ownership.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. Slot was not sacked because he was catastrophically bad. He was sacked because Liverpool, as an institution, has developed the emotional regulation of a three-year-old at a supermarket checkout. One season doesn’t feel like a title-winning season? Bin it. The toy is boring now. We want the other one.
This is what modern football ownership looks like when patience becomes a four-letter word. Slot inherited a club that had just finished outside the Champions League places. He steadied the ship. He brought structure. He did the unsexy work of rebuilding a squad that had been left in a state of advanced decay by Jürgen Klopp’s final seasons. And for this, he gets the sack.
The irony is exquisite. Liverpool spent years—years—under Klopp believing that patience and process were virtues. That you built something over time. That you trusted the manager. That you didn’t panic when things got difficult. Klopp himself was given time to construct something extraordinary, and he did. But apparently, that was the old Liverpool. The new Liverpool is a club run by people who watch TikTok highlights and assume they understand football better than the people actually coaching it.
Now they’re chasing Iraola, a genuinely talented manager who has done impressive work at Rayo Vallecano and Bournemouth. He is not a bad choice. But the speed of the pursuit, the eagerness, the almost desperate energy with which Liverpool is now courting him—it all reeks of panic buying. It smells like a club that has convinced itself that managerial roulette is a legitimate strategy. Spin the wheel. Sack the incumbent. Hope the next one is better.
Here’s what will happen: Iraola will arrive, probably with a decent transfer budget and high expectations. He’ll have a good first season or a difficult one—football doesn’t come with guarantees. If it’s difficult, Liverpool will start eyeing the next shiny toy by March. If it’s good, they’ll convince themselves they were geniuses for making the change. Neither outcome will be fair to anyone involved, but fairness stopped being part of Liverpool’s vocabulary some time ago.
The club that once prided itself on stability and long-term thinking has become a monument to short-termism. They’ve turned managerial appointments into a fast-fashion problem. Buy now, discard later. When the novelty wears off, get the next model. It’s not a strategy. It’s a tantrum that costs millions and damages the club’s credibility with every manager foolish enough to take the job.
Slot deserved more time. Not infinite time—that would be naive. But more than two seasons to implement a genuine rebuild. Instead, he’s been discarded because Liverpool’s ownership has the attention span of a goldfish on espresso. Iraola might be brilliant. He might be a disaster. But he’ll be arriving at a club that has just demonstrated, once again, that patience is not in the house rules.
This is what happens when owners treat football clubs like video games. You can always restart. You can always load a previous save. You can always find a cheat code. Except you can’t. Football doesn’t work that way. And Liverpool, once again, has learned this lesson the hard way—by ignoring it completely.