How Arne Slot Changed Liverpool's Press Without Destroying What Klopp Built

On 8 April 2026, Liverpool played 90 minutes at the Parc des Princes without a shot on target. PSG won 2-0, and the rest of the match data was grim reading: 746 passes to 253, 40 touches in Liverpool’s box to nine, and 81 per cent of the ball for PSG in the first 15 minutes. If you have followed Arne Slot’s Liverpool tactics since 2024, though, the scoreline was not the strangest part of the night. The shape was. Liverpool were not playing Slot’s football and they were not playing Klopp’s. They were playing something built for one evening in Paris, and it lost.

Slot was sacked on 30 May after finishing fifth, a year after he won the Premier League. He now sits on UEFA’s Technical Observer Panel, so this season he will be the one taking apart other coaches’ game plans. I want to take apart his, especially the one that looked sound before kick-off and fell apart anyway.

What did Arne Slot change about Liverpool’s press?

He pressed less and organised more. Slot kept Klopp’s aggression for specific moments but lowered the team’s default height, so Liverpool went from a relentless high block to a mid-block that pressed on triggers.

In Klopp’s last season, 2023-24, Liverpool allowed 8.9 opposition passes per defensive action (PPDA), the second-most intense press in the league, according to the Premier League’s tactical profile of Slot. In Slot’s first season that rose to roughly 10.8. In practice, opponents got about two more passes before a red shirt engaged them.

PPDA is a blunt tool, but it does tell you what a team intends. A low number means you hunt the ball all over the pitch. A higher one means you have picked your battles. Klopp’s 4-3-3 hunted. Slot’s 4-2-3-1 picked.

Dominik Szoboszlai made it work. Without the ball, the 4-2-3-1 became a 4-4-2, with Szoboszlai stepping up next to the striker to screen the opposition’s pivot. Behind him, Ryan Gravenberch held the space alongside Alexis Mac Allister. Gravenberch had gone from forgotten squad player to one of the best No 6s in the league. The wingers did not sprint at centre-backs. They curved their runs to shut passing lanes and waited for a trigger, such as a slow pass into the full-back, a heavy touch or a receiver with his back to play. Then the trap shut.

Did Slot destroy Klopp’s gegenpressing?

No. He kept the counter-press and got rid of the exhaustion. The six-second reaction after losing the ball survived. The 90-minute chase did not.

The case against him goes like this: a calmer press is a softer press, and Slot spent Klopp’s inheritance on a style suited to a slower squad. The 2024-25 title makes that hard to argue. Liverpool won the league with 84 points while pressing less intensely than any recent Liverpool side that had challenged for it. A gentler press won more than Klopp’s harder final one did, because the structure covered ground that legs used to.

Slot did not dismantle Klopp’s pressing machine. He made it cheaper to run, and Liverpool won a title on what they saved.

Gegenpressing, the immediate counter-press after losing the ball, was the most visible part of Klopp’s system but never the whole of it. Underneath it sat vertical compactness. If the back line and the front line stay close together, winning the ball back is a short sprint rather than a long one. Slot kept the compactness and started it lower. Lose the ball in midfield with a compact block and you can recover. Lose it with your full-backs 60 yards upfield and you concede the kind of goals that kept leaking in Klopp’s last two seasons.

Why did Liverpool’s press break down in 2025-26?

Opponents stopped trying to play through it and went over the top instead. Liverpool faced more long balls than anyone in the league, and they kept losing the second ball.

This showed up early. By October 2025, Opta’s analysis had Liverpool facing 571 long passes, at least 46 more than any other side. Long balls made up 20.5 per cent of all passes played against them, the highest share in the division. Manchester United went long 75 times in their 2-1 win at Anfield. Crystal Palace did it 71 times and Bournemouth 70.

Winning headers was not the problem. Virgil van Dijk had won 46 of 59 aerial duels, more than any player in the league. The Premier League’s breakdown found that the damage came after the header, on the knockdown. A mid-block is a horizontal shape built to screen passes along the floor. Play over it and the midfield line is turned to face its own goal, too far from the defenders to compete for the second ball.

At the same time, the pressing itself dropped off. Figures from The Times, cited by Sports Illustrated, had Liverpool falling from 177 presses per match in 2024-25 to around 141 midway through 2025-26. That was a 20 per cent drop and the lowest figure in the Premier League. Slot still had the structure, but he had lost the triggers, and a mid-block without triggers is just 10 outfield players standing in roughly the right places and waiting.

Trent Alexander-Arnold’s departure made it worse. In 2024-25, the right side worked because Trent’s passing paid for Mohamed Salah staying high and not tracking back. Good teams always went after the space behind Salah. That was the accepted cost. With Trent gone and Jeremie Frimpong and Conor Bradley in and out injured, Liverpool still paid that cost but no longer got anything back for it.

By April, they had lost ten league games and been knocked out of the FA Cup 4-0 at Manchester City. Then came Paris.

What did Slot change for PSG away in April 2026?

He left Salah on the bench and switched to a back three, which became a back five without the ball. It was the first time he had done that all season. To defend deeper against PSG’s pace, he gave up his own mid-block.

ESPN’s report called it “an unfamiliar three centre-back formation” and a “conservative strategy”. Luis Enrique pointed out afterwards that Slot had not used five defenders once all season. Slot’s explanation was simple: PSG had pace everywhere.

That reasoning deserves a fair hearing. It was not stupid, and Slot had evidence for it.

Why the back five looked like the right call

Liverpool had already won in Paris by defending deep. In March 2025, they won 1-0 there with hardly any of the ball.

That last-16 first leg on 5 March 2025 was one of the strangest Champions League wins in recent memory. PSG had 27 shots and Alisson made nine saves. Harvey Elliott came off the bench and scored with Liverpool’s first shot on target in the 87th minute. Liverpool sat deep for long spells, and the Coaches’ Voice analysis of the game shows PSG’s midfielders counter-pressing so hard that Liverpool could barely play out at all.

Six days later, Liverpool lost 1-0 at Anfield and went out 4-1 on penalties. PSG went on to win the competition.

Now look at it from Slot’s side in April 2026. His team were out of form. Alisson was injured, so Giorgi Mamardashvili was in goal. PSG’s front three of Ousmane Dembélé, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Désiré Doué attacked the areas that had hurt Liverpool all season: the channels behind advanced full-backs, and the right side behind a winger who did not defend. A back five fills those channels, and dropping Salah closes the hole on the right. Keep the first leg tight and finish the job at Anfield. For an underdog, that is the textbook plan.

On paper, each part of that plan holds up. In Paris, every part of it failed.

Assumption one: more defenders means more protection

The back five did cover the wide channels, with Frimpong and Milos Kerkez playing as wing-backs. Kvaratskhelia still had seven shots, more than twice Liverpool’s total for the whole match, according to Flashscore’s post-match breakdown.

The fifth defender has to come from midfield or attack. In a low block, that leaves one fewer body in the half-spaces between the lines, which is exactly where Vitinha and João Neves operate. Vitinha completed 133 of 139 passes. Every PSG outfield player apart from Dembélé passed at over 90 per cent. Liverpool’s extra defender stood where PSG were happy to leave him, and PSG used their spare man elsewhere.

The second goal is the clearest example. In the 65th minute, Neves found Kvaratskhelia between the lines. He cut in from the left, beat Joe Gomez and went round Mamardashvili. Liverpool had five defenders behind the ball, and the pass that beat them came from a half-space nobody was guarding.

Assumption two: Paris 2025 could be repeated

The 2025 win was not a blueprint. It was a goalkeeper having the night of his life. Nine saves from 27 shots does not mean the plan worked. It means one player covered for a plan that did not. In 2026 that player was injured, so Slot was trying to recreate a game without the one thing that had decided it.

The 2025 team also had an escape route. Salah stayed high in March 2025, so clearances had somewhere to go and PSG’s full-backs had to keep track of him. With Salah on the bench in April 2026, the ball came straight back. Gravenberch and Szoboszlai, Liverpool’s most frequent passers, managed 29 passes each, and Szoboszlai lost possession 14 times. With no one to press and no one to run in behind, a low block just waits to concede.

Assumption three: a narrow deficit keeps the tie alive

This is the best defence of Slot, so it needs a proper answer. The argument is that 2-0 away is survivable, the back five held it to two, and the second leg showed Liverpool could compete. At Anfield on 14 April, they had 21 shots and 1.92 expected goals to PSG’s 1.25, per beIN SPORTS.

I read the second leg the other way. Needing two goals, Liverpool pushed numbers forward, and Dembélé scored twice on the break, once in the 72nd minute and once in stoppage time. The Paris plan did not keep the tie alive. It guaranteed that the return leg would be played in PSG’s favourite game state, against an opponent chasing the game with space behind them. Losing 2-0 without a shot on target is not managing a deficit. Liverpool had only postponed the risks they avoided in Paris, and at Anfield they had to take all of them at once.

What single decision would have changed the result?

Slot should have played the 4-2-3-1 mid-block in Paris, with Salah starting high as the outlet. Liverpool would have kept their identity and their counter-attack, and the counter-attack was the only thing PSG had real reason to worry about.

I am not saying Liverpool would have won. PSG were the better team and would probably have gone through over two legs anyway. But the job was to keep the tie competitive, and the back five made that impossible because it took away the two things that made Slot’s Liverpool dangerous.

The first was the press trigger. Slot’s 4-4-2 worked because Szoboszlai could step up, cut off Vitinha’s passing lanes and push PSG’s build-up towards the touchline. A back five has no free player for that job. With nobody to press, Liverpool did nothing to disrupt PSG’s spell of 86 per cent possession after the hour.

The second was the threat in transition. Salah high and wide keeps Nuno Mendes at home. Leave Salah out and Mendes is free, and it was Mendes who supplied the cut-back Dembélé blazed over in the 53rd minute. Salah not defending had always been worth the price, because it forced PSG to defend as well.

Slot’s 2024-25 title came from a mid-block that pressed on triggers and attacked through Salah. In Paris in April 2026, he gave up both to defend deeper, and Liverpool did not manage a shot on target.

He spent two seasons showing that you could keep Klopp’s ideas without Klopp’s intensity, because a smarter press and a better structure could do some of the running. In 2025-26, that structure slowly lost its triggers, and under pressure he did not fix it. In the biggest game of his last season, he abandoned it.

So the press Slot built did not fail against PSG. It never got on the pitch. Of all the decisions in his final season, that is the one I keep coming back to.