Rumors of Liverpool's inevitability have been gravely exaggerated

More lessons from a very young Premier League season.

Arne Slot took to the Premier League like a duck to water. The Dutchman arrived on Merseyside, took over a Liverpool team who’d finished nine points off the pace the year before, and won the title at a canter. Then the Reds went out this summer and splashed some serious cash — £450 million, to be exact, though they had some money coming in from player sales, too. They bought shiny new forwards to replace the ultimately failed signing of Darwin Núñez.

When Hugo Ekitike hit the ground running and Liverpool started off perfect, with seven wins from seven in all competitions, it was only natural for a certain air of inevitability to creep into how they were discussed. They’d won the league with Darwin. Now they had a lethal young striker scoring freely, and they were bringing in Alexander fookin’ Isak at the transfer deadline?

The math was simple: champion team + better strikers = more championships.

But Chelsea struck another blow at that equation this weekend with Estêvão’s stoppage-time strike at Stamford Bridge. It was proper Barclays, that one, befitting of the two-decade-long feud between the Reds and the Blues, and it was Liverpool’s third defeat in eight days. Suddenly, nothing is preordained, and a whole lot of people are questioning the gospel.

Have Liverpool truly improved at full back with the signings of Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez? Will another mega-signing, Florian Wirtz, take the kind of time to settle that his manager did not, and is he disrupting Liverpool’s shape and making them easier to play through in the meantime? (He started the match at the Bridge on the bench.) Can we truly expect Mo Salah to maintain the level he did last term as he moves through his 33rd year? What about Virgil Van Dijk at 34 — and is his partner at center back, Ibrahima Konaté, getting exposed?

Injuries have been part of the story, though Chelsea are ravaged by injury as well and managed to find a way past Liverpool on Saturday. And besides, the injuries that the champions are now forced to deal with raise some uncomfortable questions about last season: How much did the Reds benefit from their strong fitness record at a time when Arsenal and Manchester City were decimated?

City are an interesting case study in this context. The air of inevitability that Pep Guardiola’s side enjoyed for years evaporated over the course of a few months last season, though they were certainly at the end of a cycle: Kevin De Bruyne, İlkay Gündoğan and others were winding down as top players, at least in games played at a Premier League pace. (De Bruyne could be reborn down in Italy this season, which would be a lot of fun.) Liverpool’s squad is much younger, for the most part, but a lot of the predictions around this current season were predicated on the idea that Salah and Van Dijk would maintain exactly the same level this year as they did last.

There’s also the uncommon situation that Slot’s second year in the job could have much more upheaval and require more deft management than did the first, particularly as far as getting all the pieces to fit together. Last year, his team was essentially plug-and-play, though he did uncover Ryan Gravenberch as the solution in deep midfield. Now there’s been a revolution at fullback and in the forward line, and Slot faces a challenge more common to a first-year manager. He’s got to get his bearings.

As for Liverpool’s opponents this past weekend, Chelsea just notched their third marquee victory of calendar year 2025. But this is really their first major statement in my book. Their win over Liverpool in the spring had the caveat that the Reds had already won the title at the aforementioned canter. They were on the beach. Chelsea’s win over PSG at the Club World Cup was impressive, but I’d maintain it existed in a sort of twilight zone, detached from the normal business of top-level European football. And they didn’t have to beat any top teams to get to that final.

This was something else, even if they happened to catch Liverpool at a good time. The Reds were doubting themselves in a number of departments, but they still looked dangerous and Chelsea were able to cope even with all their own injuries at the back. (And, to be fair, throughout the team.) This is the kind of challenge I laid down for Enzo Maresca a few weeks back, when Chelseaworld was crowing, “Champions of the World” and boasting about the third-tier European trophy they’d won at the modest cost of £1.5 billion.

I felt solid in that call when they were soundly beaten by Bayern Munich, who look formidable this year, and when the West Londoners started taking Ls (and red cards) all over the place domestically. But if this is the start of a serious run of form, maybe Chelsea really will challenge for the top honors, including the Premier League. Personally, I think they’re more a Top Four outfit, but we should all have learned by now that we don’t know what’s around the corner.

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NEWCASTLE UNITED 2-0 NOTTINGHAM FOREST

There’s a rich tradition of renegade and ruthless Premier League owners, as Chelsea can attest. Absurdly wealthy and powerful men buy these clubs, put shocking sums of money in, and demand immediate results. If they don’t get them, or they just get a bad taste in their mouth, the manager is torn out in short order and a new one planted in his place.

Sometimes, it works quite well, even if (in my WOKE! view) this whole MO tarnishes the club. Other times, as we’re seeing with Nottingham Forest, it’s a bit of a disaster.

I have no privileged information regarding the fine details of how that football club is run or what happened for Nuno Espírito Santo to be shoved out the door. There were reports of a rift with the new-ish head of football, Edu, who was recruited from Arsenal last season. There was the on-pitch verbal mauling from Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis after an undesirable result last season which may have sent things sailing fatefully towards an iceberg.

But the fact remains that last season was a very successful one for Nottingham Forest Football Club. They very nearly qualified for the Champions League, and through some ugly chicanery within the labyrinthine halls of football governance, they’re playing in the Europa League this term. And yet Nuno has been fired and replaced with a manager who lost twice as many games last year.

Forest lost 11 Premier League matches in 2024/25; Ange Postecoglou lost 22 with Tottenham Hotspur. The latter did win the Europa League with the North London outfit, even if I think the quality of that competition is ripe for a reassessment now that Champions League teams aren’t dropping down for the knockout rounds. But even with all that, it was a pretty mystifying appointment.

Forest traded the solidity and results-first pragmatism of Nuno, pretty much a necessity for a club in their position, for the freewheeling eccentricities of Postecolgouball. The results have not been good. They’re yet to win under the new manager, and they’re one point above the drop zone. The pressure is mounting on the Aussie already.

This leaves the ruthless renegade at the top of the club, Marinakis, in a position where he might have to pay off two dismissed head coaches in the space of a few months. Things could still improve for Ange at Forest, and he could romp to a second-straight Europa League title with a second club. But does it look likely? And who is really to blame if this season comes unstuck at the City Ground?