Liverpool's Summer Rebuild: The Positions Arne Slot Must Fix to Bounce Back in 2026/27

Twelve months ago Liverpool were champions of England. They finished the 2025/26 season fifth, 25 points behind Arsenal, and out of all three cups before the last four. Arne Slot keeps his job. The squad he assembled last summer needs surgery, and the transfer window is where he has to perform it.

From Champions to Fifth

Liverpool won the title with 84 points, then managed 60 the following year. Losing 24 of your own points while finishing 25 behind the new champions is not a wobble, it is a collapse. How does a champion shed that much in a single season? Defending sides are supposed to fade in May, not by November.

Money made the puzzle stranger. Slot spent close to £450 million on Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike, Milos Kerkez, Jeremie Frimpong and Alexander Isak, the sort of spending that usually builds a juggernaut. The opposite happened. Isak captured the whole season in one image, missing the entire preseason and then breaking his leg while scoring against Tottenham in December.

Bookmakers absorbed all of this and reacted quickly. Early odds for 2026/27 opened with real doubt about another title challenge, and the prices listed on Bizbet read less like faith in a comeback and more like a request for proof. After a year this strange, the market wants evidence before it trusts the badge again.

Players are leaving without anyone forcing a sale, which thins the squad further. Several senior names are gone or heading out:

• Mohamed Salah, departing on a free transfer after years as the main source of goals.
• Andy Robertson, also moving on for nothing, closing a long run down the left.
• A group described as uncertain in reports, among them Alisson, Joe Gomez and Wataru Endo.

The Midfield Ran Out of Legs

Opponents overran the Liverpool midfield, especially late in matches once the game stretched. The Athletic reported that the club wants more physicality through the centre, singling out Alexis Mac Allister for a lack of athleticism. For a side that pressed teams into dust a year earlier, that reads like a different team entirely.

Supporters spent the spring refreshing their phones for any hint of a new midfielder. Plenty follow the rumours and the moving odds together, and a quick Bizbet download iOS keeps both on one screen through another slow evening of speculation. The hunt for a genuine ball winner turned into the defining story of the season's closing weeks.

Stripped back, the midfield faults were not hard to spot:

• Rivals cut through the middle far too easily whenever matches opened up.
• The famous press lost its sting the moment legs grew tired.
• No natural destroyer sat in front of the back four to break attacks up.

Problems Down the Flanks and Up Front

Salah's exit is the first job, and it is a brute of a problem. Slot has admitted the club must work out how to move beyond a forward who carried the attack for years. Replacing roughly thirty goals a season, plus the defenders he constantly dragged out of position, takes more than one signing. Over on the opposite side, Robertson's departure leaves last summer's arrival Milos Kerkez with very little cover.

Add everything together and Slot's shopping list almost writes itself. The priorities, loosely in order of urgency:

1. A wide forward with pace and end product to replace what Salah provided.
2. A physical, mobile midfielder to put the bite back into the press.
3. Real depth on the left of defence now that Robertson has gone.
4. Another dependable finisher, since the attack leaned on too few scorers.

None of this is a mystery. The gaps are obvious, the spending has happened before, and the manager has named the problem areas himself. What the 2025/26 season proved, beyond any doubt, is that this squad as built could not defend a thing.