THIS weekend it will really hit home that Liverpool have entered the post-Jurgen Klopp era. 

Arne Slot will take charge of his first competitive game at Anfield as Liverpool manager on Sunday when they take on a tricky, savvy Brentford side who are not dissimilar to Liverpool in the way they operate.

It could be a difficult debut home fixture against a side managed by the second-longest serving manager at a Premier League club, Thomas Frank.

In the top flight, only Pep Guardiola has been in the league longer than the Brentford boss, which is a testament to the manager whose club is known for the kind of things Liverpool are known for, albeit at different levels.

“You can see that their manager has been there for a long time already as in their last game against Crystal Palace they could play a 4-4-2 and a 5-3-2,” said Slot of this weekend’s opponent.

“They can change systems within a game, and that’s impossible if you’ve only worked with a group for three, four, or five weeks, maybe even after a year that’s still not possible.

“It’s so difficult to bring the best out of them in one system, so if you can play two systems with them you have to conclude that Thomas Frank is doing a really good job over there for a lot of years already.”

There is a marriage of coaching and recruitment at Brentford that is vital for a club to function in the modern game, especially at the Premier League level. 

That they have remained in the league since their debut in the 2021/22 season is down to their consistency with Frank and the way they work throughout, from recruitment and analysis to sports science to coaching.

Liverpool under Klopp were a prime example of these methods in action at the very top level, and Klopp fully bought into the whole thing in a way his predecessor, Brendan Rodgers, didn't.

Klopp was a perfect fit for Liverpool’s approach under their current owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG), with everyone at the club pushing in the same direction with the same aims, regardless of their department.

Under Klopp’s management, Michael Edwards was hailed as one of the best sporting directors in the game and Ian Graham’s work as director of research was (eventually) much lauded, even if it went under the radar for a while.

The task for Liverpool was to find a manager who would embrace the club’s methods as Klopp had done. Not only that, but find a manager whose approach, even if it might be slightly different, was not a jarring departure from Klopp’s style of football and player management.

With this kind of remit, it is not surprising that Liverpool’s eventual choice to replace Klopp came from slightly outside the box. 

Slot would not be the first name many thought of when Klopp announced he would leave the club at the end of the 2023/24 season. 

The names doing the rounds included Roberto De Zerbi, then of Brighton, Sporting CP’s Ruben Amorim, and former Liverpool player Xabi Alonso, who had just ended Bayern Munich’s Bundesliga dominance by winning the German league with Bayer Leverkusen.

Alonso announced his intention to stay on at Leverkusen, and Liverpool turned not to De Zerbi or Amorim, but to Slot.

Slot won the Dutch league (the Eredivisie) with Feyenoord in 2023, in what was just his second season as manager of the Rotterdam club. Under his stewardship, Feyenoord finished runner-up in the Uefa Conference League in his first season and won the Dutch Cup (the KNVB Cup) in his final season.

Slot’s three years with Feyenoord, though over a shorter timespan, had similarities with Klopp’s time at Liverpool. Continental finals, domestic cup wins, and a league title were all part of Klopp’s Liverpool success, but Slot was hired by Liverpool as much for his organisational fit and his approach to the game as a whole, as for his success.

So far, any changes at Liverpool will be evident through coaching alone, as the club have not signed any new players since Slot’s arrival.

The new regime above Slot, which has seen Edwards return in a higher role overseeing FSG’s football operation and Richard Hughes appointed as Liverpool’s sporting director, has shown its ability to get good transfer fees for players sold — something it did well under Edwards previously.

This includes the two sales to Brentford. Fabio Carvalho and Sepp van den Berg joined the west London club for around £50 million combined. It’s another indicator of the similarities between the two clubs that they both saw the same potential in the same players.

Liverpool’s approach to signing new players remains a patient one, perhaps overly so in some cases, but it has served them well more often than not.

The way the club operates in the transfer market has seen it steer well clear of the profitability and sustainability issues encountered by many other Premier League clubs in recent years, meaning they always retain the financial leeway to sign players once they believe the right one is available.

Aside from strengthening the team through new signings, any manager worth their salt looking to stamp their own identity at a new club will believe they can do so through coaching alone. After all, many managers have arrived at clubs, signed players familiar to them, and failed.

Liverpool players have already praised Slot’s training methods. There has been talk of a slight shift towards prioritising retaining possession at times when, under Klopp, they might have been immediately looking to hare down the other end of the pitch.

That doesn’t mean there is no direct passing play, pressing or counter-attacking, but it has been tweaked in certain moments to take the sting out of the game in situations that could lead to problems defensively.

“He is fully involved, he coaches us a lot, and he is big on the finer details of things,” midfielder Curtis Jones said of Slot in pre-season

“He has a certain way of playing and he knows it is going to take a little bit of time because it is obviously a big change.

“He and his staff are chilled about it and they know that the quality is all there.”

All of this is not to say that there aren’t areas in this Liverpool squad that need improving. The club admitted as much with their public and ultimately failed pursuit of Real Sociedad’s deep-lying midfielder Martin Zubimendi.

Not too much further down the line, they will need to replace the likes of Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk who are 32 and 33 respectively. Having failed to sign the midfielder they felt they needed, the club may start planning ahead so they have less to do next summer, but time in this transfer window is running out and they may wait until January.

The easiest thing to predict in these situations is that the manager replacing the legendary manager will not be as good and that the team will not be as successful. In these situations, failed new signings are more often to blame than any perceived lack of new signings.

Though Klopp’s Premier League tenure was shorter, the situation is not dissimilar to Manchester United post-Alex Ferguson or Arsenal post-Arsene Wenger. It is safe to say that the managers coming in after those struggled somewhat. 

This post-Klopp period is a real test of Liverpool’s methods, and they hope those methods have found them an ideal Klopp successor in Slot. This is the major new signing they needed to get right this summer.

When asked whether he was nervous ahead of his first league game at Anfield, Slot replied: “No, I’m not nervous at all. I trust what we as a staff do during the whole week to prepare the team in the best possible way, and I trust the team a lot.”

It’s this kind of trust in process, in coaching, and the work already put into signing and/or developing players that Liverpool hope will get their new era off to a respectable start.