Let’s Find Out What We Have

As always in life, there are a few ways to greet Saturday’s 2024-25 season kickoff, the Reds’ 7:30 a.m. visit to Ipswich Town, who were last in the Premier League when Tony Blair was talking WMDs. For us in Brooklyn, there will be enough of the familiar. There will be breakfast tacos; there will be (for some) the notorious Vinny Effect; there will be a roster full of players who’ve been here before.

But hugging the familiar will be a strange, alien feeling. For the first time in a long while, there’s some first-day-of-school, first-date type of nervous-yet-excited anticipation.

Here, again, but for real this time is Arne Slot, the new boss who’s less of a boss than the last one. We’ll be locked in with this new head coach (not a manager!) we don’t know for a while; how will he arrange the desks?

There are so many questions. That’s what uncertainty is. For starters: What is “Slot Ball,” and would you know it if you saw it?

Who are the favorites, and who will be left out? Is Ryan Gravenberch a 6, is Joe Gomez a center-half exclusively again, is Darwin Nunez a malcontent? (Sepp van den Berg is, but admit it: if he walked into the Monro, would you recognize him?)

Do we need another player or three? Why did we fail to sign the 6 of our dreams for the second-straight season, are Trent and Virgil and Mo Salah all playing their last season?

What, in other words, do we have here?

Because we don’t really know yet. And the not-knowing is as exciting as it is nerve-racking. It is, as they say, why we get up in the morning.

If Jurgen Klopp had a fault, it was that at times he was too rigid and predictable. We knew what we had because we knew the players and we knew the system. It was because the thing Klopp put together almost always worked, and worked well, and worked better than anything this club has had in a generation. But when it didn’t work, there was a tendency to just keep trying, to dig our way up, and then – the nadir of it all – to sit forlornly on a water cooler in Bergamo, fresh out of juice and out of ideas, wishing you were somewhere else (like 90 minutes or ten days in the past).

If Arne Slot has one advantage over the Boss of Bosses, it’s that he has juice. To torture the metaphor, we’re just not sure what the flavor is, or how much of it is in the jug, or how any of it will taste at the Etihad or the Emirates.

Slot has not had to juggle European Cup and Premier League grinds for most of a decade like Klopp did. We don’t know yet how he’ll manage all that without spilling. Maybe he will and maybe the bodies of the players, many of whom had longer seasons and shorter breaks than normal because they are their countries’ best, won’t cooperate.

All we know is that Arne Slot comes here after doing great things at Feyernood, which is to say he succeeded past most expectations (and in that way, for me, has both the better resume and the better aura than the other smooth-headed Dutch manager in the league).

Exceeding expectations will be much harder to do at a club that was a legitimate contender for four trophies, in March, in two seasons out of three, where finishing third is both a reasonable expectation and (truthfully) a massive success all at the same time.

Most other clubs would throw a bus parade qualifying for the Champions League; for us, watching Pep Guardiola smoke yet another cigar is a form of torture. It will feel different, but maybe just as bad, if it’s Mikel Arteta.

I’m still not sure what value the preseason fixtures have. For me, this year, I’ve decided they’re just about vibes and catching a feeling. If that’s true, then we ought to feel pretty good. Arne Slot has good vibes, feels built on his past success and his current player management. The vibes in the USA tour were similar. Trey Nyoni looked great. Diogo Jota and Luis Diaz looked even better.

The Slot era is an opportunity for fresh turn for the familiar, a possible renaissance for a team full of winners of one trophy or another who were Premier League trophy contenders very late in the season. It could be the final push that was lacking. It could be something else. Either way, odds are it won’t be boring.