THE ROOT CAUSE OF LIVERPOOL'S PROBLEMS

Paul Cope
27th November 2025

I’ve debated whether I should write this.

On the one hand, I’ve had enough experience publishing articles about football online to know that writing something of this nature will inevitably summon the worst of the internet in reply.

On the other, with what I do for a living it’s become increasingly difficult to watch knowledgeable football people, including the Liverpool manager, genuinely looking and sounding like they have no explanation for what has happened to the team this season.

On balance, I’ve decided it’s worth sharing this for the rational minded football fans out there to consider as the underlying explanation for an almost unprecedented time in the history of Liverpool Football Club.

Let me start by saying that elite sports teams are complex beasts.

There are so many moving parts that it’s almost impossible to pinpoint one thing that explains a slump in performance like we’re currently witnessing.

Old players whose performance has dipped.

New players who haven’t settled.

Players who have departed the club and left a huge space behind.

One signing that wasn’t made that now looks like a big mistake.

However, in my view, there is one thing underlying everything else.

It’s the one thing many people have mentioned but seemingly very few want to look at directly, maybe because it feels like it’s being used as an excuse and it can’t be used as that.

The purpose of this isn’t to make excuses for anything. The purpose is to suggest a rational explanation for what’s happening.

What’s Changed Since Last Season?

The place to start is to ask what’s changed since last season?

It’s important to remember, as I’ve seen mentioned over the past few days, that many of this team and squad were described not so long ago as mentality monsters.

Most of this squad won a Premier League title only a few months ago.

Some have won the Champions League.

One has won the World Cup.

So, do we think that those same players have just suddenly stopped wanting it as much as they once did? That the captain and leading scorer have decided they no longer care as much because they’ve signed new deals?

That players who have won the biggest prizes in the game have suddenly taken their collective feet off the pedal?

That could obviously be true, but it doesn’t stand up to any real scrutiny.

If that was the explanation, why did Van Dijk, Salah and Mac Allister put in the performances they did last season when between them they’d already won the biggest prizes the game has to offer?

The same can be said for the new players not settling and us missing the likes of Luis Diaz and Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Again, those factors have occurred in the past when Liverpool’s squads were far weaker than it is now, and those teams and squads didn’t go on the club’s worst run since 1953.

The Thing No-One Wants to Focus On

The one thing that’s changed since last season that is unprecedented is the one thing no-one really wants to talk properly about.

And for me to talk about it I want you to pause for a moment and do something that most football fans don’t like to do.

I want you to look at the young men who play for Liverpool Football Club as normal humans.

Because that’s what they are.

As I sit typing this I can already feel the army of online keyboard warriors bursting to scream at me that these human beings get paid loads of money every week.

I know: they’re all really, really rich.

But here’s something you need to accept if you’re going to read the rest of this calmly.

It doesn’t matter how much money any human has in their bank account or how much they get paid at the end of every week.

They’re still human and feel all the things that all humans feel. No amount of money overrides our basic emotions.

If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have so many high-profile movie stars and celebrities committing suicide when they seemingly have a perfect life.

So, what has happened to these young men since last season that could be the one thing underlying everything else?

One of their best friends died suddenly in unexpected and tragic circumstances.

It saddens me that I know as I type that line that some people will read it and immediately push back against it.

But let me take you back to the first game of the season.

One of the team’s most experienced players stood in front of the Kop after a dramatic win and cried while the crowd sang for his lost friend and team mate.

Last week, after Scotland had qualified for the World Cup, Liverpool’s vice-captain was in tears as he talked about the loss and admitted he’d been really struggling in his hotel room before the game.

These aren’t things we can just dismiss.

These are palpable signs of just how badly some of these young men have been impacted by the loss of one of their closest friends.

How Does It Explain The Slump?

I know you might read what I’ve just written and be shouting “but, Paul, how can that explain how erratic everything has been? How does it explain how a team can play well for 60 minutes then fall apart, or how it can beat Real Madrid one week then capitulate to Nottingham Forest a few weeks later?”

I’m glad you asked.

The problem is explained by something we don’t talk about at all in our society, and the answer also lets me address why I feel qualified to talk about this and put it forward as an explanation.

For the past seven and a half years I’ve been intensively studying psychology, emotions and human behaviour, and I did it for one reason: to save my own life.

To the outside world I had a perfect existence. I wasn’t a movie star or a footballer, but I was seemingly successful, wealthy and happy. However, behind the scenes I was secretly deeply depressed and suicidal.

That led me to tear everything apart in search of answers, which I found, allowing me to transform my life.

I took what I’d learned and started coaching people around the world using the same philosophies, with many of those people crediting the ideas with saving or transforming their lives.

What I found is that the majority of the problems we all face in life are caused by repressed and suppressed emotions, and that’s exactly what I think is causing everything we can see happening with Liverpool that otherwise seems so baffling.

Emotional Suppression

This isn’t the place to go into the deeper explanation for why we’ve all learned to repress and suppress our emotions but, in simple terms, most of us have been taught since we were little kids that certain emotions are not acceptable to feel.

Sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, grief, loss, shame.

The problem, though, as the legendary psycho-analyst Carl Jung coined, is that whatever we resist, persists.

When we don’t feel our emotions fully, they linger and manifest in other areas of life, usually in subconscious and unhealthy ways.

While we’ve started talking more about mental health in our societies, I hardly ever hear anyone talk about emotional health when, in reality, that’s the root cause of most of the problems we face.

Think about it.

Depression isn’t a mental health problem. It’s emotional.

When we suffer with anxiety or anger issues, they’re both emotional, not mental.

The trick, though, is that they usually manifest as psychological issues which makes us focus on the mind instead of on the real root cause.

What I suspect is happening at Liverpool is that the players and staff have suffered a huge emotional blow and done what we’ve all been taught to do: push it away and try to get on with life.

Which is what I think explains most of what we’re seeing.

We Can’t Override Our Emotions Long Term

I’ve heard people saying that they want to see the team respond with different emotions than the ones we’re witnessing.

But that’s just not how it works.

Again, just pause for a moment and think about any strong emotional state you’ve been in.

You might even be angry as you’re reading this, or you might have been furious while watching Liverpool fold in so many games.

Could you just stop in the middle of that feeling and decide instead to be happy?

No, because we’re more complex creatures than that, and if we could just switch our emotions on and off at will we could all just choose to be happy all the time.

Wouldn’t that be great?

If you’ve never experienced severe grief, depression or anxiety you might struggle to comprehend what I’m talking about, but if you have experienced any of those things just think about how difficult dealing with life is when you’re stuck in the middle of the emotion.

It often feels like walking through a dark cloud with your feet stuck in treacle. Every now and then you might be able to pull yourself out of it, but the darkness will sooner or later pull you back until it’s had time to fully pass.

The explanation for how the team can beat Real Madrid and look good in patches in other games is that we can psychologically override our emotions for short periods of time.

We can take a deep breath and put on a brave face to get through something, but the problem is if we don’t fully feel the emotion underneath everything else it will, sooner or later, burst back through to the surface.

In our normal day to day lives, we can lose a loved one and take time to fully grieve while getting through life for a while, but most of us aren’t operating in situations where a drop in performance of one per cent is enough to completely change the outcome of our day.

Sadly for the Liverpool players and coaching staff, that’s exactly the scenario they’re operating in.

So we can analyse individual errors and mistakes made in moments as much as we like, we can question the manager’s team selections, tactics or substitutions, but the underlying issue is that players and coaches who know they have to operate at maximum capacity in order to compete are simply not currently able to perform at that capacity for over 90 minutes three times a week.

It explains why when things are going well everything looks okay, but as soon as they hit some adversity they crumble.

It explains why they’re not able to be consistently aggressive and why their body language is poor at times.

The mentality monsters suddenly look fragile because that’s exactly what they are.

Fragile humans who are struggling to deal with something unprecedented, and none of them have the answer because they’re not in an industry that does any more than give a passing thought to these things.

It still amazes me that multi-million pound sports teams and individuals don’t have personal psychology and emotional coaches, when a huge part of their performance is dictated by what’s going on inside them.

One day they’ll all have individual psychological and emotional plans and we’ll look back at the current era in the same way we now look back at the days before personalised nutrition plans when the players went to the chippy after the match on a Saturday before drinking 20 pints.

What About The Portugal Team?

I know people might ask why the Portugal team hasn’t been as badly impacted by the loss of Diogo as the Liverpool team has, and the most reasonable explanation is that they’re not living his loss every day.

I saw Roberto Martinez on Sky Sports talk about how they’ve used his death as motivation to come together and try to achieve something he wanted to achieve.

But those players aren’t having to come into their workplace every day and miss his presence.

They’re not being reminded every day of their loss.

Again, try to put yourself in the shoes of the players. We usually take longer to grieve the loss of someone we lived with every day than we do to grieve someone we spent less time with, because they literally had more impact on our life and they leave a bigger hole behind when they’ve gone, especially if they were a character like Diogo.

What’s The Solution?

If everything I’m suggesting is correct, the 64 million dollar question is, of course, what can be done to fix it?

The idea that sacking the manager and replacing him with someone else simply will not solve the underlying problem. A new manager wouldn’t be carrying the grief that Arne Slot is carrying, but he would still be faced with a dressing room having to deal with all of these challenges.

One of the main problems being faced by Liverpool’s staff is that they don’t work in a place in which they can take a few weeks or months off to deal with all of this.

There’s a game every three or four days and as the pressure grows through games being lost, the emotional challenges become greater.

There is a solution, it’s just that it’s simple but not easy.

At the heart of dealing with our biggest challenges in life is learning how to fully feel our emotions to enable them to pass naturally, rather than trying to push through them.

That includes feeling all of the things we really don’t want to feel because we’ve been taught to be ashamed of them.

When my dad died a few years ago, I spoke to my mum and sister about how they were likely to feel some things they really didn’t want to feel, and that it was okay to feel them.

Feeling the grief is hard enough, but at least we know we’re meant to feel grief when someone dies.

The complication comes when other mucky emotions come up like anger, resentment or guilt.

These are all common emotions that no-one talks about when someone dies, because it’s unacceptable for us to talk about how much we resent a loved one for leaving us, how angry we are with them for dying or how much guilt we feel for still being here enjoying a life that they no longer have.

Which is why, in my view, what Liverpool’s players and staff need more than anything right now are people to help them process and feel all of their emotions about the loss of their close friend.

The club needs to assess each player and coach individually to ascertain how much they’re struggling and whether they might need to be taken out of the firing line for a while.

To ask difficult questions like whether the fans singing for Diogo in the twentieth minute of every game and keeping his shirt up in the dressing room are doing more harm than good when it comes to grieving his loss (as lovely as they are as tributes).

Ultimately, though, the way out of this is through.

The players and staff need to accept and acknowledge that this is impacting them more than they anticipated.

To feel their emotions fully rather than trying to push past them.

If they don’t go down that path, what we’re seeing is likely to continue until enough time has passed that the intensity of the emotions they’re all feeling naturally fades.

Complex