Liverpool’s 2025-26 season hasn’t gone as anyone would have expected, planned, or hoped. After winning the Premier League last season and ending the 2025 summer as consensus Transfer Window Champions for the first time in the club’s history, results on the pitch have lagged.
Worse than that, the performances have been downright bad at times, with the team embracing a dull and uninspiring brand of low-incident football, seeking to hold possession and limit opposition chances at the cost of Liverpool themselves not offering a lot of excitement on or off the ball.
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According to centre half Ibrahima Konaté, though, it’s an unavoidable—or, at the very least, difficult to avoid—result of attempting to rebuild a top side along with other complicating factors, key amongst them of course the tragic death of Diogo Jota shortly before pre season kicked off.
“We can say many, many things,” Konaté responded when asked about the difficult season this week during a break in training with the French national team. “People are going to say we brought in new players, but many other things also happened like losing a player at the start of the season.
“Many things happened this season. What people have to understand—and this is my point—is that before we won the league last season we built a team to win the Premier League in that moment. That’s part of success, that’s the way to success, and now we have brought in new players.
“So of course they are not going to perform from the first game. This is what I have said to many players, we just have to be relaxed, this is part of success. We bring new players, we adapt, try to work and understand each other, and at a point in time we will win trophies and we will have success.”
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In some ways it’s a reasonable and measured take on the current situation. Yet if last summer was the start of a squad rebuild, this summer looks set to hold even greater changes. Mohamed Salah along with Andy Robertson, while Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker aren’t getting any younger.
There are question marks about the futures of players like Cody Gakpo and Alexis Mac Allister as we near the end of a season that has been especially difficult individually for both. And then there’s even Konaté himself, with the centre half on an expiring contract with a seemingly uncertain future.
If this summer’s changes are to be as significant as last summer’s, and last summer’s changes are the reason for the disappointing season—and the fact we’re heading into April with a team that doesn’t look fit to run for more than about 60 minutes once a week—are we also writing off the next?
“When we win the league or the Champions League people will forget every bad season,” Konaté added. “We won it last season but two seasons before we were in the Europa League and people don’t talk about it any more. This is part of success. We have to stay together and success will come.”