Liverpool spent £450 million on new signings this summer to cement their position as England's dominant force after winning a 20th league championship last season. But after 12 games of their chaotic title defence, Arne Slot's side are on course to be the Premier League's worst-ever champions.
Having been heralded as the perfect successor to Jürgen Klopp after gently steering Liverpool into a new era with the minimum of changes last season, Slot is facing a wholly different challenge this season. The 47-year-old is floundering, so much so that his team is only threatening to make history for the wrong reasons.
Mohamed Salah has lost his scoring form, big summer signings Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz -- both of whom cost in excess of £100 million -- have been expensive flops and Ibrahima Konaté has embodied a defensive malaise that's seen the team concede more league goals than it has scored.
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The champions' air of invincibility has been shattered, even at Anfield. Saturday's 3-0 home defeat against Nottingham Forest heralded the first time that Liverpool have lost successive league games by three goals since 1965. It was their sixth loss in seven league games, a run dating back to Sept. 27 that has seen them slide from top spot down to 11th position.
Only José Mourinho's Chelsea, as champions in 2014-15, have made a worse start to a defence of their title with seven defeats in their first 12 games. That dismal run led to Mourinho being fired in December 2015, just seven months after guiding the Blues to the title for the third time.
Blackburn Rovers (champions in 1994-95) and Leicester City (2015-16) are the only other teams to record as many as six defeats in their first 12 games as champions. Blackburn steadied the ship to finish seventh in 1995-96, but Leicester -- having fired title-winning coach Claudio Ranieri in February 2017 -- ended the season in 12th position to record the lowest-ever finish for a Premier League champion, two places lower than Chelsea finished a year earlier.
Are Liverpool heading for the Leicester-style ignominy of a bottom-half finish? Or can Slot halt the slide and put his team back on track for some kind of success this season?
Everything points toward Liverpool emerging from their losing streak and claiming a top-four finish at some point. But if football was that simple, then those Chelsea, Blackburn and Leicester teams would not have suffered such a rapid fall from grace. The pressure is on Slot to turn the situation around quickly.
"Of course there is a way out, especially with the quality players we have," Slot said after the Forest defeat. "But I want to emphasise I am responsible for the current losses. You are responsible when you are winning but also responsible when you are losing. "I can never come up with enough excuses for us to have the results we have. That is far from good enough and I am responsible for that."
Slot's captain, Virgil van Dijk, offered a more cutting assessment of the team's failings, suggesting that the players had to accept a share of the blame while questioning whether all of his team-mates are doing everything possible for the side.
"As the champions we can't be in the situation we are in right now but it's a fact," the centre-back said. "What are we going to do about it? We're going to try to turn it around and that's the mentality everyone should have. The main thing for me is that everyone has to take responsibility. Are people doing that? I don't know. But you have to do that."
Slot has many problems to solve, but the question is where to start and some of them have no obvious solution.
At the back alongside Van Dijk, Konaté's form has deserted him but Slot has no alternative to the France international. The failure to complete a deadline-day deal for Crystal Palace defender Marc Guéhi is now haunting Liverpool.
It has perhaps been overlooked that Liverpool's back-up option Giovanni Leoni, the 18-year-old signed from Parma, suffered a cruciate ligament injury in September and will be out until next season. But Konaté's loss of form has impacted Van Dijk, as has the prolonged absence of goalkeeper Alisson Becker, who played his first game since Sept. 30 in the defeat against Forest.
At left-back, Slot has taken too long to realise that Milos Kerkez is too raw and inexperienced to replace Andy Robertson. Meanwhile the departure of Trent Alexander-Arnold to Real Madrid is now being felt every week at right-back, where Liverpool have often had to resort to playing midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai.
With a defence that has become so inconsistent and unreliable, Liverpool's midfielders are struggling to cope with the demands on them, especially when Wirtz is selected by Slot. The Germany international has failed to register a single goal or assist in 11 Premier League appearances -- he has two assists in four UEFA Champions League games. The 22-year-old has repeatedly failed to deal with the pace and physicality that he faces on a weekly basis in England, and opponents have already worked this out and are exploiting his weaknesses.
And up front, nothing is working, which is the most remarkable failure of Slot and his players considering the depth of talent available. Isak has yet to score a league goal since arriving from Newcastle United, and his work-rate is already generating audible frustration among the Liverpool supporters. Meanwhile Salah, last season's Footballer of the Year, is performing like a player who wishes he had moved on to pastures new in the summer rather than sign a new two-year contract. As for Hugo Ekitike, the apparent success story of the summer window, it is now one goal in nine appearances for the France international and no Premier League goal in over two months.
Salah's impending departure to the Africa Cup of Nations with Egypt next month may yet crack the code for Slot, perhaps enabling him to field Isak, Wirtz and Ekitike with the instruction that it is now their time, rather than Salah's. But none of them is showing signs of being able to meet that challenge.
So it is on Slot to dig the team out of a hole and ensure that Liverpool don't end this season as the worst defending champions in Premier League history.