Roy Keane makes feelings clear on Liverpool firing Arne Slot after brutal season

Liverpool head coach Arne Slot is under pressure to improve performances and results at Anfield, with a place in next season's Champions League on the line in the next few weeks

Roy Keane and Ian Wright on The Overlap(Image: The Overlap // YouTube)

Roy Keane has insisted that Liverpool should stick with Arne Slot next season, despite the Reds now only having a place in the top five spots to fight for.

This week, Slot's side exited Europe at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain by four goals on aggregate. This weekend, the Premier League title might become mathematically beyond Liverpool, though it has long been clear that either Arsenal or Manchester City will take the crown.

But Keane believes that Slot has enough credit in the bank from winning the league last season for his job not to be on the line. In addition to that, there are mitigations that can go some way to explaining the Reds' troubles.

"You can’t be sacking the manager a year after winning the league," Keane said on the Stick To Football podcast, sponsored by Sky Bet. "The fans are restless, of course, but aren’t most fans?

"It’s about how they finish the season. They’ve got they got Manchester United in a couple of weeks. So, they’re big games emotionally for the fans, aren’t they? But I’ll think they’ll be fine for top five."

Had Liverpool's two seasons under Slot been the other way around, that would have made things feel like they were on the up. But there have been jeers at Anfield this season and the team has struggled in large parts.

Liverpool will go without a trophy in year two under Arne Slot(Image: Photo by Alex Livesey - Danehouse/Getty Images)

After a disrupted summer and so many changes in the transfer market, though, it was always likely to take some time. Liverpool has been very unfortunate with injuries, too, with Hugo Ekitike the latest to pick up what looks like a bad one.

"I think we made a lot of progression compared to last week," Slot said after the second leg against PSG. "I have to give a lot of credit to the players for how hard they worked.

"I have to give a lot of credit to our fans, how they helped us tonight to execute our game plan. And that means if we have a high press, it's so helpful if there are fans behind you to keep on pushing you.

"That's what they did. Unfortunately, it's one of the many examples of this season where we weren't able to score from the many chances we had.

"Again, we were so underperforming in terms of xG, and that is just an ongoing thing with us throughout the whole season.

"And add to that, it seems to be a bad injury (for Ekitike) — we don't know [for] sure yet. Add to that another intervention of the VAR, which went not in our favor and that's also not for the first time this season.

"Then of course we are very disappointed because I think there were parts in the second half where you could just feel, 'If we can score now this is going to become a special night.'

"But the future looks very bright for this team, for this club because we've shown that we can compete with the champions of Europe in our stadium, to be the dominant team — not many teams can be dominant against Paris Saint-Germain and generate so many chances as we did. But yeah, chances is one thing; scoring is a second."