Arne Slot mission statement lays bare the challenge Liverpool face in securing UCL qualification

Arne Slot has starkly declared that Liverpool will need to be ‘close to perfection’ if they’re to secure a place in the Champions League for next season.

Even with fifth in the Premier League likely to ensure qualification for Europe’s premier club competition for 2026/27, the Reds are already four points outside the top five, and it’s not unthinkable that the gap could stretch to six or seven depending on results over the next two nights.

John Aldridge already feels that a top-four finish is beyond the defending champions, who’ve begun 2026 with just one win from seven top-flight matches, and their slump in form has coincided with sustained improvement from Manchester United and Chelsea.

Slot: Liverpool will have to be near-perfect to finish in top five

In his press conference on Tuesday morning ahead of tomorrow night’s trip to Sunderland, Slot laid bare what’ll be required from his team if they’re to call themselves a Champions League club next season.

He said (via Liverpool Echo): “[We must be] close to perfection because of how many points we are behind.

“It’s different when you’re four points behind a team that’s 18th as they normally don’t pick up as many as a fourth- or fifth-placed team. We have to win a lot and we haven’t doen that a lot this season, so that has to be better.

“The margins are very small. Seven minutes from time we were five points behind [Manchester] City [when leading 1-0 in the 83rd minute] and now we are 11 behind.”

Breaking down the maths of what Liverpool must do from hereon

With fifth-placed Chelsea currently on 43 points after 25 matches, that average of 1.72 points per game indicates that it’ll require a final tally of 65 points or more to finish inside the top five.

Based on that projection, Liverpool will need a minimum of 26 points from their 13 remaining Premier League fixtures (exactly two per game), which works out at a target of nine wins or more. They’ve won just two more than that from 25 games so far.

Slot isn’t being melodramatic in saying that his team must be close to perfect if they’re to usurp any of the five teams currently above them in the table, and the maths don’t paint a pretty picture as to the scale of improvement that’s required.

However, the Reds finished strongly in their two most recent campaigns of prolonged struggle (2020/21 and 2022/23), miraculously salvaging Champions League qualification in the first of those and coming close to repeating the trick a couple of years later.

Just as Man United and Chelsea are currently enjoying an upturn in form, Liverpool are more than capable of doing the same during the spring months. The key is to avoid the mistakes of three years ago and not leave the revival too late.

The first step is to win at Sunderland tomorrow night, something no visiting team has managed in the Premier League all season. Slot’s team are good enough to pull it off, but only if they put in a complete 90+ minute performance and arrest their habit of conceding costly late goals.

You can watch Slot’s full pre-Sunderland press conference below, via Empire of the Kop on YouTube:

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