"I would like to give them a team that they can feel proud of." Four months into a dismal 25/26 season at Anfield, Andoni Iraola arrived at his first Liverpool press conference and went straight to the point that matters most.
Pride was the word. And it's been absent. Last season Liverpool were outworked, outpressed, and at their lowest points simply outclassed by sides with a fraction of their resources. Visiting teams left Merseyside with points regularly, without being forced into anything particularly taxing. That doesn't happen at a functioning Liverpool. Iraola knows it.
A direct rejection of what came before
The Basque coach was careful not to name Arne Slot or dismantle his predecessor publicly. He didn't need to. The language he used — aggressive, intense, vertical — reads like a direct answer to the criticism that Slot's Liverpool had become too passive, too predictable, too easy to play against. "Boring" was the word that circulated last season, and while it may have been unfair at its peak, it became increasingly difficult to argue against by the end.
Iraola's vision is straightforward: press high, work harder than the opposition, and create an environment at Anfield where the atmosphere builds from what the players give on the pitch rather than hoping the crowd turns up regardless.
He referenced the Federico Chiesa volley against his Bournemouth side on the opening night of last season — one of the rare moments the terraces genuinely erupted — and said he wants that every week. "It has to come from us from inside the pitch," he said. That's not a romantic notion. That's a tactical instruction dressed in emotional language.
The Bournemouth track record matters here
There will be skeptics who look at the size of this job and question whether Iraola is ready for it. Those people should remember that his Bournemouth side finished one place below Liverpool last season — with a squad worth a fraction of what sits in the Reds' first team. The gap in output versus resources wasn't small. It was stark.
He's not arriving to revolutionize Liverpool's identity. He's arriving to reconnect the club to one it already had — high-intensity, confrontational football that made Anfield a genuinely difficult place to visit. Whether that translates in a squad that needs significant personnel changes alongside a tactical reset is the question that will define his first months.
Liverpool's odds across multiple markets will start to shift as Iraola's preferred shape and press structure becomes clearer in pre-season. Right now, the direction of travel is obvious. The execution is what remains unknown.
"I hope it doesn't change me a lot," he said, when asked about the scale of the role. For Liverpool's sake, it's what he changes in that dressing room that counts.
