Gary Neville has unsurprisingly predicted Liverpool to experience ‘pain’ in their first season after Jurgen Klopp.
The Sky Sports pundit gave his predictions for the campaign ahead along with Jamie Carragher on Monday Night Football, and he provocatively forecast the Reds to miss out on the top four, scrambling to explain his reasoning for that bold call.
The 49-year-old said: “My view would be that the impact of Klopp [leaving] will take its toll, just going off evidence of history. That’s it. Evidence of history with a manager like that leaving, I think there’ll be some pain this season for Liverpool and it could cost them.”
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The declining fortunes of Manchester United and Arsenal in the years immediately after the exits of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger respectively may have given some credence to Neville’s doom-mongering prediction about Liverpool this season, but that was until he backed Chelsea to finish ahead of us and take fourth.
The Blues were swept aside by Manchester City on Sunday and are once again under new management in Enzo Maresca, who’ll have quite a job on his hands trying to make sense of a disjointed and (to put mildly) bloated squad.
The Old Trafford favourite might wish for Arne Slot’s team to miss out on the Champions League, but the early evidence is that the Reds are adapting well to their new head coach, who certainly has a far more solid foundation from which to build than his counterpart at Stamford Bridge.
We suspect that Liverpool fans may have had a bit of a chuckle over Neville’s top-four prediction!
You can view Neville’s predictions below (from 6:17), via Sky Sports Premier League on YouTube:
Thankfully, Neville is sitting down otherwise, he would make a terrible stand-up comedian.