Andoni Iraola’s Liverpool: Promise and Problems Ahead

The first glimpse of Andoni Iraola’s Liverpool came not under Anfield’s lights, but under American floodlights and stadium scoreboards. Wins over Sunderland in Nashville and Wrexham in New York, then a 4-2 defeat to Leeds in Chicago. Three games, three different moods, and one clear conclusion: this is going to take time.

A new idea, still in pencil

For 45 minutes against Leeds, Liverpool looked like a team that had been waiting for this kind of football.

The press was sharper. The distances between the lines were tighter. The ball went forward with purpose, not habit. With more of the established names on the pitch, Iraola’s front-foot, high-intensity blueprint finally had something like the right actors, and the first half was comfortably Liverpool’s best spell of the tour.

Then came the second half.

Once the changes arrived, so did the familiar problems. Switching off at key moments. Soft edges at set pieces. The sort of lapses that haunted last season reappeared, as if to remind Iraola that a new voice on the touchline does not erase old habits overnight.

That is hardly surprising when he has not even met some of the dressing room’s heaviestweights. Virgil van Dijk, Cody Gakpo, Alisson, Alexis Mac Allister and new signing Víctor Muñoz have yet to work a single session under him. They are due back at the AXA Training Centre on Wednesday, still shaking off the flight from Chicago. Mac Allister will remain on extended leave after his World Cup exploits.

There are fewer than three weeks until a Premier League opener at Newcastle and only two more friendlies – a double-header against Como at Anfield – to prepare. Iraola knows the calendar is unforgiving. He admitted he would love to say that on day one everything will be in place. He also knows it will not be.

The idea is there. The execution is nowhere near finished.

A squad that still needs help

If the football looked incomplete, so did the squad.

Across the tour, Iraola was without eight first-team players on post-World Cup breaks and six more through injury. Joe Gomez joined the casualty list in the US. That is 14 absentees, enough to fill a bench and half a team-sheet, and it inevitably slowed the squad’s adaptation to new demands.

Strip away the excuses, though, and the gaps are still glaring.

Mohamed Salah’s departure was announced in March. Talks to cut his deal short began even earlier. Five months on, Liverpool still have no replacement for the man who defined their right side for a generation. Conor Bradley’s serious knee injury leaves them light at right-back. In central defence, the club’s optimism about Jérémy Jacquet and Giovanni Leoni is genuine – Leoni’s physical transformation during his ACL recovery has not gone unnoticed – and 18-year-olds Ifeanyi Ndukwe and Mor Talla Ndiaye handled themselves well in the US.

Promise is not the same as readiness. Premier League minutes are thin on the ground in that department, and Ndukwe cannot feature at all this season because of post-Brexit work permit rules. Given Gomez’s injury history, counting him as a permanent, reliable option would be naive. When he is fit, he is a bonus, not a pillar.

Iraola spoke intriguingly on tour about his preference for wingers who can operate on both flanks, and the benefits of switching them mid-game. It is an approach that fits the modern game and suits several in the current squad. But until Liverpool resolve the right side – even if Bradley Barcola arrives from Paris Saint-Germain – the theory will be working against a headwind.

The new head coach needs more than tactical buy-in. He needs reinforcements.

Nyoni steps out of the shadows

One of the unexpected themes of the tour was how much the kids had to grow up, and how quickly.

With so many seniors missing, training sessions and friendlies leaned heavily on academy graduates and fringe prospects. Lewis Koumas, Kieran Morrison, Luke Chambers, Ndukwe and Talla Ndiaye all showed enough to justify the air miles. The standard rarely dropped to the point of embarrassment.

Yet one youngster separated himself from the pack.

Nyoni arrived in the US as a prospect on the fringes. He left it as a player firmly in Iraola’s plans. The 19-year-old had been a regular presence in Arne Slot’s squads last season, along with Rio Ngumoha, but their paths diverged sharply. Ngumoha made 19 Premier League appearances, five of them starts. Nyoni had to settle for six cameos from the bench.

On this evidence, that balance will shift.

Nyoni took to Iraola’s demands as if he had been waiting for them. The instruction was simple and unforgiving: find forward options as quickly as possible, under pressure or in space, and do it with conviction. He did exactly that. His movement created passing lanes. His touch under pressure bought him time. His decision-making rarely slowed Liverpool’s attacks.

His pass in the buildup to Florian Wirtz’s goal against Leeds summed up his tour – precise, imaginative, and brave. After the game, Nyoni admitted he knew he had to improve this summer. Across the Atlantic, he backed his words with performances.

Jones at a crossroads

While one midfielder used the tour as a springboard, another watched an opportunity slip away.

Curtis Jones is entering the final 12 months of his Liverpool contract. Inter, the Italian champions, are circling. This was a chance to stake a claim in front of a new head coach, to show he could live inside Iraola’s high-energy, vertical midfield.

He did not take it.

Where Nyoni and Dominik Szoboszlai adapted quickly to the new demands, Jones looked uncomfortable, particularly in the second half against Leeds. The tempo seemed to run away from him. His positioning often jarred with what Iraola wants from the role.

Worse than the football was the optics.

Against Wrexham, Jones reacted petulantly when he did not receive the captain’s armband from Szoboszlai. He was also overlooked when Gomez went off in the opener against Sunderland. On both occasions, the armband went to Kostas Tsimikas, a reserve left-back who spent last season on loan at Roma.

For a boyhood Liverpool supporter and one of the more senior players on the tour, that was always going to sting. Jones, Szoboszlai and Tsimikas worked hard to laugh off the incident in the days that followed, and the social media noise probably inflated it.

But it clashed awkwardly with Iraola’s message. In Chicago, the new head coach stressed the primacy of the collective, of roles and responsibilities over ego. Against that backdrop, Jones’s reaction felt out of step with what Slot’s successor is trying to build.

His future suddenly looks less secure than his talent once promised.

Szoboszlai steps into the void

If one player embodied Iraola’s ideal on this tour, it was Szoboszlai.

With Salah, Andy Robertson, Van Dijk and Alisson all absent, the Hungary captain became the face and voice of Liverpool’s summer in the States. Every introduction drew a roar. Every touch carried weight. Media outlets lined up for him. Supporters in red shirts flocked to see him.

He gave them more than selfies.

On the training pitch, Szoboszlai set the standard. His intensity matched the new manager’s demands. His influence on a young, patched-together squad was obvious. At 25, fresh from signing a new five-year contract, he looks like the natural heir to one of the vice-captain roles vacated by Salah and Robertson.

The tour ended with a defeat and a reminder of how far Liverpool still have to travel. It also ended with a clearer picture of who will be driving that journey – and who might be left standing at the side of the road.