Despite a record £446m spent in summer transfers, why Liverpool are struggling?

His close friend Andy Robertson remembered him after Scotland secured its World Cup berth last week. “I couldn’t get my mate Diogo Jota out of my head today,” he said. “We spoke so much about going to the World Cup because he missed the last one with Portugal, and I did with Scotland. I know he’ll be smiling over me today,” he added. Scotland qualified; as did Jota’s Portugal. But the friends won’t go to the World Cup together.

His Liverpool manager, Arne Slot watched Robertson’s touching interview and admitted: “I saw the interview live and I know that it is an issue for us, which is completely normal. I think it is good for us to remind (ourselves) of him every time possible because of the person and player he was. But it is impossible to measure what it does to the players and then to measure what it does to our results.” Firming up his tone, he said: “The last thing I would do is use it as an excuse because I simply don’t know. I cannot measure what impact that has on our performances, let alone results. That is impossible to say.” The very conversation sounds awkward.

At the start of the season, Mohammed Salah admitted that he dreaded returning to Anfield. “I never thought there would be something that would frighten me from going back to Liverpool after the break,” he said. “Team-mates come and go but not like this. It’s going to be extremely difficult to accept that Diogo won’t be there when we go back.” The club’s medical team began to offer counselling weeks before the restart, and Slot himself gave a touching interview to the club’s in-house media 10 days after his death, stressing that there is no burdensome notion of “do it for Jota”.

“So let us try to be ourselves as well. So, if we want to laugh we laugh; if we want to cry we’re going to cry. If they want to train they can train, if they don’t want to train they can not train. But be yourself, don’t think you have to be different than your emotions tell you,” he said.

But there is no single prescription for coping with grief (no metric to measure it either). Every individual moves on differently; some don’t. The effects of a tragedy on the human mind are immeasurable. Sometimes, success heals the pains faster. Conversely, defeats slow the process. Bad times bring bad memories. The travails of Liverpool are many; the expensively assembled forward line is rebelling; the physicality of the league has overwhelmed the midfield wunderkind; the backline is tattered and pleading for revamp, the talisman Salah has endured a slump, the press is not as aggressive as it used to be, and cracks are cracking up everywhere. Slot has read a whole tabloid of excuses too — new personnel taking time to teeth in; string of five away games; short turnaround time; soft penalty; opponents discovering antidote and refereeing bloopers.

To turn his fortunes around, he has tweaked his formations, switched his personnel around, tried different shapes, and players have tried as hard as they could, yet Liverpool have jarred and juddered like a ship resigned to the inevitability of sinking into the ocean’s belly. With 18 points in 12 games, it has been the worst start for a defending champion since Leicester the season after their fairy tale triumph. They have already lost more games than they had in the entire last season (6 and four). No solution seems to work; one setback only breeds the other. Maybe, one day, the rot would stop and everything would fall into place. Isak would start scoring goals, Wirtz would buzz with ideas in the midfield, Salah would reunite with goals, the backline would tighten up, and the wingers would fly. They are too good an accumulation to fail forever, and Slot is too sharp a manager to not arrest the slide.

But it was a season they lost even before it began. Losing the title would be painful, but it would hurt them less than the loss they endured before the season began.