Let's be honest. The moment Andoni Iraola was confirmed as Liverpool's new head coach, one uncomfortable question surfaced almost immediately. Where are the trophies?

It is a fair point. For a club of Liverpool's standing, ambition, and history, appointing a manager whose only piece of silverware amounts to a Cypriot Super Cup won back in 2018 with AEK Larnaca feels, at first glance, like an unusual call. A penalty shootout win over APOEL is not exactly the stuff of Anfield folklore.

Compare that to what came before. Jurgen Klopp arrived having won the Bundesliga twice and claimed a German Cup during his seven years at Borussia Dortmund. Arne Slot followed him in having guided Feyenoord to the Eredivisie title in 2023 and a Dutch Cup the year after. Both men had tangible, traceable proof that they could deliver when it mattered most.

Iraola, across four previous clubs, has not replicated that. The CV, judged purely on trophies, is thin.

But here is where that line of thinking starts to unravel.

Former Liverpool defender Glen Johnson, who made 200 appearances for the Reds between 2009 and 2014, puts it well. "'Success' can't be measured with the same common denominator all the time," he tells the Echo. "You know, success at Manchester City and Liverpool and Arsenal, it's trophies. But if you're taking a club who have been in and out of the Premier League and only a mainstay for the last few years and then you take them to the brink of Champions League qualification, then that has to be considered a success in terms of the club's size."

He is right. And when you actually look at the landscape of the Premier League more broadly, the trophies argument becomes even less clear-cut than it first appears.

Since the 2016-17 season, only five different managers have won the Premier League title. Antonio Conte, Pep Guardiola, Klopp, Slot, and current champion Mikel Arteta. Of those five, only Guardiola has done it more than once. The reality is that even the best managers in the world can go entire eras without winning a league title, not through any lack of quality, but because Guardiola's Manchester City sides were, frankly, operating on a different planet.

Klopp himself, for all his brilliance on Merseyside, twice came agonisingly close to Premier League titles that ended in heartbreak by a single point. That is not failure. That is the modern game.

The wider trophy picture across English football tells its own story. From the last 30 major honours across the Premier League, FA Cup and League Cup, only eight clubs have managed to get their hands on one. Crystal Palace, Leicester City, and Newcastle United have gate-crashed that exclusive party in the last decade, but it remains overwhelmingly dominated by City, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, and Chelsea. The silverware is concentrating at the very top, and for clubs outside that orbit, success demands a different measuring stick.

Bournemouth, under Iraola, operated with a revenue of £181.7m in the accounting period ending June 2025. Liverpool's revenue for the same period stood at £703m. Nearly four times the resources. Yet Bournemouth finished just one place behind Liverpool in the Premier League last season. That is not a coincidence. That is management.

Iraola did all of this whilst working out of the smallest stadium in the Premier League, a ground with a capacity of just 12,357, and whilst the club continued to sell their standout players around him. Dean Huijsen, Antoine Semenyo, Milos Kerkez, all moved on over the past 12 months. Most managers in that situation would be fighting to tread water. Iraola kept Bournemouth competitive and growing.

Liverpool's recruitment team clearly saw all of this coming. The club reportedly poured over Iraola's work with a fine tooth comb, and two things stood out in particular. His development of young forwards, which matters enormously given the direction of Liverpool's squad building, and his aggressive, high-intensity style of play, something Anfield supporters have long come to expect and demand.

Johnson is cautiously optimistic about what this could mean when that approach is applied to a squad of Liverpool's calibre. "I'm initially upbeat," he says. "I think the style of his play and the way he sets the side up. I am sure he'll have changes but with a better side and better individuals Liverpool will improve. I am sure he'll have some different ideas too. So if he can get his team playing the way Bournemouth played, consistently, and you now do that with better players, no disrespect to Bournemouth of course, but if you're doing that with a better group of players then, for me, that can only be a positive."

Hard to argue with that logic.

This coming season has a genuinely fresh feel to it across the Premier League's upper reaches. City are starting over, Chelsea welcome Xabi Alonso in a bid to rediscover former glories, Michael Carrick embarks on his first full season at Manchester United, and Iraola takes the reins at Anfield after a campaign that, by all accounts, brought a fair amount of pain and frustration.

The absence of a Guardiola era City to contend with changes the calculation significantly. For the first time in years, the title race feels genuinely open.

Iraola's lack of trophies is not the conversation Liverpool fans should be having. What he did with far less is the conversation worth having, and if he can replicate that same intensity and clarity of thought with the resources Anfield now gives him, the silverware question may well answer itself before long.