A club remade from the ground up

When Andoni Iraola touched down in Chicago with his new squad last month, he was not simply preparing a team for a new season. He was beginning the process of rebuilding a Liverpool side that had finished fifth, sold Mohamed Salah, Andy Robertson and Ibrahima Konate, and tasked him with injecting something altogether more urgent and aggressive into the whole operation. That is an enormous ask in any summer, never mind one as compressed and complicated as this.

It is worth stating plainly: the Reds are not yet the finished article. Nobody who watched pre-season with clear eyes would argue otherwise. But the signs emerging from the training pitches at Chicago Fire's Endeavour Health Performance Centre are encouraging enough that despair feels entirely the wrong register. Iraola was appointed in early June and has had precious little time to stamp his identity on a squad still in flux, patience is not just reasonable here, it is required.

The decision to base the squad in Chicago throughout their two-week Stateside trip, flying in and out of Nashville and New York for fixtures rather than constantly moving camp, was a deliberate choice to maximise time on the training pitch. It was a plan conceived before Iraola's arrival, but the new head coach made full use of it. Those around the group spoke in consistently enthusiastic terms about the sharpness and relentlessness of the sessions, and the players themselves were not shy about confirming it.

What the players are saying about the new regime

Milos Kerkez, speaking to reporters on the rooftop of the team hotel, was particularly vivid in his description of what Iraola demands: "What makes him a special coach? The intensity. It's the intensity. He's not scared to play one-on-one all over the pitch, to press high and to be on the front foot always. If you see footage of how we all are after training, all lying down, then you can see what he is preparing us for. You definitely need legs and good condition for what he wants us to do, but we will be all right."

That is a player who sounds energised rather than ground down, and that matters. Alexander Isak, speaking the following week, added a measured note that felt equally telling: "I mean it is early days but the training has felt good. We all like his game ideas, it feels positive but there is still a long way to go. There is a lot of work to be done."

Both quotes land in roughly the same place, enthusiasm for the direction, honesty about the distance still to travel. Iraola himself set out his stall clearly when he sat down with reporters at the Park Hyatt in downtown Chicago: "The most important thing that we can deliver is our performances. It doesn't matter if I speak well, if I don't speak well, if I say the right things or if I don't say the right things. At the end people just want to see the team play well and deliver good results. I know this is 90% of my job. For me, now, it is about creating a very good team to beat, a very difficult team to beat. The team that I envision now, that I see and think of, if we become that team, I think we are going to be successful."

Results on the pitch and noise off it

The pre-season results themselves told a mixed but not alarming story. Liverpool dazzled in the second half of a 4-2 win over Sunderland in Nashville, with Dominik Szoboszlai particularly impressive, before a more routine 1-0 victory over Wrexham at Yankee Stadium. The Chicago finale against Leeds United was a chastening finish, two up at half-time through Luke Chambers and Florian Wirtz, only to concede four in the second half as Daniel Farke's more experienced outfit ran out 4-2 winners. The inability to hold a lead has since reappeared as a concern, with Monaco overturning a two-goal deficit to win 3-2 at Anfield just last week.

Off the pitch, the noise around Fenway Sports Group's talks with an Amit Bhatia-led consortium broke publicly while the squad were still on American soil. Bhatia confirmed he was stepping down from Queens Park Rangers after close to two decades at Loftus Road, and the investment discussions with his 1892 Holdings group appear to have been discussed in more detail with Iraola around the time of the Leeds fixture, where FSG president Mike Gordon met the head coach in person for the first time. The ownership backdrop adds a layer of uncertainty to an already transitional summer, though it did not visibly derail Iraola's focus during the trip.

With Victor Munoz, signed from Osasuna after Liverpool triggered his £34.5m release clause, only able to join up on Merseyside following the World Cup, and Jeremy Jacquet sidelined throughout the American tour, Iraola worked without a single new face integrated into the group across the fortnight. The pieces are still arriving. When they do, the real work of translating the training ground intensity into ninety minutes of Premier League football begins in earnest.