Liverpool win Premier League to match Man Utd record in Arne Slot's first season

Liverpool have won the Premier League after a season of domination, taking their total of English league titles to 20 and matching that of their fierce rivals Manchester United

Liverpool are Premier League champions for the second time in five years, and the Reds have drawn level with Manchester United on a record 20 English league titles. A thumping 5-1 win over Tottenham on Sunday rubber-stamped Liverpool's latest triumph.

Arne Slot has led his side to success in his first season, as the Dutchman becomes just the fifth boss to win the Premier League in his maiden campaign in English football. Only Jose Mourinho (Chelsea, 2005), Carlo Ancelotti (Chelsea, 2010), Manuel Pellegrini (Manchester City, 2013) and Antonio Conte (Chelsea, 2017) have previously achieved the feat, with Claudio Ranieri (Leicester, 2016) the only other boss to win the title in his first season at a club.

Strikes from Luis Diaz, Alexis Mac Allister, Cody Gakpo and Mohamed Salah - plus an own goal from Destiny Udogie - were more than enough to secure the solitary point needed to mathematically clinch the title, with sorry Spurs barely putting up a fight.

Liverpool's victory comes at the end of a dominant campaign, with Slot inheriting the side left behind to him by Jurgen Klopp when the popular German departed last summer after almost nine years in charge.

Slot took Klopp's attack-minded team and has moulded it into a more well-rounded, solid unit, capable of playing possession-based football but also moving through the gears to blow sides away.

The Reds have held a vice-like grip to top spot in the table for virtually the entire season, and went 27 league games unbeaten between losing 1-0 at home to Nottingham Forest last September and being defeated 3-2 at Fulham earlier this month.

Driven on by the goals and assists of Salah, who broke the 38-game Premier League record of 45 goal involvements with his assist for Diaz in the win over West Ham this month, Liverpool have secured the title with plenty of room to spare.

Salah scored on the opening day victory at Ipswich Town and then never looked back, with the Egyptian topping both the goal and assist rankings in what will surely go down as the greatest individual season in Premier League history.

Like Salah, Reds captain Virgil van Dijk came into the season with a question mark hanging over his future, with both the pair and homegrown right-back Trent Alexander-Arnold out of contract at the end of the season.

But both Salah and Van Dijk have now extended their stays on Merseyside for two more years, and the Dutch centre-back will get to raise the Premier League trophy aloft at Anfield after the final match of the season against Crystal Palace on May 25.

Slot's ability to utilise the experience of the likes of Salah, Van Dijk, Alexander-Arnold, goalkeeper Alisson Becker and left-back Andy Robertson - all veterans of Klopp's 2019-20 title winners - with the club's more recently-added talents has been key to the title success.

Centre-back Ibrahima Konate, initially overlooked by Slot, has struck up a fine partnership with Van Dijk this season, while the midfield - an area completely revamped by Klopp in the summer of 2023 - has provided the energy so often needed in the Premier League.

Dutch midfielder Ryan Gravenberch was redeployed into the deeper-lying No.6 position by his fellow countryman Slot at the start of the campaign, and it proved to be an absolute masterstroke as he's gone on the start every Premier League game in the position.

Mac Allister, Dominik Szoboszlai and Curtis Jones have also all enjoyed fine campaigns in the Liverpool engine room, while Diaz and Cody Gakpo have shone in attack as goalscoring backup to Salah. Diaz has enjoyed his best goalscoring season at Liverpool and scored braces in big wins at Manchester United and Tottenham, and Gakpo scored 10 goals in 10 Anfield appearances in all competitions between November and February.

Slot's Reds were comfortably able to see off what amounted to title challenges from their rivals, with reigning four-in-a-row champions Manchester City imploding at the beginning of November as they went on a run of just one win and six defeats in nine matches.

After five wins and two draws from their opening seven games Arsenal ran into trouble in mid-October, and despite emerging from a four-game winless run to go 15 games undefeated, they were unable to really get near a dominant Liverpool.

The Reds will now play out the remainder of their fixtures before they lift the trophy on the final day of the campaign, with an open top bus parade scheduled to take place in Liverpool on May 26.

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