Liverpool wants to play aggressive soccer and Iraola could be the perfect fit

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Liverpool wants to play aggressive soccer and Iraola could be the perfect fit

2026-05-31 00:20 Last Updated At：00:40

The search is on for the next Liverpool coach after Arne Slot was fired a year after winning the Premier League.

Liverpool is looking for someone who can implement an “aggressive and urgent” style of soccer, a person with knowledge of the situation told the Associated Press on Saturday.

The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the club has not publicly stated the details of its selection process.

It is clear Liverpool is looking for someone who can bring back the high energy of former manager Jürgen Klopp, who won a full set of trophies during his time at Anfield, including the Premier League and Champions League.

Slot also delivered a title but not the thrills of Klopp's so-called heavy metal soccer.

The frontrunner to replace Slot is Andoni Iraola, the Spanish coach who led Bournemouth to European qualification this season and then walked away.

Iraola's Bournemouth established itself as one of the most entertaining teams in the Premier League and punched above its weight to regularly upset high profile opponents with significantly more spending power.

Iraola was responsible for honing talents like Antoine Semenyo, Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez, who all left for bigger teams. Despite that, he still secured a sixth-place finish this season, just one place and three points below Liverpool in the fight for the last Champions League qualifying position.

Liverpool has not revealed any names of potential candidates but the process of drawing up a shortlist has already begun.

It is looking for a coach who fits its preferred playing style of front foot, attacking soccer to suit the forwards it signed last year and its targets in the upcoming transfer window.

Players like Florian Wirtz, Jeremie Frimpong and injury-hit striker Alexander Isak all underwhelmed in their debut seasons at the club.

Liverpool's hierarchy hopes to bring in a new coach quickly in order to give them as much time as possible to prepare for next season.

The appointment of Slot came after an extensive search that proved successful. Slot led the club to a record-equalling 20th English league title in his first year. Now Liverpool says it has “come to the conclusion that change is necessary in order for the club to keep moving forward.”

It said it needed a “change of direction” and a “different approach.”

In a summer of high-profile coaching changes, another potential candidate in former Liverpool midfielder Xabi Alonso has already been hired by Premier League rival Chelsea.

Former Chelsea coach Enzo Maresca is favorite to take over at Manchester City after Pep Guardiola stepped down.

Oliver Glasner, who won back-to-back trophies with Crystal Palace over the past two seasons, is available, but his playing style might not be the right fit.

Bookmakers have also included Stuttgart's Sebastien Hoeness and Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann as potential candidates.

James Robson is at https://x.com/jamesalanrobson

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

The Latest: Arsenal up 1-0 early in Champions League final

The title match in soccer’s biggest club competition is underway: Paris Saint-Germain vs. Arsenal in the Champions League final in Budapest, Hungary.

PSG is looking to win Europe’s elite competition for a second straight year while Arsenal is bidding to become European champion for the first time on its return to the final after a 20-year wait.

Both teams are coming off winning their own domestic leagues, in France and England, respectively.

Here's the Latest:

PSG goalkeeper Matvey Safonov needs attention from team medics after receiving a blow to the head.

Backup keeper Lucas Chevalier is warming up but Safonov remains on the field for now. Chevalier lost his starting spot in favor of Safonov earlier this season and, due to his limited playing time, was not selected for the French national team for the World Cup.

The teams are taking a break for drinks at the midway point of the first half.

Things are going just as Arsenal would like, still leading 1-0.

The Germany forward becomes only the third player – after Cristiano Ronaldo (Manchester United and Real Madrid) and Mario Mandzukic (Juventus and Bayern Munich) — to score in a Champions League final for two different teams, according to stats supplier Opta.

Arsenal is sitting deep and PSG has all the possession.

Expect that to be the case while Arsenal leads.

There’s even a bit of time-wasting from Arsenal on goal kicks -- to the annoyance of PSG fans.

Kai Havertz makes it 1-0 for the Gunners in the sixth minute.

Marquinhos’ attempted clearance rebounds off Arsenal winger Leandro Trossard and into the path of Havertz, who strides through on goal from near halfway. His shot from a narrow angle goes into the roof of the net.

The players emerge from their huddles and the Champions League is underway with Arsenal taking the kickoff.

An English fan was taken to hospital Saturday afternoon after suffering what police called a “life-threatening” injury in an electric scooter accident, but wasn’t willing to let the injury keep him from the final.

Budapest police said the man “left the hospital without permission because he was adamant about going to the match.”

They added that they are looking for the man and trying to contact his family “because he requires immediate medical attention.”

Only Real Madrid has successfully defended the Champions League title since the competition was rebranded in 1992.

Can PSG be the second team to do so?

The Madrid team of Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Gareth Bale won the Champions League three times in a row (2016-18), under coach Zinedine Zidane.

Since then, no defending champion has reached the final until this PSG team, which beat Inter Milan 5-0 in Munich last year.

PSG and Arsenal have reached the title match adopting vastly different playing approaches.

PSG is the top-scoring team in the competition with 44 goals -- that’s an average of more than three per game.

Arsenal has the Champions League’s best defense, letting in just six goals in 14 games and keeping nine clean sheets, three more than any other team has registered.

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The man entrusted with being the referee for the biggest match in club soccer won’t even be going to next month's World Cup.

German ref Daniel Siebert was left off FIFA’s list of match officials for the World Cup – after going to the 2022 edition in Qatar – so handling the Champions League final is a consolation prize in a sense.

This will be the third straight round Siebert will have worked an Arsenal match.

Video review – or VAR, as it’s known in soccer circles — will be in operation for the final.

PSG: Matvey Safonov; Achraf Hakimi, Marquinhos, Willian Pacho, Nuno Mendes; Vitinha, João Neves, Fabian Ruiz; Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Ousmane Dembélé, Désiré Doué.

Arsenal: David Raya; Cristhian Mosquera, William Saliba, Gabriel Magalhães, Piero Hincapié; Declan Rice, Myles Lewis-Skelly, Martin Odegaard; Leandro Trossard, Kai Havertz, Bukayo Saka.

Zohran Mamdani is a big Arsenal fan and the New York Mayor was seen wearing club-branded clothing when he joined residents across the city for Eid al-Adha prayers this week.

In an article he has written for The Athletic ahead of the final, Mamdani said he started supporting Arsenal from the age of 9 after his uncle “introduced me to a team with a cannon on its shirt.”

He says supporting the team “increasingly became an exercise in nostalgia” until the recent uplift under Mikel Arteta.

“Over these past two years, no matter how chaotic life became, Arsenal remained the constant,” he writes.

Mamdani acknowledges PSG is “brilliant” and “frustratingly well-managed” by Luis Enrique, but has a message for Arsenal and its fans: “Enjoy this moment, because they don’t come around often.”

Fans are making their way to the stadium under a cloudy, threatening sky in Budapest, and they’ll have a role to play in the final.

Not least with the rival chants that you might get to hear in your TV broadcast.

PSG’s most notable song will see their passionate Ultras bellow “Tous ensemble on chantera” (All together we will sing).

Arsenal fans have their own chant that has grown in popularity over the last few seasons in manager Arteta’s 6 ½-year reign, with a chorus taken from “The Angel (North London Forever)” -- written by singer and Arsenal fan Louis Dunford in 2022.

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This is the first European Cup final to be staged in Hungary and it comes at an interesting time for the Central European country, a few weeks after right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán‘s heavy defeat in the elections.

Péter Magyar is the prime minister and is set to attend the match at the 67,000-seat Puskas Arena, a stadium that opened in 2019 and was built on the same site as the previous Ferenc Puskas Stadion — named after the Hungarian and Real Madrid great who won three European Cups as a player.

Orbán is a massive soccer fan and attempted to bring back the glory days of the 1950s, when Hungary had one of the world’s top teams.

To that end, the arena, located a few kilometers east of central Budapest, has become a well-known host for European games. The stadium staged the UEFA Super Cup in 2020, as well as a slew of Champions League group games and four European Championship matches in 2021. In 2023, it hosted the Europa League final won by Sevilla.

Pre-match entertainment is being provided by American rock band The Killers, who are best known for songs like “Mr. Brightside,” “Smile Like You Mean It” and “Somebody Told Me.”

It differs from the Super Bowl, where artists perform in a halftime show.

The Killers, who hail from Las Vegas, predicted an “epic match” when they were announced to be performing – though at the time, they didn’t know who the finalists would be.

In previous years, Linkin Park, Lenny Kravitz and Dua Lipa have been headliners in Champions League finals.

Some 48,000 fans are expected to fill PSG’s stadium in Paris, the Parc des Princes, to watch the match on giant screens.

PSG said Paris mayor Emmanuel Gregoire is among the officials expected to attend.

Former players, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Claude Makélélé and Ronaldinho, have been invited to Budapest for the final.

It’s the first time in 55 years that clubs from two different capital cities are competing in the final of Europe’s biggest club competition.

The last was Ajax (of Amsterdam) vs. Panathinaikos (of Athens) in 1971.

There were only two before that: Benfica (Lisbon) vs. Real Madrid in 1962 and Real Madrid vs. Partizan Belgrade in 1966.

This is also the first major European final featuring teams from France and England.

It’s the last match of the European club season – and World Cup coaches will be watching on with a mixture of intrigue and nervousness.

The World Cup begins in 12 days, and the squads of both PSG and Arsenal are bulging with players heading to the tournament being held in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Any injuries sustained in the final could be devastating so close to the big kickoff.

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta says winning the Premier League has whetted the players’ appetite for more trophies.

Nothing comes bigger than the Champions League.

“The ambition is bigger,” Arteta said in his pre-match news conference. “We have one, and we want the second one ... there has to be a platform to reach bigger destinations.”

Arsenal captain Martin Odegaard was the first player in the squad to get his hands on the Premier League trophy, and he liked it.

“When you get the taste of winning and lifting a trophy,” Odegaard says, “you know how nice it feels. And we want to do it again.”

Many of soccer’s superstar players will be taking the field at Puskas Arena – not least PSG forward Ousmane Dembélé, the most recent world player of the year.

Désiré Doué, the 20-year-old forward who lit up last year’s final with two goals in the record 5-0 win over Inter Milan, is still a shining light for PSG along with Georgia winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and three of Cristiano Ronaldo’s top teammates with Portugal – Vitinha, Nuno Mendes and Joao Neves.

Arsenal has England stars Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice in midfield and the striker who has just sent Sweden to the World Cup – Viktor Gyökeres.

Groups of fans got physical late Friday in Budapest’s frequented party area, leading police to launch an investigation over disorderly conduct.

Videos on social media showed several dozen people throwing punches and kicks, driving another group down Király street in the capital’s District 7.

One fan held a burning red flare before throwing it toward the other group, which was retreating down the street. Budapest police said in a statement that the violence erupted shortly after midnight, and that it was using surveillance footage to try to identify participants.

__ AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer