Somehow, Liverpool may now be the Premier League’s biggest unknown quantity

Anyone who tells you they know what to expect from Liverpool next season is, in all likelihood, a big old liar.

That’s been the case for quite some time, of course. As fabulous a steward as Jurgen Klopp was for the club, there was always a chance they could embark on a new campaign and lose more games than they had in the previous two combined, or have a disappointing season one year only to go and reach the Champions League final the next.

The level Klopp took them up to was, if not on a perch, at the very least hovering around that perch, like a hummingbird that had returned home only to find a big fat sky blue cuckoo had taken over its nest.

This year, though, there is not even the Klopp’s constant static energy on which to tentatively stick our fragile balloons of expectation.

Arne Slot’s name could not be more appropriate, because Liverpool are very much a blank space we are waiting to have filled in.

No new arrivals have come in to give us a hint about what Slot values in his side, or where he feels they might need improvement from last season. Their only friendly so far was played behind closed doors, against Preston North End .

Even last season tells us virtually nothing about Liverpool. They were in the title race for ages, which suggests they are good. But they fell away from that title race quite dramatically towards the end, with the loss of personnel and greater accumulation of fatigue from a mid-season injury crisis only mostly accounting for how rubbish they looked at times in those closing stages of the season.

Even when they were in better form, legitimate questions were raised about just how much of that was down to luck more than judgement.

You can, obviously, look at Slot’s previous teams to get an idea of what he will have them doing, but any change of club naturally requires a new head coach to adapt his approach, at least at first, to meet the habits and skill set of the players he inherits.

Several of those players, by the way – big ones, like Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold and Virgil van Dijk – have uncertain futures of their own. Others have been so streaky and inconsistent – especially in that front line – that you could just as easily predict them to be panic-sold in January as you could for them to score 30 goals next season.

None of this is necessarily a red flag (a stupid idiom, given it would actually be their preferred colour of flag), nor particularly unexpected.

The fact they are refusing to rush into making a splashy signing just for the sake of it could well be an eminently sensible move. Slot may well turn out to be the Bob Paisley to Klopp’s Bill Shankly, building on his predecessor’s construction work to take them to even greater heights.

The thing is that they have given us so little to go off, in fact, that you start to wonder if the whole thing is some elaborate art project – a work in progress kept under a tarpaulin until they are good and ready to show it off to the world.

That’s as it should be, really. The noisiest clubs are so often the most poorly-run, full of empty promises and rash decisions that they are unable to back up.

But for us nosey and curious lot, who will soon be tasked with making our annual rounds of pre-season predictions…it would be nice to have at least something to build an opinion around.