Rebecca Lowe thinks Arne Slot is finished at Liverpool. Not might be finished — is finished. "There's no way a manager can come back when a star player has undermined him in public twice and half the squad are liking the post," she told Awful Announcing ahead of the Premier League's final Sunday. That's a pretty clear verdict from someone who has watched English football long enough to know the pattern.
Lowe and the NBC crew fly to England this week for what shapes up to be a genuinely chaotic end to the season. While Lee Dixon and Robbie Earle head to Selhurst Park to watch Arsenal lift the trophy at Crystal Palace, Lowe takes the main set to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — where Spurs need a single point against Everton to avoid the unthinkable.
The Slot situation has no good ending
On Liverpool's collapse, Lowe didn't pull punches. Salah called out the club's standards publicly. Half the squad liked the post. The Anfield faithful are already turning. And they might miss the Champions League entirely. "It makes it very easy for the club to get rid of him," she said.
The historical wrinkle is real: Liverpool have never sacked a title-winning manager. Slot won the league last season. But history and logic are pointing in opposite directions here, and Lowe thinks the fans win that argument. "They don't want him, so he ain't coming back."
Her Claudio Ranieri comparison lands. Ranieri won Leicester's title in 2016 and was out four months into the following season. But even that didn't carry this level of player-versus-manager toxicity. Liverpool's summer recruitment window is going to tell you everything about whether the club sees this as a Slot problem or something structural.
Spurs on the edge of something nobody wants to see
The Tottenham story is the one Lowe calls the second most shocking in Premier League history — behind only Leicester's title win — if it actually happens. A club with the best stadium in the league, a training ground most top-six sides would envy, potentially dropping into the Championship. Lincoln City away next season isn't just embarrassing. It's financially ruinous.
Lowe doesn't think it'll happen. She expects Spurs to nick a point. But she's right that the jeopardy itself is the story, and she's equally right that American sports fans have no framework for it. No NFL team gets relegated. No NBA franchise drops a division. The concept that failure has permanent structural consequences — at least for a season — is one of the things that makes European football genuinely different, not just stylistically but emotionally.
Focusing the main broadcast on survival rather than celebration is an interesting editorial call, but the correct one. The trophy lift at Selhurst Park is covered. The drama is at N17.
A World Cup assignment she never expected
Beyond Sunday, Lowe is heading into what she calls the busiest year of her career. The Premier League, the Winter Olympics, the Kentucky Derby, and now the World Cup with Fox Sports — her first time working the tournament. She's got a dedicated email folder labeled "World Cup prep" and says once the final Premier League whistle blows, it's all-in from there.
She's a Crystal Palace fan who won't make it to the Conference League final because the World Cup commitments got locked in before Palace's run became believable. "I never in my wildest dreams thought I should turn those down because we might get to the Conference League final." That's the kind of fan logic that makes complete sense until suddenly it doesn't.
Opening day of the World Cup, in the country she now calls home, for the biggest sporting event on the planet. She's calling it a dream. Given where she started — following a Crystal Palace side bouncing between divisions — that framing is hard to argue with.
