Q&ABilly Hogan interview: Successes of 2024-25 and exciting events ahead

Arne Slot’s Reds will be presented with the Premier League trophy at Anfield on Sunday after the conclusion of the season finale against Crystal Palace.

On Monday afternoon, the squad are then set to tour the city with the silverware in a victory parade to celebrate the triumph of a 20th league title with supporters.

Hogan sat down with Liverpoolfc.com to discuss the positives for the club on and off the pitch over the course of the past 12 months, and moving forward.

Read the Q&A below…

Billy, a massive weekend is ahead for all of us at the club. As we look forward to lifting the Premier League trophy on Sunday, how are you feeling?

Obviously incredibly excited. A sense of pride, certainly, for the club. An incredible accomplishment from the squad over the course of the season. Obviously Arne and Richard [Hughes], the backroom staff, so proud of everybody who has put in all the long hours over the course of a season to get to this moment. Now we have the opportunity to look forward to Sunday and experience the joy that comes with winning – that’s why we do this. I know for our supporters it’s incredibly important but all of us who work at the club, whether you kick a football or not, we wake up every day focused on winning. So, it’s incredibly exciting to be in this position. Obviously incredibly proud, as I said, and looking forward to Sunday. The match against Spurs was an incredible event and I’m sure that Sunday will be similar in the energy at Anfield.

Then obviously looking forward to the parade on Monday; we’ve had the good fortune now of having a few of those over the last few years. Looking forward to that, it’s always an incredible experience. I will say, I know there’s been some communications around trying to do that as safely as possible. With the pyrotechnics and the flares outside Anfield [at the Tottenham Hotspur match], we had almost 50 different burn reports, one being a three-year-old child. Which is sobering. So, asking everybody to have a great time – it is a great time, it’s a celebration – but to do it as safely as possible.

You mentioned the game against Tottenham there. When we clinched the title, it was such an outpouring of emotion on the day. How will you remember that day at Anfield?

I’ll never forget it, even just talking about it now gives me goosebumps. Going back five years, when we last won the title and obviously brought a 30-year drought to an end, I was one of the few people who were fortunate enough, I guess, in that case to be able to attend the matches once we restarted the season. As everybody knows, the team had been so successful and hadn’t lost a match until February. I remember being at Anfield in the second game after Project Restart started, we beat Crystal Palace actually – ironically, we’re playing Crystal Palace [this Sunday] – and there were four great goals.

I remember turning to Peter Moore and Andy Hughes, we were in the stadium, and I remember saying to them, ‘How heartbreaking is this, that we’re in here by ourselves and our supporters can’t see this and can’t celebrate?’ That would have taken us right to the brink of clinching the league at that point. Fast-forward five years, I think there was that emotion of a) being able to do it at Anfield and b) being able to do it in a way where there was such incredible emotion and support from the supporters. It was an amazing day, something certainly I’ll never forget.

Looking at this season as a whole, it’s fair to say it has probably exceeded the expectations of even the most ardent Liverpool supporter. The transition from Jürgen Klopp to Arne Slot has been pretty much seamless. What is your assessment of that time period and how well it has gone?

Obviously no-one knew quite what to expect, right? If we go back to just over a year ago, back in January 2024, when Jürgen made his announcement, that was a real moment for the club. Jürgen, the personality and the person that he was, the manager and the coach that he was, there was a real sense of uncertainty in terms of, ‘Where were we going to go from here?’ I will say, credit to him in the sense of making that announcement, frankly, as early as he did in the season gave us the opportunity to really prepare and really plan. Normally that doesn’t necessarily happen as it relates to a manager’s tenure, they oftentimes come to an end very quickly. In this case, we had a bit more time.

Obviously we have seen, from an ownership perspective, the decision to kind of re-evaluate the structure; Michael Edwards coming in as the CEO of Football at FSG; shortly after Michael joining, Richard Hughes joining as our sporting director. And the work that has gone in from them and the football staff to identify – you never know obviously, but try to identify – the best person to carry on. I think what they found in Arne is somebody who obviously from a style of play, tactically, fits well with the club and the team that was already built. But also had the opportunity to sort of take it to the next level. That’s something that we’ve seen over the course of this year. And it has been seamless.

It’s a huge credit to everybody involved, and a credit to Arne obviously. I was involved on the pre-season tour and even just talking to some of the guys coming back from the training sessions and just the changes in terms of what they were doing on a day-to-day basis and how invigorated they were, it was just really a sense that there was a really good energy right from the start. Obviously everybody bought into that and we’re seeing the rewards of that now.

It’s not just on the pitch that we’ve been breaking records this season, off the pitch it has been a record season as well in a number of areas, including concerts, tours and partnerships…

Yes. I know we’re coming to the final match of the season but this is the last 10 days or so of our fiscal year. Our year starts June 1, so if you rewind 12 months we were coming to the end of last season and then launching into concert season. It seems a long time ago but we hosted Taylor Swift and P!NK, two of the biggest acts in all of music. Five different nights, 250,000 music fans coming through Anfield, which is just another great example of utilising the stadium in a way that is allowing more and different people to experience Anfield.

The concert season was a busy one – more to come on that obviously this coming summer. Then we headed off to the tour, a really successful tour in the States, we were in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and South Carolina. The opportunity for the team to start working with Arne at that point. And over the course of the season we have launched seven new partnerships through our partnerships team. We have just completed a pretty seamless rebrand, which has been really well received by the supporters and looks great. So, there has been a lot of activity.

And some big news on the merchandising front and retail as well…

Yeah, obviously a couple of weeks ago we were extremely excited to announce the upcoming partnership with adidas coming back into the family, which is terrific. We have obviously had a great relationship with Nike and we thank them. We’re in the final year of our agreement with them and actually this will be a record year in terms of retail sales, so thank you to everybody who supports the club through the retail channels. It has been a really important year from a merchandising perspective. And actually, we’ve just launched our 19th standalone store, which is in Copenhagen, so please go and visit it if you’re in Copenhagen. Daniel Agger, who took some time off from his coaching duties with the Danish national team, was nice enough to come and help us open that. And 19 is actually a unique number because it actually means we are now the team that has the most standalone stores of any football club, any US franchise, which is something for us all to be very proud of.

Let’s speak about digital as well, massive strides once again made in that area. And The Red Way too…

Absolutely. From a digital perspective, we have been working really hard to continue the trajectory of where we’ve been and where we’re headed. Last year, LFC was the No.1 most-viewed Premier League club in the league and we’re hoping to build on that. We had over 1.5 billion engagements over the course of the season, which is a mind-boggling number. And that was last year; we’re hoping with the success of this team that we’ll have improved upon that. Over 200 million people across our social media channels that are following the club. Really the hope is to try to create a platform where wherever you are and whatever platform you use, that there’s LFC content that our team here has created. In my personal opinion, I think they create the best content in world sport. And that’s something we want to bring our supporters closer and bring them closer to the club and have them be in a position where they can consume that content wherever they are.

And you mentioned The Red Way, something that is incredibly important to us. This is our third annual release of The Red Way report and really it’s just kind of a milestone and a checkpoint to see how we’re doing. The Red Way is our focus on sustainability and that’s across our people, our planet and our communities. It’s something we think is incredibly important, it’s important and obviously we can always be improving but it’s something we are doing really well. In fact, we are leading across football and have won a number of different awards off the pitch for the work on The Red Way. Yes, it has been an incredibly successful year all round.

And looking to the immediate future, football never stands still. We’ve got a really exciting summer ahead: first-class concerts at Anfield once again and a pre-season tour to Hong Kong and Japan…

Absolutely, we never stand still. We’ll obviously have the trophy lift on Sunday and then the parade on Monday and then we’ll launch right into concert season. We’ll be welcoming The Boss to Anfield, Bruce Springsteen will be coming for two shows, Dua Lipa for two shows, and Lana Del Rey for a show as well. I will say a huge thank you to all of our staff that work on the concerts, because it is a lot of work to turn Anfield from a football stadium into a concert venue. So we really do appreciate everything that they do to execute those concerts.

Then we’ll head out on tour. We’re going back to Asia, which is really exciting. We’ll be in Hong Kong and then we’ll be in Yokohama. First time for pre-season in Japan, which is exciting, and we’ll be playing in the new Kai Tak Stadium in Hong Kong, it’ll be the first football match ever played at the Kai Tak Stadium, which is pretty special. It’ll be part of the Standard Chartered Trophy, Standard Chartered – obviously our main club partner – sponsoring that match against AC Milan. Then we’ll fly over to Yokohama, and I do want to thank our partner Japan Airlines, who have provided us a plane to get us from Liverpool to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Yokohama and then back to Liverpool in comfort and in style. So, a huge thank you to Japan Airlines.

Then we’ll come back and play in the Community Shield and we’ll face Crystal Palace, our opponents this weekend. I would want to just take a minute to say a huge congratulations to Crystal Palace for winning the FA Cup – it was a lot of fun to watch the celebrations. Again, just a huge congratulations. Then off we go again for the season, so not a lot of break but we’re looking forward to it.