Brighton's Danny Welbeck celebrates after scoring during the English Premier League soccer match between Brighton and Liverpool in Brighton, Saturday, March 21, 2026. (AP Photo)Liverpool manager Arne Slot was forced to admit that his team have not been “good enough” and said that the defending champions’ latest defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion “hurts a lot”.Danny Welbeck scored a brace for Brighton at the Amex Stadium on Saturday while Milos Kerkez pulled a goal back for the Reds. The defeat meant that Liverpool have earned just a solo point from their last three league games. The club is now in fifth place in the Premier League, one point ahead of sixth-placed Chelsea ahead of its match at Everton later.“Of course now looking at the league table, this loss hurts a lot and it should hurt us a lot,” Slot said after the game. “It’s not good enough, no matter how many excuses I come up with.”The result will add more scrutiny on his position at the helm of the club.“The main problem is that we are in this position because we dropped a point at Wolves in the last minute from a deflected shot. That [Tottenham] goal last week in the 90th minute is, I would say, even a bigger problem than losing away at Brighton,” Slot lamented.Just last season, Slot had led Liverpool to a record-equalling 20th Premier League title. The club had seemingly done well in the transfer window as well, splurging £450million ($602m) they spent in last summer’s transfer window.At his press conference, Slot was asked if he expected people to have sympathy with him, given the money the club had splurged in the transfer window.Story continues below this ad“No, I have complete sympathy with that for all the people who are saying this because no one in England is used to the fact that there are also clubs that are selling players. So usually in England when a club is buying £450 million like we did, that’s adding that to the already great team you are having. But this club has a different model and no one wants to see that and no one wants to understand this, that I can also understand because fans of other teams and certain pundits don’t want to tell you that we sold for £300million ($401m).“Then, the £150 million ($201m) player is never available. That’s already one thing, and Giovanni Leoni has never been available because of his injury. That’s already the second thing, and now we’re already going underneath what we’ve sold. Jeremie Frimpong is recently much more available and Mamardashvili was one of the signings, the second goalkeeper. But, yes, it makes complete sense if you win the league last season and you spent £450 million that the expectations are high, and those expectations were high for the pundits, for the media, for me, for the fans. At our club we’re also looking at the situation and the challenge we had during this season, and then we might be a bit more realistic, why the season has gone why it is gone. But still it’s not good enough no matter how much excuses I can come up with, it’s still not good enough for the position you’re in right now.”