Up until the morning of Thursday July 3, everything was bliss on the Red half of Merseyside.
Four major transfers had been agreed and one from last season was also set to complete his move after a year on loan. Significant reinforcements had been added to the Premier League title winners.
Plans were already being made for the remaining two months of the transfer window and expectations were slowly being built for the upcoming season, hopes of backing up their success.
But now that we have been given the heartbreaking news that Diogo Jota has passed away, time has stood still and it likely will continue to for at least the next couple of weeks while people are grieving.
The idea of considering potential incoming or outgoing transfer moves feels incredibly insensitive at this time and no one is expected to move for the foreseeable future until normality resumes.
Although of course, for a lot of Liverpool’s players, their lives won’t be the same again now that one of their friends is no longer here. We don’t know what the full impact of Jota’s passing will be.
One potential likelihood is that we don’t see any more transfer activity for the remainder of the summer if the players wish to keep the squad together as a family and work together to get through the upcoming season through a collective effort of supporting one another.
Losing another player, albeit in a transfer, would be difficult for some fans to imagine.
As such, Slot might hope to focus on getting the team into a headspace where they can compete again, while working through their grief, rather than continuing to build the squad.
But exactly the same could be said for the opposite approach. Mohamed Salah wrote in his tribute to Jota that the idea of returning to Liverpool after the break actively frightened him, so without attempting to speculate, the idea of playing on Merseyside without Jota might be took hard to bare.
Either of these eventualities are possible and in time, each player will decide how they would like to move forward once they feel comfortable to confront the situation they find themselves in.
And to make it clear, there is no right or wrong way for the club to handle these circumstances.
Whichever way Liverpool decide to act, we will all have our opinions about it, and that’s fine, but the club has never been in this situation before, so mistakes might well be made.
Until we get to a point whereby those decisions can take place, we will all just have to sit and wait.
Regardless of what happens, it feels unfair to have any expectations for the upcoming season.