Rafael Benitez on Andoni Iraola's Liverpool Challenge

Rafael Benitez has seen Liverpool from the inside at its most intense. He knows what the club demands, what the crowd responds to, and how unforgiving the Premier League can be for a new man in the dugout.

So when the former Liverpool manager looks at Andoni Iraola and sees an advantage, people at Anfield tend to listen.

Iraola was appointed last month as Liverpool’s new head coach, stepping into the role after Arne Slot was sacked barely a year after guiding the club to a record-equalling 20th league title. It is a ruthless twist, even by elite football standards, but one that underlines the scale of the expectations now attached to the job.

Benitez, who led Liverpool between 2004 and 2010 and delivered a Champions League crown along the way, believes Iraola arrives with a crucial edge: he already understands the Premier League.

“It’s a massive club,” Benitez told Sky Sports, weighing the size of the task. “But I think he has an advantage – he knows the league. That is not easy.”

Benitez’s own arrival in England came from Valencia, straight into a very different footballing landscape. The pace. The physicality. The relentlessness of the schedule. All of it hit at once.

“At the beginning when we arrived to the Premier League, it was totally different,” he said. Iraola, by contrast, comes in battle-tested.

The 42-year-old earned his shot at Anfield through his work at Bournemouth, where his front-foot approach and aggressive, high-energy style turned heads. Benitez has been tracking him longer than most on Merseyside.

“Iraola has done really well obviously in Bournemouth as you have seen,” Benitez said. “But then we were following him when he was in Rayo Vallecano. One of the members of my staff was watching him training and he told me after that he liked it because he (Iraola) was involved, he's trying to do things on the pitch all the time.”

That detail matters. Liverpool fans have grown used to a team that plays on the front foot, that presses, that runs, that suffocates opponents. A coach who lives inside the training pitch, driving intensity and clarity, fits the identity they have come to expect.

“Bournemouth has done really well and now he has a different challenge,” Benitez said. The step from survival fights to title expectations is huge, but the footballing principles carry over.

And this is where Benitez is most confident: the bond between style and support.

“The fans will be very supportive, for sure,” he said. “The way that he wants to play, I think they like that. And I think he has great possibilities to do well.”

Liverpool have turned to a Spaniard before in a moment of transition and ambition. It reshaped the club’s modern history. Iraola does not arrive with the same backdrop or the same squad, but he walks into the same cauldron, with a style that should speak the same language as the Kop.

Now comes the test of whether that shared footballing dialect can carry him through the unforgiving noise of a Liverpool season.