Brendan Rodgers has hit out at the treatment of managers in the modern game and said the explanation for Liverpool's struggles this season should be "clear."
Rodgers, whose side host Arsenal on Sunday, said he found it hard to accept that Gunners supporters had verbally abused Arsene Wenger at a train station following the defeat to Stoke earlier this month.
"If you look at Arsene Wenger, he has been an iconic figure for football, he has been amazing," he told Sunday newspapers. "You get criticised when you don't win games but some of the personal stuff he takes is disgraceful. Absolutely disgraceful.
"The other week he was at Stoke and what happened was absolutely disgraceful. As a leading figure in football, a real statesman of the game, it was really poor, but that is the modern world, unfortunately."
Rodgers, too, has come in for criticism this season, with the Reds failing to recover the form that saw them narrowly miss out on the title last season.
However, with Luis Suarez having moved on to Barcelona and Daniel Sturridge missing with a succession of injuries, he feels there should be more understanding of the situation.
"Six or seven months ago I was the manager of the year and I was going to be this and that, tactically this and tactically that; because we lost two world-class players, one out of the club and one injured, I am useless," he said. "But I accept that."
He added: "It is a fair point that people are looking at us and seeing that we haven't been as dynamic as the last couple of years, but there are simple reasons for that. It should be clear really."
Borussia Dortmund, who had been Champions League finalists in 2013, have also suffered a dramatic collapse this season and will go into the Bundesliga's winter break in the relegation zone.
Rodgers highlighted the significance of Robert Lewandowski's move to Bayern Munich in the summer, with Mario Gotze having made the same switch a year earlier.
"You look at Jurgen Klopp's example at Dortmund," he said. "There are certain players that will move on each year, but the minute he takes Lewandowski out, he is a world-class player, it sometimes doesn't matter about the other players.
"You see where they have been this year, where they are struggling. There are still top players in there, but if you lose two of those, I don't care what team you are -- let alone the team that has come through unexpectedly like we did last year but was improving and developing -- you take that out, and it is a massive, massive loss to any group.
"It has taken us that bit of time to try and recover our way of working, to find the balance which to produce those type of performances and results, all without much coaching time."
Liverpool invested heavily in the squad in the summer on the likes of Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren, Mario Balotelli and Lazar Markovic, but Rodgers stressed that, despite the players' price tags, they would still need time to adapt to life at Anfield.
"Football is a critical world, but when you think of the past players, they would come in here and would need a bit of time to adjust and play," he said. "For some reason in the modern game, they don't need that just because you have to pay more money for them.
"Players used to come into Liverpool and you wouldn't have heard of them. They would be given time to develop -- six months or a year or two years.
"Modern players, because of the media and everything and social media, they don't get that time. They come in and are expected to be unbelievable straight away. And young players."
Liverpool showed signs of improvement in the 3-1 Capital One Cup win at Bournemouth in midweek, with Raheem Sterling scoring twice as the team's central attacker, and Rodgers said: "I just think we are coming to terms with dealing with working in a different way.
"I have had to look at different solutions and different personnel and different areas to see if we can recapture our model of play.
"We are in a position now where we put in some good performances without getting results but we see players starting to improve slowly like Markovic, who has taken time to come in, and others.
"We are in a position where we know we are going to improve and develop over the coming games. We just need to ensure we are doing it our way."