After Diogo Jota died, I said I didn’t care if Liverpool finished 17th this season. How can anything on a football pitch matter after a tragedy?

While I have frequently become annoyed during matches this season, I broadly stand by what I said. We have seen Mohamed Salah crying on the pitch. Andy Robertson was unable to think of anything else before playing a crucial World Cup qualifier, a tournament for which Portugal have symbolically included Jota in their squad. The pain doesn’t fade easily or quickly.

To expect the grieving Reds of 2025/26 to be ultra competitive entirely misses the weight of what they endured (and continue to carry).

“Nobody can prepare for what we had to go through… the first time me seeing the lads after the trophy days, we’re on a plane on the way to one of our mate’s funerals. It’s been tough and we can’t hide away from that.”

Andy Robertson, The Overlap, May 2026

And to be clear, I thought they would win the league or at least be in the race when the season began. It’s just that I was also willing to accept a lost season in a way many supporters were not. There’s no right or wrong here, it’s just cards on the table time.

We’ve reached that point because the season is ending. The club need to decide whether to stick with Arne Slot (as appears likely) or twist on somebody else. Many fans are hoping, even demanding, the suits opt for the latter. But supporters worry about table positions and 19 defeats and being behind Manchester United and jokes from their mates at their expense and if the manager has a mid-season holiday and players’ social media posts.

Much of that is noise. Bad optics, to use a phrase of the day, but mostly noise.

FSG, Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes will be concerned with the signal. Trying to find some of that here is the perfect way to round off the final edition of this newsletter.

Many of the talking points which follow have been touched on throughout the campaign. We can now assess them with the season (effectively) over to try to determine what impact they have upon Slot’s immediate job prospects.

Open Play

There are two obvious ways to approach this: a comparison with the rest of the league or a look at the shifts since 2024/25. For the former, you can make a case that Liverpool have been broadly fine. Their expected goal difference is only 0.07 per game below champions Arsenal (though we’ll get to set plays shortly).

The concern for fans is how much of this is down to Slot versus how much rests with the brilliance of players who are improvising rather than working to coached plans.

The Reds’ other problem is not so much the season-wide performance as the trend. Liverpool rescued Jürgen Klopp’s poorer campaigns by finishing strongly. It engenders positivity about the future, unlike the way in which Slot’s side are stumbling over the finishing line for 2025/26.

Gathering cups in May? Gathering a few decent performances would do for now.

If Liverpool dispense with Slot having recently backed him, this chart explains at least some of why they will have had a change of heart.

The Reds’ open play xG difference average for the season peaked at match 15 (the 3-3 draw at Leeds), when it equated to 0.63 per game. It has hit 0.6 at points since, but the split works out at 0.59 for the first half of the campaign and 0.26 since.

It has been less than half as good since turning for home, in other words, in a season that wasn’t going very well before that.

A comparison with last season is enlightening for all teams, not just Liverpool. The Reds’ open play defence has worsened by about 0.15 expected goals per match, which is not ideal but won’t sink a season. What will drag a team down, will make a grown man cry, is the offense dropping by over three times as much.

When you sign Hugo Ekitike, Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz but are unable to start them together in the league, seeing the new-look attack flounder is somewhat inevitable. And although Liverpool have seen by far the biggest slump in open play attacking, very few clubs have escaped a downturn since last term.

Slot is a very good manager. His career proves as much, with 2025/26 the first slump of his career. Whether he is the right man to lead a top team in a Premier League heading in this direction is another matter.

Set Pieces

Liverpool have already twisted in this sense by dispensing with the service of Aaron Briggs. He left after 18 matches, a convenient point for assessing change across a season.

The Reds had scored three league goals via set plays when Briggs was dismissed, conceding 12 at the other end. Those figures are 15 and eight for the 19 matches since.

Nerds being nerds, we must examine the xG. It’s a confusing picture.

The underlying numbers have increased at both ends since Briggs left, with the conversion rates all over the place throughout the campaign. The improved attacking rate over the previous half season would still only place the Reds eighth in the Premier League if expanded across the entire campaign.

The difference between the potency of Arsenal and Liverpool’s set pieces is beautifully laid bare. The Gunners have generated as much set play xG in their 37 league games this season as the Reds have in their previous 68. Worship at their meat wall.

Slot frequently refers to set piece goals yet his entire Liverpool tenure has produced little more xG than Arsenal have in 2025/26 alone. Whether he stays or not, whoever is in charge next season has to make the Reds more potent.

Physical Data

“We had a disrupted pre-season. Certain things we had to do and certain things we had to be respectful towards in terms of how we were dealing with it in terms of grief. The manager and the sports scientists, they couldn’t push us too hard too early because of what we were going through and they were going through the exact same.”

Robertson on The Overlap

Liverpool have covered an average of four kilometres fewer than their opponents in the 33 league matches for which data is available this season. As previously discussed, how much this matters is up for discussion:

The Reds have sprinted slightly further than their opposition overall, ‘winning’ this metric 19 times They’re clearly still capable of moving at top speed when required.

As they finished 16th for covering distance in the Premier League last season, potentially little has changed in their approach. They simply never had a solid base of advance physical work from which to build.

While pre-season will be disrupted by a World Cup this summer, it won’t be sent spinning sidewards by the death of a player. It’s reasonable to assume the squad should be fitter next season.

Pressing

This is perhaps the ultimate battle of eye test versus analytics this season. The Liverpool press looks horrible. Too easy to play through, offering wet paper bag-levels of resistance. The fast-twitch fibers of the likes of Firmino, Henderson and Mané didn’t die for this standard of passive engagement.

But.

There are just four clubs who average more possession-adjusted pressures per match than Liverpool. Only the same number have a better success rate, with Manchester City the sole side who top the Reds on both points. Hmm.

Maybe the Statsbomb data is incorrect. Perhaps it counts different things to what we think of successful pressures when watching a match. The range of success rates isn’t very wide so it could be that the teams are essentially alike.

This brings us back to the changing style of the Premier League. A lot of teams aren’t that bothered about pressing, or at least not in the gegen, Klopp sense. They’ll close opponents down without haring about like maniacs.

Whatever the explanation for Liverpool’s apparently good press by the above measure, Opta is inclined to agree from an attacking perspective. The Reds have translated 10 high turnovers (which are ball recoveries in the final 40 metres) into goals, the most of any team in the Premier League. One thing stands out in their PPDA data though.

Liverpool have allowed 11.5 passes per defensive action, the seventh lowest mark in the division (where a lower number equates to a more intense press). That figure was 9.7 after six matches of the campaign, below any team’s current level.

Some of the slide will be down to Slot implementing a different style after three successive three-goal defeats. The squad being undercooked physically might be the bigger factor. Either way, what was strong has declined. It also brings us nicely to the final section.

Style of Play

Salah recently called for the return of the “the heavy metal attacking team that opponents fear”. Kopites, disgruntled after a series of anaemic performances, are largely in agreement.

But they also wanted Slot to be replaced by the new Chelsea manager, Xabi Alonso. If he were at Liverpool and if he implemented his title-winning Leverkusen template (a reasonable assumption with Jeremie Frimpong and Florian Wirtz on board), the Reds might be even slower than they are now.

We can recreate the above chart for the 2025/26 Premier League. It shows that Liverpool have been a little faster than average moving up field, playing roughly 0.6 passes per sequence above the going rate for the division.

The Reds’ direct speed of 1.84 metres per second is below the 1.93 they posted in Klopp’s final season. No surprise.

However, it is higher than the 1.73 they recorded last term and markedly above Liverpool’s figure of 1.45 in 2022/23. More pertinently, it is within 0.01 of what Slot’s Feyenoord delivered when setting a new club record for Eredivisie points in his final campaign with them. We are seeing the established speed of his football.

You don’t have to like it, but you’ll have to go along with it as long as Slot is in charge.

Conclusion

There are not vast amounts wrong in the areas of football that can be easily measured.

The attack needs to perk up in open play, which would have the twin benefit of lessening the burden on the backline. The same is true for set pieces, though sharper concentration in defence would at least tip the balance of chances back in their direction. They should also be better prepared physically next season, which should improve them on every front no matter what else changes.

But what about the intangibles? We have seen the team give up in games, collapsing badly after making reasonable starts on multiple occasions. Salah will have left but the squad may no longer retain faith in Slot and his methods.

Unpicking the effects of grief from any other disharmony among the playing staff is not an easy task. Perhaps this is why the club is willing to give the gaffer another shot next term. We can only speculate at how life has been behind the scenes this season.

Whatever happens with the identity of the manager (sorry, head coach) and no matter where the team finish in 2026/27, we’ll be there. Cheering, grumbling, analysing, venting. Win, lose or draw, the fans are the constant. Take note, FSG.

I won’t be sad if Slot leaves. The season has been too disappointing, too often. Nobody will be stunned or upset if Liverpool move in a new direction. I will always wonder what might have been had the boss had a better run of things this season though. He didn’t stand much of a chance from the start.

We all assumed the hard part for Slot would be replacing Klopp. That looked routine compared with steering the team after the death of one of their teammates.

Thanks for the title, Arne. Maybe I’ll see you around next season.

A final thank you for your support with this newsletter, friends. A reminder that I will be refunding the outstanding amounts for the existing annual subscriptions next week. If you have any issues, please email me at andrew@andrewbeasleyfootball.com.

“It seems like the club has thrown me under the bus”

“I want to see Liverpool go back to being the heavy metal attacking team that opponents fear”

"We fought together through the hardest time in our life”

Mohamed Salah. December 6th, May 15th, March 24th.

Nobody could have predicted that Mohamed Salah would’ve made more headlines for post-match comments and social media posts than for goals and assists in the final season of his Liverpool career.

It won’t matter in years to come. His gripes about being benched or how the team has performed will be long forgotten when supporters reminisce about the Egyptian King. The positive memories overwhelm the occasional low points. It feels sad now; it won’t last.

Salah’s recent downturn in form was as much of a surprise as his initial rampant success. Members of the Liverpool brains trust told me at an OptaPro forum in 2018 that even their expectations had been surpassed by what the former Roma man had delivered in those first few months.

What Salah has achieved with the club has been truly remarkable. Is it possible to change the world within eight years? It’s been done before.

If the Beatles had split up today, their debut single Love Me Do would have been released in November 2018. That feels far too recent for that to be true. Can you remember the best new bands from that year? Genius moves life fast.

There obviously aren’t too many direct parallels between Liverpool’s best band and one of the club’s greatest ever players, even if the timelines broadly fit. Paul McCartney announced he’d left the Beatles 2,865 days after the group had signed with Parlophone, just one week longer than the gap between Salah inking his Reds contract and the title-sealing 5-1 win over Tottenham.

Hindsight tells us this may have been the final Liverpool match in which Salah was truly happy with his performance, the outcome, everything. The Reds didn’t win another game last term, before the death of Diogo Jota summoned a dark cloud that is unlikely to have fully lifted. Maybe it never will for those who knew him best. We may eventually learn the full extent of the impact that the tragedy had upon 2025/26. For now, we can merely guess.

So, although he didn’t get the chance to break America on The Ed Sullivan Show, make a few films or release Sgt Pepper in 2022, Salahmania is a fair description of his first campaign. He was initially part of a Fab Four too.

This Beatles comparison didn’t last as Philippe Coutinho’s exit left Salah to form one of the greatest ever front threes with Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mané. Now it feels like he’s gone solo, in more ways than one.

Klopp’s attacking trident all scored in the Egyptian’s debut, a 3-3 draw at Watford, and never really stopped. While not an official assist in Opta terms, Salah was fouled for the penalty from which his Brazilian colleague netted that day. Given how referees have treated him in the years since, it’s something of a wonder that the spot kick was awarded.

When it comes to Premier League matches in which players have both scored and set up a goal, Liverpool’s current number 11 has no equals. His twin threat has been unrivalled in the modern era of English football.

This formidable productivity has carried Salah to third on the Premier League standings for goal contributions, with 286. He trails Alan Shearer (324) and Wayne Rooney (310), not that he could have hoped to match either when playing over 11,000 minutes fewer. Of the 10 men with the most combined goals and assists in Premier League history, only Sergio Agüero and Thierry Henry collated their tally more rapidly.

Even then, Salah’s contribution combined with his longevity is arguably unparalleled in this competition. He was averaging a goal contribution per 90 minutes across his Premier League career as recently as Liverpool’s 3-2 win at Newcastle earlier this season.

If you round up from one decimal place instead of two, he still would be; whatever happens against Brentford, Salah will end his time in the Premier League (assuming he doesn’t remain in England) with 0.96 goals and assists per 90. We will be blessed to see such phenomenal attacking consistency in a red shirt ever again.

The proportion of non-penalty goals and assists that truly mattered is an area in which the 33-year-old has fallen a little short against his elite Premier League peers. The big moments. The contributions that occurred when either level or no more than one goal up or down. Never mind the cakewalks and lost causes, what have you got when it really matters? Leave your stat-padding at the door.

As impressive as he has so often been at Anfield, a higher proportion of Salah’s ‘important’ (by this measure) contributions have been on the road. Perhaps that is inevitable with big wins unlikelier to occur. Nonetheless, despite being 38 shy of Shearer’s goal contribution record in the Premier League, he is just nine behind Rooney’s leading tally of 139 for away matches alone.

Salah has also delivered for Liverpool away from home in Europe. He scored the opener in the Champions League final in 2019, claimed the competition’s fastest ever hat-trick, struck against both Milan clubs in the San Siro and bagged an iconic goal directly in front of his adoring public at the Etihad. This map shows where he has appeared and scored on the road for the Reds.

Whenever, wherever Liverpool needed a goal, he was there more often than not. He tied a generation of very successful Reds together too. Salah either assisted or was set up to score by 37 different teammates. It would probably take you some time to even name that many Liverpool players from the last nine seasons, never mind jointly contribute to goals with them. You can see how the top 20 for shared goal involvements with Salah has evolved here.

The best part of this video? It could be the sight of Darwin Núñez charging into view with only about 100 goals to go, eventually forcing his way to fifth in the standings. Salah has put his pleasure in playing with the Uruguayan on record, with this chart illustrating why.

He probably enjoyed playing with most of these guys, in fairness. It’s been a remarkable nine years. As fantastic as Salah has been for Liverpool, he wouldn’t have achieved anything without his teammates, the two managers (with whom he has occasionally fallen out) and the support of the fans. It is his relationship with the latter that usually forms some basis of his rare public comments, just as his bond with Kopites has driven him to succeed on the pitch.

And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Farewell, Mo.

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The total of 14 shots was the second fewest in a Premier League match this season. The visitors mustered a solitary attempt after the 39th minute, with the Reds only producing two after the hour mark. Wake me up when it’s over.

If one were to be charitable, the pair of late Liverpool shots added an air of what might have been to a very mild performance as they both struck the woodwork. Dominik Szoboszlai hit the post from outside the box before he delivered a corner to Virgil van Dijk, who thundered a header off the crossbar (as you can see here).

It’s eminently possible to win despite playing badly, with the Reds coming very close to proving the point in this match. Only Manchester United (16), Bournemouth and Crystal Palace (both 13) have hit the woodwork more times than Liverpool in the 2025/26 Premier League, suggesting Arne Slot’s men have suffered with a degree of misfortune.

We have been here before. Kenny Dalglish’s Reds found the frame of the goal a ridiculous 24 times when finishing eighth in 2011/12. Tables were made that showed results if hitting the woodwork counted as a goal, with Liverpool up in fourth (if memory serves correctly). A sport of fine margins consumed them and spat them out that year.

Has the same happened this season? Or were both iterations of the Reds just bad teams, with errant finishing merely one facet of their poor performance?

Leaving aside that any game plays out differently if a shot goes in rather than hits the goal frame, Liverpool could argue they have been unlucky in 2025/26. Only two of their 12 woodwork rattlers occurred in matches that they won. Draws with Sunderland, Leeds, Fulham, Arsenal and Burnley could easily have turned in their favour, as could defeats to Manchester United and Wolves. In Europe, van Dijk struck the crossbar when the PSV match was 1-1; what might have been.

Fans only tend to remember post hits that rob their team. There have been 11 from opponents in the Reds’ league matches this term, including in their wins against Aston Villa, Brighton, Newcastle and Crystal Palace. Liverpool had lost four consecutive league games when Morgan Rogers struck the Kop end goalframe in just the fifth minute of the Villa match; what might have been.

Just as only three teams have hit the woodwork more than Liverpool, only three have seen their own goalframe struck more often. The average per team in 2025/26 is 9.6, so the posts and crossbar at each end have been a bigger factor in Reds games.

To establish what degree of luck there might have been, we must dig deeper. Understat provides the expected goal totals by shot outcome, which are fascinating.

Goals have the highest xG per shot rate, as you would expect (not least because they will include most penalties). The descent follows a logical progression; shots leading to Premier League goals in 2025/26 have been worth an average of 0.38 expected goals, with saved efforts (0.13) ahead of off target attempts (0.10) and those that are blocked (0.07).

The interesting aspect is that woodwork hits are worth 0.20 xG, illustrating that they are often really good chances. Liverpool’s pair against Chelsea were just 0.02 and 0.01 on the Understat model, with Opta only marginally above that for van Dijk’s header. Being centimetres from scoring doesn’t mean they were unduly unlucky to be denied.

The Reds’ xG average for their shots that have hit the woodwork (0.14) is below the going rate despite Szoboszlai’s missed penalty against Burnley being in the sample. Their only other Opta-defined big chance that struck the frame occurred in this kerfuffle at Wolves.

The mean xG score for opposition efforts has also been under par (0.15), albeit they have had five shots of at least average rate. The most recent examples highlight the statistical issue with how offside is handled these days though. Both Jørgen Strand Larsen and Bryan Mbeumo recently struck the Liverpool woodwork in moves that were offside but were allowed to continue and thus enter the data.

We can’t do anything about that, nor can we easily find out the game state in which other clubs hit the woodwork or had their own goalframe struck. One way in which we can attempt to assess luck is to look at what proportion of a team’s xG found the post or crossbar, eliminating the issue of some teams creating far more chances than others.

If the percentage is above league average (3.4 per cent), then a team can be deemed to be unlucky. They can also be viewed that way if under that proportion of opposition expected goals were kept out of the net by the white frame holding it up.

By this crude measure of kismet, West Ham, Fulham, Manchester City and Arsenal could be said to have been lucky at both ends, in descending order of combined fortune. Crystal Palace (by a wide margin), Aston Villa and Leeds have been unlucky in attack and defence.

Liverpool? There hasn’t been much that could be attributed to fortune at either end. The Reds have been a little lucky with regards woodwork in attack (and would be rather more so had Szoboszlai’s penalty been converted), with some of that welcome fortune disappearing in defence. Combining the two makes them the seventh most luck-neutral side of the 20.

Sorry, Arne. The woodwork hasn’t explained the downturn in results this season. It did have Liverpool supporters hitting the bar last weekend though.

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Most onlookers might have expected him to last slightly longer than three months though. If one wanted to defend Rosenior, one could point to Chelsea’s underlying data. There were signs of improvement at both ends of the field early on.

At worst, he left them where he found them after 13 league games. That’s about as much as you can hope for when promoting a young coach way above his experience level.

Aside from it representing one third of a season, a 13 game sample is an odd number to choose unless it’s the full duration of a manager’s tenure. Ten makes more sense, humans like a round number.

It works well when assessing the impact that Michael Carrick has had at Manchester United. His predecessor left after overseeing the first 20 league games of 2025/26. Have the Red Devils improved since the much-derided Ruben Amorim got the boot?

We will gain an insight into whether United are getting smarter as a club based on the decisions they make this summer. Positive vibes only last so long, they can only carry a team so far.

With the managerial changes that have occurred in the Premier League this term, as a little as rolling five-game sample size can show how certain clubs performed under certain coaches.

There are four managers who have taken charge of exactly this many matches, with Graham Potter the first of them to be dismissed. As unlikely as it looks that Nuno Espírito Santo will keep West Ham up, they eventually began moving in the right direction.

If they go down, it will be at the expense of the ninth richest club in the world managing to escape the drop. Slow hand clap for Tottenham, everyone.

Spurs are a good team to assess in this way, as Igor Tudor oversaw five league matches before Roberto De Zerbi has since done likewise. The latter has proven more effective, aided somewhat by a kinder schedule over their equally small bodies of Premier League work.

Nottingham Forest have also barely escaped relegation through a succession of relatively small managerial bursts. Nuno had three games, Ange Postecoglou five, Sean Dyche 18 with Vitor Pereira handling the final 12 (assuming Evangelos Marinakis doesn’t ditch him now the club are safe; you never know).

We can be confident that Forest’s owner prefers mood music to underlying numbers, attitude to trend lines. How ever Marinakis landed on Pereira, he may to have finally made the right choice. Eenie, meanie, minie, Vitor.

The rolling five game graph makes for interesting reading back at our first club, Chelsea. It highlights short-term ups-and-downs that are smoothed out in the 13-game chart. We more readily see the upsurge that came under Rosenior before the slump that saw him leave faster than Abe Simpson in the Maison Derrière.

It’s also worth a once over as Mr High Performance’s first five games saw the Blues earn 13 points. Nobody would have imagined he had just eight league matches remaining after a start that hot.

Five-game spells have been hugely relevant to Liverpool’s campaign too. They had a perfect record and a five point lead atop the Premier League table after five matches. The points tally hadn’t risen four games later after a run of defeats.

The Reds have also had a run of four consecutive draws, with 11 the most points they have earned in any stretch of five league games since the first five fixtures were in the bank. Had the season begun on September 25th, for argument’s sake, Liverpool would be eighth; only four points adrift of fifth, but 12 off fourth and closer to the bottom three points-wise (16) than the leaders (25).

What does their rolling five game chart look like?

It looks like the EastEnders logo if someone poured red paint into the Thames somewhere around City Airport. Will the red river sweep Arne Slot out towards his homeland?

As difficult as 2025/26 has been, you would hope to see improvements by this point, not a slump. Not that tired minds allied to tired bodies, on and off the pitch, will have made it easier to eke that out of the squad.

The graph sums up the rollercoaster of a campaign. In very broad terms, when expected goals have increased at one end they have also gone up at the other.

The Reds recently recorded their best five-game sample for underlying numbers, only to immediately follow it with their worst. Only five of the 32 overlapping five-match runs have seen Liverpool drop below an average of at least +0.4 non-penalty xG difference but only two have been above 0.7.

It’s mildly dominating games without doing enough to consistently win matches, over and over and over again. The good, the bad and the ugly frequently show up in any given game, with the whims of the referee or the bounce of the ball capable of deciding so much. It has been a season of ‘okay, but’.

For comparison, here is Manchester City. They funnelled into a mid-season blip before emerging out of it in style. Even with a red patch, the Cityzens have dominated many more of their matches than the Reds.

Arsenal have been in credit for every five-game streak, usually by a decent margin. It would be fascinating to see their figures for open play chances only. Even the Gunners haven’t entirely escaped Liverpool’s trend of seeing xG rise at both ends at the same time.

A rolling 10-game chart for Liverpool is the right way to finish. Smoother than the five-match version, it enables us to look at their unbeaten run of that length in the middle of the campaign.

Slot’s decision to tighten up the team after the trio of three-goal defeats led his side to have their best 10-game run defensively this season. The failure to sustain it has seen the xG Against line creep up towards the attack, with the team’s passive approach doing little to prevent opposition chances to the extent that it should.

This has created a bottleneck on the graph as Liverpool approach their final two matches. Maybe the lines will cross, snipping Slot off ahead of 2026/27. Never cross the streams, Arne.

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“Dominik Szoboszlai (13 goals, 10 assists) became only the third player to reach 10+ goals and 10+ assists for Premier League clubs in all competitions this season, after Rayan Cherki (10 goals, 14 assists) and Jarrod Bowen (10 goals, 11 assists). He was the first midfielder to achieve this for Liverpool since Steven Gerrard in 2013-14 (14 goals, 14 assists).”

The above quote is from Opta Analyst’s review of Liverpool’s recent 3-2 defeat at Old Trafford. As much as reaching double figures in the two main output categories is an utterly arbitrary achievement, it feels significant. Evidence of output. A good addition to the CV.

Florian Wirtz is unlikely to hit these marks in his debut campaign with the Reds. They will likely remain tantalisingly out of reach, with his goal and assist totals currently standing at seven and eight respectively.

The frustration is that he could easily have been there already without need for a hot finishing streak by him or his colleagues. Wirtz has scored 2.45 goals fewer than expected across his league and European appearances, with teammates squandering 2.94 of his expected assists.

Moving the abacus to 10 in the goal and assist columns wouldn’t suddenly make his 2025/26 a roaring success. Being the first Liverpool midfielder since Steven Gerrard to achieve, well, anything is never a bad thing though. Ignoring penalty goals would’ve made Wirtz the first Reds midfielder in double figures for both setting up and scoring goals for 17 years, assuming he got there before Szoboszlai.

In a recent episode of their Anfield Wrap show, Rob Gutmann and Mo Stewart were discussing Wirtz’s pre-assist against Crystal Palace, his similarity of sorts with Peter Beardsley and how the pass that precedes an assist should be more widely recognised. It’s time to discuss Flo’s role in the flow before a goal.

‘Secondary, ‘hockey’ or ‘pre’ assists can be hard to define. In simple terms they are the pass that precede the assist. But what if a player delivers the ball to the goal creator when they then score themselves?

You can’t assist your own goal so can you pre-assist it? Is there a tree falling in this forest? Exhibit A, Wirtz against Newcastle.

Let’s allow it, this isn’t a court of law. As long as we treat all players the same, it seems fair enough. The data which follows comes through checking clips and pass maps, there isn’t a source of secondary assist data (to the best of my knowledge).

Liverpool have three men with more pre-assists than Wirtz this season. Two feel very obvious, the other less so.

Before we get to them, the full Flo picture. As well as the above example and his recent pre-assist for Andy Robertson’s goal against Palace, we have one from when Manchester United visited Anfield:

With the other at West Ham:

While not identical, there’s an air of similarity to the three clips here. In each instance, Wirtz played a pass into or within the penalty area before a cross or cutback was delivered to the scorer. This will have been exactly what Arne Slot will have wanted to see the young midfielder produce, it just hasn’t happened enough. Adding a little verve on the wings this summer should make a huge difference to Wirtz’s output.

Szoboszlai has the most pre-assists, with six. Two were against Barnsley, with three of them for stoppage time goals in matches which the Reds were already winning. The only really important strike was Ryan Gravenberch’s opener in the Merseyside derby, albeit the secondary assist wasn’t really integral to the goal.

Gravenberch’s goal was set up by Mohamed Salah, who has five pre-assists in his final Liverpool campaign. Two of them put the Reds 1-0 up; at Wolves in the FA Cup and against Fulham at Anfield. The latter was assisted by Wirtz, as was one Salah both secondary assisted and scored against Galatasaray.

A stronger, more productive connection between these two players is another thing Slot would have anticipated at the start of the campaign. The partnership will never hit the heights it should have.

The man with five pre-assists that might not automatically come to mind is Curtis Jones. In echoes of the others, two were against the Tykes with one for a goal he scored himself in the cup win at Molineux.

The final player to highlight is Hugo Ekitike, as all three of his hockey assists were for opening goals. The only one for which he didn’t also finish the move himself occurred against Tottenham in north London.

High turnover? Check. Ekitike, Isak and Wirtz all involved in the brief, sharp sequence? Check. More please? Oh, hell yeah (a.k.a. check).

When we get to overall goal involvements - scoring, assisting or contributing to the sequence prior to that - we’ll have to include pre-assists in the other involvements to avoid rewarding scorers twice as in some examples above. There’s one player who stands out…

…at the bottom of the chart. Reading too much into Isak’s largely wasted first season is pointless. Nonetheless, he hasn’t yet contributed to any goals when he wasn’t the scorer (four) or assist provider (one).

Much has been made of his low touch count, the near total lack of involvement; here’s the outcome. If Isak isn’t scoring, he isn’t doing much of anything (at least based on what we’ve seen so far).

As for Wirtz, only Salah has assisted goals more frequently but almost everyone has played a part in the preceding build up more often. There aren’t too many hidden contributions to be found lurking here.

Not that every attack becomes a goal, far from it. No player with at least 1,700 minutes for any club has completed more final third passes per 90 minutes in the 2025/26 Premier League. Understat’s xGBuildup metric (which rewards players for the xG of the possession sequences in which they’re involved without shots or key passes) has Wirtz 10th in the top flight among players with at least as many minutes, second only to Szoboszlai for Liverpool.

He’s on the ball, he’s in the right area. He’s not hidden in that sense. The Reds will need Wirtz to contribute more, with a little improved precision in front of goal potentially making all the difference before anything else does.

In case you’ve not seen, the newsletter is ending this month. Here’s why:

Hello, friends.

I wanted you to hear from me before I post on social media later today. The newsletter is coming to an end in a few weeks. But it is ending for a positive reason.

I have got a job with The Guardian, working as a data visuals journalist in sport. I start next month. Those emails I send you that you enjoy so much? You might start seeing something similar in a national newspaper.

I am so grateful for the support your subscriptions have given me since I started the paid tier in October 2024. It’s rarely dull following Liverpool but it has been a remarkable 18 months, from title wins to tragedy, through the struggle that has been this season. There has been so much for us to celebrate, commiserate and investigate together.

I paused the paid subscriptions earlier this week so that nobody who has one will be billed again. I will be continuing articles for the remainder of 2025/26, then I will ensure that everyone with an annual subscription will be refunded for their outstanding amounts in the final week of the month.

I will reiterate this again before closing the doors but if anything goes wrong with your refund then please email me in June at andrew@andrewbeasleyfootball.com.

And hey, the newsletter and website will still be here, so there’s no need to unsubscribe as such. I follow some writers who send out ‘things I have written’ round-ups so may end up doing something similar.

All that is to come. For now, thank you again for everything. It has meant the world to me. It’s time to step outside.

Cheers,

Andrew. Up the Reds.

Arne Slot’s side were two goals down before they’d taken a shot or a third touch in the opposition penalty box. There seemed no way they’d score once, never mind twice, in response. No Ekitike, no Isak, no Salah, …

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The first episode in the Question Time series looked at Arsenal, the partnership between Hugo Ekitike & Alexander Isak (#jinx) and the success of Liverpool’s academy. It’s time to dig into a few …

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“I consider the veracity of the idea that LFC currently has the worst coach in EPL. Most of our wins are ugly and due to the players we have as opposed to team performance and tactics. This season we are Man U 2.0.”

The above comment was posted on my review of Liverpool’s 3-1 win over Crystal Palace. If you want to build a case that Arne Slot is the wors…

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• All four of Alexander Isak’s Liverpool goals have been openers. Only Dominik Szoboszlai (seven) and Hugo Ekitike (five) have put the Reds 1-0 up more times this season.

• Andy Robertson’s goal was probably the first that saw one full-back assist the other for Liverpool in the Premier League since December 2023. It’s hard to be certain with so many different players deputising in the positions.

• Alexis Mac Allister became the first Reds player to provide two assists in a game on more than one occasion in 2025/26, recording his fourth such match for the club. Only Mohamed Salah has done this more times (six) since the Argentine joined Liverpool. #OnlySalah

• Freddie Woodman is the first goalkeeper to make at least five saves in a league win for the Reds since Alisson Becker did so at Manchester City last season. The last example at Anfield was delivered by Caoimhín Kelleher against Bournemouth earlier in 2024/25. It’s your turn next, Giorgi.

• Three of the shots Woodman kept out were defined as big chances by Opta. The only other example of a Liverpool goalkeeper making a trio of similar value saves this season occurred in the reverse fixture at Selhurst Park.

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Match Review

Crystal Palace arrived at Anfield in 13th position in the Premier League. It is their natural resting place. In the 12 completed seasons since they were last promoted, the Eagles have finished no higher than 10th, no lower than 15th.

Having Roy Hodgson be your manager for a sizeable chunk of the time makes that sort of position inevitable, but still. With a trip to Shakhtar Donetsk to come in midweek, it would’ve been no surprise if they went through the motions at Anfield with yet another lower mid-table finish guaranteed.

Not a bit of it. They came to play.

You can’t blame them either. They’ve had Liverpool’s number to some extent in recent years. Even if we choose to dismiss the Carabao Cup clash earlier this season - Arne Slot certainly did with his team selection that night - Palace have now had more Opta-defined big chances than the Reds in all four meetings this season.

But the visitors only had one golden opportunity today before Alexander Isak broke the deadlock. Much has been made recently about his lack of involvement. He had five touches including a shot on target in the first half of both of the recent matches with Paris Saint-Germain and Everton.

Two of the Swede’s first three touches against Palace were clearances. His fifth was the opening goal and he lasted 79 minutes for his third longest appearance of the campaign. There is much more to come.

There should’ve been more output from Jean-Philippe Mateta in this match, as he saw Freddie Woodman save a pair of his big chances. Liverpool countered following the second of them to score a wonderful goal.

“I think the moment of the game was, of course, the lead up to our 2-0 where Freddie made a big save. Otherwise it would have been 1-1 and 10 seconds later it's 2-0. These are the current margins in the Premier League and today they were on our side and so many times they have been not on our side.”

ARNE SLOT

The Reds’ attack then flatlined, as you can see above. There wasn’t too much happening at the other end until Woodman saved another golden opportunity (from Ismaïla Sarr), appearing to injure himself to leave an open goal as a result.

Palace scored. Is all fair in love and war? Their goal was merely the latest in a string of weird occurrences in Liverpool matches this season. Here’s a free article that details them (to the start of March):

Even though the goal denied Woodman a clean sheet, he still earned the club’s Player of the Match award. If anything sums up the Reds’ campaign, it may be that their third choice goalkeeper has now won this gong as many times as Mohamed Salah, the reigning FWA and PFA player of the season.

The nerves that set in were inevitable, mostly minimal and put to bed in stoppage time. Alexis Mac Allister’s assist for Florian Wirtz for the third goal made him the first player to have set up all three of the German, Isak and Hugo Ekitike. Liverpool will need more players than Mac alone to achieve this feat next term.

This match is only the fifth at Anfield in the Premier League in which Liverpool led 2-0 at the break before winning 3-1. Most of the others were rather more memorable. Think John Arne Riise’s free-kick or Dirk Kuyt’s hat-trick against Manchester United. Their cousins from across town were memorably dispatched in the same fashion in October 2019.

This game won’t be remembered anywhere nearly as fondly as those victories. The nature of Daniel Muñoz’s goal means the match won’t be forgotten entirely either, especially in the Woodman household. Liverpool march into the top four while Palace end the day 13th; same as it ever was.

Source for graphics: Opta Analyst, LFC. #ShowFSGTheYellowCard.

It’s impossible to do this without keeping everyone fi…

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They have far greater need for the points this season too. Their victory was made all the more remarkable by the fact tha…

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“Liverpool are leading the race for 28-year-old Bournemouth and Argentina defender Marcos Senesi, who is out of contract this summer” (i paper)

BBC Sport

This feels plausible (although The Athletic reported on Friday that the player is in talks with Tottenham, subject t…

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One query regarding injuries, rotation and substitutes was answered recently. Now it’s time to tackle a few more questions.

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“Have there been any signs of the ‘next’ idea in football yet? Really hoping the Arsenal way does…

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Intrigue is added by the Reds facing the three teams with whom they are contesting the Champions League qualification places. The bookmakers have Liverpool as favourites to finish fifth, with Opta Analyst in agreement.

Their prediction is for the Reds to earn another nine(.19) of the 18 available points. With three of the remaining games at Anfield, you’d hope they can improve on that total. But aside from their clash with Crystal Palace, every other fixture is with a team currently housed between third and eighth in the table.

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None of those clubs is more than five points adrift of Liverpool, with the Reds three points off third (ahead of Manchester United playing their game in hand against Leeds on Monday). Everything is on the table.

As daunting as that sounds for Slot’s stuttering side, several of these teams are in false positions if you trust xG data. The expected points method I have used for years has Liverpool third; Understat agrees, Opta has the Reds fourth. Either way, their foundation is far more solid than whatever is propping up Aston Villa.

There will be Liverpool supporters who will think there must be an error here. The Reds frequently look clueless, spineless, fragile. This data doesn’t automatically mean that they’ve played well. It simply highlights a pertinent fact: they’ve often had opportunities to improve the result in many matches in which they dropped points.

The issue has often been how bad Liverpool have been in the moments that matter. Inside the boxes, rather than in-between them. As covered last week (below), it’s easy to understand why the squad’s confidence and belief are utterly shot after a punishing campaign. This has occasionally undermined reasonable performances.

Liverpool’s open play xG difference is within one of what Arsenal have posted (even if this comparison is weakened by Mikel Arteta’s lack of interest in allowing a football match to break out). This may be part of why the club have backed Slot when corners of the Reds’ fanbase would have driven him back to Rotterdam months ago.

As positive as this appears, Liverpool’s run-in is tough. If you analyse remaining fixtures via opposition points-per-game averages, only Brentford and Palace have tougher sets than the Reds.

We can predict how matches will pan out using the xG numbers. No need for a supercomputer here, just Excel. Here are the games Liverpool have left to play.

You won’t find many Kopites giving their side coin-flip odds for a win on their first visit to the Hill Dickenson Stadium next weekend. Many would say they have a better than one-in-three chance when Chelsea visit Anfield though. Both blue teams have had comparatively better attacks on the road than at home, to explain how these numbers have come about.

We can repeat this exercise for the 62 Premier League fixtures that remain in 2025/26. The results deliver rather varied news for north London.

If this comes to pass, it will be something of an achievement for Liverpool to finish fourth after all they have endured in the last year. Not that they have much room for manoeuvre, with the predicted margin for them to do so being paper thin. Losing at Villa Park, where they are favourites to win, could see them finish sixth. This picture will shift dramatically with every passing game.

FSG won’t decide Slot’s future on the outcome of the remaining six matches. Qualifying for the Champions League through a strong end to the campaign might win back a few doubters though.

If the defeat to Paris Saint-Germain was largely expected, the thumping at Manchester City hurt. Marc Guéhi could easily have spent this season with the Reds; he has beaten them five times in four different competitions instead. Thanks, mate.

The whole campaign has been roug…

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“I’d be interested to understand how much squad depth contributes across the league. E.g. how ma…

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We saw something which has plagued Arne Slot’s side throughout the campaign, namely a poor reaction to adversity. The below is the shot map for the match prior to the opening goal.

Liverpool were arguably the better side in this period. At the very least, their only real crime was failing to maximise their good opportunities to score or create better quality chances.

Slot was in credit in the game to this point. His men were doing well in a very difficult away game, at a ground were Liverpool have rarely won in the last 15 years. But then Virgil van Dijk conceded a penalty, with this the balance of play for the next 20 minutes (plus first half stoppage time).

A capitulation. Every shot City took in the Liverpool half in this period was converted. The Reds suffered a blow in going behind after starting pretty well and showed little resistance thereafter. This has occurred on multiple occasions in 2025/26.

It wasn’t happening at the start of the campaign, though. Liverpool recovered after letting leads slip to win multiple matches. Even when they were coming to terms with a horrendous tragedy, they had the belief and muscle memory of champions. Equalisers for Bournemouth, Newcastle, Atlético Madrid and the might of Southampton didn’t matter to them.

We go again. We win.

Seeing their advantage in the Merseyside derby halved with over half an hour left to play might have led to nerves. But no.

We see it out. We win.

And then came Crystal Palace, the first of 15 defeats this season (with the count unlikely to be over on that front). Liverpool went in at the break grateful to only be one goal down after a dismal first half. They regrouped, improved markedly and got a deserved equaliser. Here’s the second half data prior to the winning goal.

There were no issues with belief or mentality there. It was arguably trying to counter to win the game in the 97th minute that caused the defeat. Overconfidence may have been an issue if anything was.

The late sucker punch from Eddie Nketiah would have taken a toll, compounded by defeats at Galatasaray (to a very soft penalty) and Chelsea (to another stoppage time winner) in the following two games.

We don’t see it out. We lose.

An even bigger punch to the nuts was to come: an Anfield defeat to Manchester United. Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United, for pity’s sake. The Reds had now lost four consecutive matches despite amassing 8.6 non-penalty expected goals and conceding 5.8. How’s your belief now, lads? You must be wondering if it’s all worth it when you’ve lost your mate and every mistake is punished.

A month later, Nottingham Forest were in town. This match was the precursor to what unfolded at the Etihad Stadium this weekend. The shot map here shows what had played out before Murillo scored in the 32nd minute.

This is a dominant performance. Rarely will the cliché ‘goals change games’ have been more apt. The Reds’ collapse thereafter in this game was as spectacular as it was painful, crushing belief further.

Confidence cannot be measured on a linear scale. There have been disappointing results since the Forest loss that contained sparks of fight.

Liverpool came within seconds of winning at Leeds after being pegged back from 2-0 to 2-2 earlier in the game. Slot’s men swung a 0-2 score line to all square against Bournemouth before conceding a late (drink) winner (drink) from a long throw-in (drink). They came from behind to take the lead in stoppage time at Fulham, only to see a player who barely features find the top corner from a different postcode. All of these moments, hammering away at the diminishing block of confidence.

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This is not to say Liverpool performed well for the entirety of all of these matches, or even that long in some of them. This is to examine the spirit crushing nature of what has played out. We question the mentality of a group of grieving young men when we had few concerns on this front early in the campaign.

They were almost certainly papering over cracks early in the season but doing so with full belief in themselves. Belief in trying to win something for Diogo, most likely. The Reds were initially contesting what proved to be defeats until the final whistle in most cases too.

There are probably only so many setbacks that even elite sportspeople can stand. The Liverpool squad suffered a bigger collective loss than almost every other team in history has had to endure, then a series of points dropped late on in games. It’s maybe a wonder they have any spirit left at all.

Arne Slot likely won’t see it out. He’ll lose.

Between 2017/18 and 2023/24 they collectively conceded 7289 times (excluding own goals) from a total of 6976.4 expected goals on target (xGOT). That’s a league-wide underperformance of roughly 45 goals a season.

It could be that it’s the data that’s to blame rather than the shot stoppers. Adding France, Germany, Italy and Spain to the sample shows that goalkeepers in the big five leagues underperformed by 941 goals across a seven year period. Can’t anyone save a shot around here?

Perhaps the model is wrong. Or maybe it’s a quirk of an enormous sample; the average goalkeeper being just 0.04 goals per match below par makes the system sound more accurate than underachieving by almost 1,000 goals.

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The heart of the issue is that it is impossible to beat the model year after year. This became apparent when reviewing the efforts of Alisson Becker and Giorgi Mamardashvili in 2025/26. Both are underperforming against xGOT this season when they have rarely had such problems in the past:

There are 68 goalkeepers who featured for over 900 minutes in at least five campaigns in the aforementioned seven year period. Not one of them saved more goals than expected every season. You need a huge sample to get a decent read on their abilities.

If anyone has the data for 2024/25, let me know. For now, I’ve pieced together 2017-2024 with the current campaign. The stats appear to pass the eye test for the big dogs of the goalkeeping world; Jan Oblak has performed at 14.8 per cent above xGOT, with Thibaut Courtois is at 10.5 and Allison 8.6. The latter would look better with last season included but perhaps the others would too.

The Brazilian’s statistics brought to mind a passage in Ian Graham’s book, How To Win The Premier League. When he was Director of Research at Liverpool, they would use similar numbers to weight performance.

“Each outfield player and each goalkeeper was given a conversion skill. Players that consistently overperformed the predictions of our Post-Strike model increased their skill rating and vice versa. The result was that elite finishers like Son Heung-min and elite shot-stoppers like Alisson Becker were expected to score and save more goals than the model estimated. A side effect was that making a save from a Son shot, or scoring past Alisson, was more highly rewarded than performing the same action against a lower rated player.”

By compiling the details of every goal scored in the 2025/26 Premier League, we can do a simplified version of the same process. Who deserves credit for against whom they’ve scored and which goalkeepers might have exceeded expectation given who has beaten them?

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The only way to numerically assess goalkeepers at that time was save percentage. It’s far from ideal as it takes no account of the quality of the chance that the shot stopper faced. Simon Mignolet’s save percentage looked great at Sunderland because he was behind a low block that encouraged long range efforts. In the hurricane of Brendan Rodgers’ Reds, the Belgian was far less impressive.

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As limited as the metric is, Alisson Becker has seen his figure dip to a career low in the Premier League this season. Only 12 goalkeepers with at least 25 matches played in the big five leagues have a worse figure. That’s far from ideal, how ever much of the blame lies truly at his door.

Mohamed Salah looks his age these days, so the same may be true for his fellow 33-year-old between the sticks. The noisy nature of save percentage means we shouldn’t be too hasty with condemning Alisson to an Anfield exit too soon though.

Former Crystal Palace goalkeeper Vicente Guaita was the worst performing 33-year-old for save percentage in the last decade in 2020/21, only to improve by 10 per cent the following season. His efforts in 2022/23 are the best by a shot stopper who was 35 years old at the start of any of the last 10 campaigns. Form fluctuates, both for goalkeepers and the teams they represent.

Another old school metric to assess goalkeepers is their record versus Opta-defined big chances (with penalties excluded). Becker’s save percentage for this has floated a shade above league average for the past two seasons when it was previously his superpower. Not that anybody in the Premier League with a decent sample since 2018/19 has a better success rate, even allowing for the recent cooling Alisson has experienced. That’s not a skill to shed from your backline too hastily.

With his pass accuracy at it’s lowest since his season with Roma and injuries taking a toll, it’s fair to ask if this summer will be the right time to handover the number one shirt to Giorgi Mamardashvili. While the detailed goalkeeper data is no longer neatly compiled on FBRef, we can obtain it elsewhere to start making a fairer comparison between Alisson, his peers and the Georgian waiting in the wings.

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