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, no chance.

Or so we thought. The Reds scored twice quicker in the second half than United had in the first. Dominik Szoboszlai had recorded just eight league shots after carrying the ball at least five metres this season, only half as many as Ryan Gravenberch.

Yet he was able to run from the Old Trafford centre circle into the box in close to a straight line before slotting the ball home. If nobody could have expected that, what followed was maybe even stranger.

The source for the second goal was something you probably didn’t realise has been a strength for Liverpool in 2025/26. Not just in relative terms either but against almost all of the other 95 teams in Europe’s big five leagues.

It being the season that it has been for the Reds, they also suffered with a couple of negative outliers in the match too. Here are some of the reasons why this has been such a strange campaign.

Positive: High Turnovers

Liverpool’s pressing has been criticised throughout the season. They have been far too easy to play through (though Josh Williams’ analysis of how they have chosen to defend is well worth a read).

Pressuring opponents can be used offensively as well as defensively. Szoboszlai was the Reds’ leading presser for volume at Old Trafford. Twelve of his 31 pressures saw Liverpool regain possession, with the former figure the highest by anybody in a Premier League game this weekend.

One of them forced Senne Lammens to cede possession cheaply to Alexis Mac Allister in the ‘D’ of the Red Devils’ box. In a heartbeat, Szoboszlai had become just the fourth different Liverpool player to score and assist away to United in the modern era. No Ekitike, no Isak, no Salah, no problem.

The Reds had recorded what Opta define as a high turnover: a possession that starts in open play beginning 40 metres or less from the opponent’s goal. It was their 10th of the league campaign that led to them scoring.

Only Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich have more such goals in the big leagues. Leverkusen are the sole side that has converted a higher proportion of their shots that have been fashioned in this way. Liverpool have been elite.

Whether by accident or design, this has proved unusually profitable for the 2025/26 Reds. Their 10 is only one fewer than Jürgen Klopp’s side mustered across his final two seasons. Now who’s heavy metal?

Negative: Goals Conceded from Outside The Box

The draw Liverpool recovered via a carry from a player who hadn’t been productive with them and pressing the goalkeeper in the penalty area slipped away. Kobbie Mainoo made the Reds pay for a weak Mac Allister clearance with a strike from just outside the box.

Slot’s men have been on the wrong end of nine league goals from further than 18 yards this season. It’s more than Burnley or Wolves, the two worst defences in the division (who are easier to create better chances against, of course).

It’s only one fewer long-range goal than Liverpool conceded in the four seasons between the summers of 2017 and 2021.

One of those was a Kop end corner that Burnley meatwalled into the net. Two were deflected efforts in a crazy 7-2 loss at Villa Park. Pure hits outside the box that found the Liverpool net were as rare as Jordan Henderson goals at the other end in this period.

Some have been unlucky, like Nico González’s strike for Manchester City that deflected off Virgil van Dijk or Daniel Muñoz’s goal for Crystal Palace when Freddie Woodman was laying prone. They didn’t materially affect the result, though, which was not the case for the efforts by Chemsdine Talbi (which was deflected), André (as was this), Harrison Reed and Mainoo.

Liverpool used to encourage shots from distance, so confident were they in Alisson’s ability to save them. That would remain a better strategy than some of the half-hearted attempts we’ve seen at blocking shots this season.

Positive: Goals from Carries

Szoboszlai’s carry-powered goal was rare for him last weekend. It wasn’t actually that unusual for Liverpool.

It feels unusual. How can a team that has lost Luis Díaz and an effective version of Salah be proficient? Especially when Cody Gakpo is ranked 11th out of 15th for Premier League players converting shots following at least 20 carries this term?

The Reds have been boosted by some of their irregulars contributing. Rio Ngumoha and Andy Robertson have both scored following a dribble of at least five metres recently. Szoboszlai (with 22.2% shot conversion), Hugo Ekitike, Ryan Gravenberch (both 14.3%), Salah (13.0%) and Florian Wirtz (8.3%) have all been above league average (8.0%) too.

If Slot can produce this with mis-firing wingers, a couple of tasty summer acquisitions could go a long way to salvaging his Liverpool tenure.

Negative: Set Piece Goals Conceded

This feels like an obvious issue, as highlighted by Opta Analyst in their review of the defeat at Manchester United:

I think they are now counting routine throw-in goals in the set play tally when they wouldn’t have before, thanks to the long throw epidemic. It doesn’t override that the Reds have conceded too often in dead-ball situations.

Either way, Matheus Cunha’s record-setting goal on Sunday was customary of so many set piece goals that have gone against Liverpool this season. It was typical in the sense that it didn’t come directly via the set play itself.

Only one of the 17 has, with Taty Castellanos heading in a Jarrod Bowen corner when West Ham were 4-1 down at Anfield. As you know through enduring Reds matches, so many of the other set piece goals have proven far more costly than that one.

Teams have scored 243 times in set play situations in the 2025/26 Premier League. Not just against Liverpool, even if it feels like it. There have been 59 assists from corners (50), free-kicks (nine) and throw-ins (none; is it worth it?). At this rate, a team might expect four of 17 set piece goals to be assisted, not one. If not a ridiculous outlier, what has happened to Liverpool has been a little odd.

Conclusion

The fact so many unusual occurrences have come into play for Liverpool could be taken two ways. How full is your glass? It could be viewed as evidence that they deserve to be comfortably in the top three rather than in the scrap for fifth. Or maybe it shows that they’ve been fortunate not to be mired in mid-table.

In wanting to avoid the cliché about making your own luck, what seems plain is that they haven’t been good enough. Too much has been left to these random coin flips. How much blame FSG assign to Slot for this remains to be seen.

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 more queries.

“Looking back at when Liverpool have struggled during a season, do they bounce back the next year? If so, has there been a pattern of changes made?”

This is an interesting question as we have some very pertinent examples in terms of the Reds’ level of performance, even if the explanation differs from season to season.

Liverpool have 58 points after 34 matches this season. Five years ago they had one fewer at this stage of the campaign, then one more in 2022/23. All three campaigns were disappointing, underwhelming, a struggle. They also all followed either a Premier League title win or a quadruple bid that went further than any before, since or maybe ever will.

The Reds have now finished in the top two of the table before tailing off badly the next season under Gerard Houllier, Rafa Benitez, Brendan Rodgers, Jürgen Klopp and Arne Slot. The club has rarely escaped a slump after a high. The comedowns are upsetting, the hangover lodges right behind your eyes.

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The problems of 2020/21 were caused by an injury crisis. The squad didn’t change much before the next season - Gini Wijnaldum out, Ibrahima Konaté in - yet they were able to win two cups, finish second in the league and reach the Champions League final. The mid-season addition of Luis Díaz was useful too.

The demands of 2021/22 partly explain why the club found the next season so difficult. The midfield aged painfully almost overnight. They were replaced ahead of what became Klopp’s final campaign. Though not as impressive a recovery followed in 2023/24 as two years earlier, the Reds were top of the league in early April.

We can put the recent three struggling seasons (very broadly) down to injuries, legs going and a grief-drenched rebuild respectively. The solutions were players returning to fitness, younger players being bought and TBC.

This summer? A little of both solutions from the previous two problematic seasons could come into effect. Richard Hughes and Slot (both also TBC) will hope the players they bought last summer can retain fitness to actually play together, once Ekitike returns. Signing a red hot winger who can go past defenders in the way Mohamed Salah no longer can would measurably help too.

Look back at those former Liverpool managers above. The Reds of Houllier and Rodgers never fully recovered. Benitez left but would’ve struggled to engineer an upturn with the club approaching administration. Only Klopp has steered the ship back on course after hitting the rocks.

Slot’s reputation outside of his homeland may rest on him doing likewise. As a fan of Pep Guardiola, Liverpool’s manager should look to him for inspiration. Manchester City are potential title winners this term after only having 61 points after 34 matches last season.

“Hi mate, did you see Kevin Schade’s shot map this season? Explain that to me please.”

I hadn’t seen it. Having looked it up, I’m interested. Very interested. Maybe Liverpool should be too.

Kevin Schade’s shot map (above) is so interesting because we’ve spent a season watching Cody Gakpo do this:

The two players have been positionally similar to Spider-Man meme levels. Per Opta Analyst, both have spent 16 per cent of their league campaign as a central forward with the rest spent on the wings.

Yet almost all of Schade’s shots have been taken within the danger zone (central section of the penalty box) while Gakpo has repeated his ‘cut in before shooting wastefully’ schtick all season. There must be more reasons than Brentford not facing low blocks with the same frequency as Liverpool to explain the difference.

It isn’t a question of where they receive the ball. Gakpo accepts 10 per cent more of the passes he receives in the opposition half than Schade, 15 per cent more in the final third.

A look at combined shot maps and passes received in Schade’s strongest games for expected goals show that he is often receiving the ball in the centre of the box. The light blue lines on the right side are chances created, yellow are assists (with the same colour denoting goals on the left). He appears strong at being in the right place at the right time.

One other thing stands out in the data. Schade carries the ball a long way for an attacker, an average of 13.7 metres each time. Among players with at least 200 carries this season, only Noah Okafor (14.6m) and Álex Jiménez (13.9) travel further. It may be that whereas Gakpo carries the ball to the edge of the box, Schade crosses the white line.

Whatever the explanation, it’s working. There are only nine players who’ve been as productive for non-penalty expected goals and expected assists across the four seasons that Schade has been in England. Most of them play for the established big clubs too.

The presence of teammate Dango Ouattara suggests there may be a degree of Brentford’s special sauce in the recipe, but with numbers like these Schade looks very capable of playing at a higher level. Liverpool need winger/forwards too.

“How much of an advantage it is for Real Madrid, Barca, Bayern & PSG that they have less to do to win their leagues and are almost guaranteed to qualify each season... it hampers our chances of UCL success that (1) PSG & Bayern play 34 league matches instead of 38 and, (2) the opponent quality of teams from 6 to the bottom of the table is far worse, and (3) those 4 clubs have zero threat of not qualifying for UCL”

This issue is topical following the Champions League semi-finals in midweek.

Everyone loved the freedom with which Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich went at each other in their match. They were able to do so because their top stars play far less football. Before we get to the standard of opposition they face domestically, clubs in France and Germany have four fewer league games (as Stephen noted in his question) and one fewer cup competition to navigate.

Genoa have a Mexican centre-back called Johan Vásquez. He has played a combined 3,877 minutes in the league for his club and in matches for his country this season, the most of anyone in the big five leagues of England, France, Germany, Italy or Spain. Virgil van Dijk (3,735) is next, then if you ignore goalkeepers, Dominik Szoboszlai (3,590) takes bronze.

The Liverpool pair will have topped Vásquez overall as they have European football, but sadly the Transfermarkt data no longer accounts for cup competitions (even though it says it does). Still, if we compare Champions League quarter-finalists, then the top players from the eight clubs should have broadly similar figures there. This will work fine as a guideline.

Wow. I chose a bar of 2,700 minutes as that equates to 30 complete games; raising it slightly to 3,000 leaves five Liverpool players, three Arsenal men (including their goalkeeper) and none for any other club. The Champions League is not a fair fight physically.

The fight is also harder in England, as Stephen noted. Here are the Club Elo ranks of the teams in the big five leagues, by country. See how almost all of the Premier League sides are jammed up into the top 40 whereas every other country has far more than three teams below that.

The competitive nature of English football will have forced Slot’s hand to some extent in terms of repeatedly selecting the same players. The club’s injury situation this season won’t have helped his cause with rotation either. It’s easy to see why PSG and Bayern look fresh when around half of their league games are against Championship standard opposition though.

“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 worst coach in the Premier League, that match represents a decent place to start.

The Eagles generated roughly twice as many expected goals as the Reds, leading the Opta-defined big chance count by five to three. Fellow statto Michael Reid noted that Palace’s 2.26 xG “was the fifth-highest non-penalty tally by a visiting side at Anfield on Opta’s records in the Premier League (from 2012-13).” In coaching terms, Oliver Glasner had Slot pinned to the mat.

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The difficulty in trying to assess coaches is that sport is not a control experiment. Football is like Formula One; the best driver won’t win if they’re in the worst car. You can see this in the managerial career of Vincent Kompany, who couldn’t keep Burnley in the Premier League yet has Bayern Munich playing like a dream. The standard of the players determines far more than the skill level of their coach.

Far smarter people than I have tried to establish the numerical impact of a good manager. Liverpool’s former Director of Research Ian Graham put a figure to the question in his excellent book. “There is some evidence that on the pitch, controlling for the quality of the players at his disposal, a good manager can add a few points per season. This is about the same value as a good player brings,” he wrote.

Fans will tell you that Jürgen Klopp added far more than that to the Reds, and perhaps he did. But the club didn’t consistently challenge for major honours until they signed the likes of Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker. Player quality prevails, as much as it’s on their manager to elicit their peak performance level.

“I learned more from the lads I was playing with than any instructions I was getting from the manager.”

Roy Keane on Alex Ferguson

Money talks loudest in this game. Transfermarkt estimated that Liverpool had the third most valuable squad in the Premier League in mid-September. This suggests their likely final position of fifth is an underachievement.

The wage data is no better for Slot, albeit with the usual proviso that nobody really knows exactly how much players are paid. The figures on FBRef have the Reds as having had the second highest salary bill for their Premier League starters this season. That’s with top earner Salah starting his fewest league matches since the middle of the last decade too.

There’s an unquantifiable tax for playing when grieving that factors in to any analysis of Slot and his team’s performance this season though. It doesn’t matter how much a footballer is worth or the size of their pay packet if their head is not in the game. And if it just came down to relative performance against financial standing then Scott Parker is a better manager.

Slot out, Scott in? Didn’t think so.

Unai Emery is one man who is outperforming the Liverpool boss against monetary expectation and he has also won more trophies across his career. Pep Guardiola has very obviously collected more silverware, while Vitor Pereira has amassed league titles in China, Greece and Portugal. Otherwise, Slot is doing comparatively well against his Premier League peers for winning prizes.

To assess a coach, we should consider the success of their tactical plan. Were they able to nullify the opposition, then dominate the game to the point of deserving a victory, regardless of the actual outcome of the match?

Before we answer that, let’s get a word on the importance of tactics from a man with 107 international caps, a Champions League winner’s medal and three Premier League titles to his name. His opinion carries serious weight.

“We never done tactics, we just played.”

Ashley Cole on Arsene Wenger

Jonathan Wilson considered the concept of quantifying tactics in 2013. “Imagine a match in which Team A would be expected to create 20 chances and Team B 10. If Team B's manager can shift that to, say, 14-8, he has done a good job, whether or not his side wins the game or not,” he wrote, in a passage that seems quaint now that expected goals are so widely used in football analysis.

With player quality inevitably influencing matters to some extent once again, using numbers along these lines feels a reasonable way to make an assessment. It will reward managers who eke a statistically better than expected performance out of their team.

Liverpool’s recent victory against Crystal Palace provides the perfect example to explain the concept. The Reds have led the xG tally by an average of 0.5 in their home games this season. As the Eagles outdid them by 1.1 on Saturday, they are rewarded with 1.6 as that is the margin by which they bettered expectation.

Palace’s average expected goal difference on the road in 2025/26 is zero. Liverpool underachieved this mark by 1.1 at Anfield, so this is debited from the Reds’ total for the campaign.

Slot has overseen the fourth best relative xG difference in the division. Liverpool’s figure for this metric is only down 1.6 against their actual xG difference. The problem is that only two teams have underachieved by more. Equally, Guardiola is only one place better off.

With the highly rated Andoni Iraola also in the bottom five, we may need a better way to measure the difference a coach can make. This doesn’t pass the eye test. It’s also notable that generally the teams with negative xGD improve on this whereas those in credit decline. Removing the random factor of penalties doesn’t make any significant change to the standings either.

We can conduct a similar experiment by comparing the expected goal difference in matches with the predicted xG outcome for the fixture. The order remains similar once again, likely because it’s a more long-winded version of the simpler experiment above (so that’s an hour or so spent spreadsheet wrangling that I won’t be getting back).

There is a method that produces results that look somewhat more reasonable. The non-penalty xG (npxG) is weighted against league average for home or away as appropriate. We then compare the new figure with the original npxG to find the difference; in essence we are rewarding notably above average performances and punishing the team on the wrong end of them. Look away now, Arne.

Emery is clearly a great coach. Daniel Farke and Régis Le Bris have dragged their teams to levels in the table few would’ve anticipated in August. The top three in this chart make a degree of sense.

The problem here is that this system is too volatile; Chelsea gained 7.1 npxGD at both Tottenham and Villa by utterly dominating them, so would be bottom by a long way if those two matches were excluded. Any one game can carry too much weight.

For the record, Liverpool were third by this measure at the point at which they won the title last season. That maybe feels about right for Slot; doing a decent job with a team that was already at a good level without necessarily being the best coach in England.

What makes some of his recent work so baffling is that he seemed so tactically adept last season. Perhaps the best example was making changes to recover after going a goal and a man down early on against a Fulham side that were seventh in the expected points standings. That was masterful from Slot. Where has that guy gone?

Ranking Premier League managers is ultimately an impossible task. Mikel Arteta will probably win the title this season but you wouldn’t want him to manage Liverpool. Too intense, too weird, too insistent on dour football.

In terms of who is over Arne, Guardiola is a given. Emery too, as he has trophies on the board allied to an ability to outdo financial expectation. The standard of football Iraola extracts from a frequently changing Bournemouth squad makes one wonder what he could achieve with even better players. Even then, he may be a risky appointment for a big club given his silverware is limited to a Cypriot Super Cup.

Beyond this trio, I’m less certain about who I think is better than Slot. I’m already very uncertain about how to assess the Liverpool head coach this season in any case.

An optimistic read is that he remains a good manager, just one who has endured a bad season in circumstances so unbelievably difficult and close to unprecedented that he deserves some grace. A pessimist will be ‘Slot out’ regardless. Let me know your view in the comments section.

I mentioned the idea of this article on Bluesky and asked for opinions - you can see the responses here. In January, Football365 ranked Slot 15th out of 28 Premier League managers this season. Has your opinion changed? You can recast votes on Slot’s standing among his peers too:

• 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 fit. Milos Kerkez is the only one of the Reds’ signings from last summer who has yet to suffer an injury this season. The Reds also bade farewell to Trent Alexander-Arnold and Luis Díaz, two of the 28+ club in 2024/25. It has been impossible to keep the starting XI stable.

Except that it has been, more or less. As noted on here recently, Arne Slot is only making marginally more adjustments to his Premier League starting XI from one game to the next than he did before the title was won last season. The equivalent of 28 starts in a 38-game season is 24 after 33 matches; the Reds have nine players at that mark.

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The devil is in the detail, as he so often is. Seven of the eight players Liverpool reportedly paid at least £150k per week in Slot’s debut campaign made 28+ league starts, with Federico Chiesa the exception.

With 24 our current benchmark for starts this term, we find six players in that financial bracket that have appeared often enough. One difference is that there are 11 eligible squad members in 2025/26.

The other is that only three of the seven men on over £150k have more than 23 league starts on their ledger. Mohamed Salah, Hugo Ekitike (who have both made 21) and Alexander Isak (seven) won’t make the season-long target of 28. The Egyptian King will make his fewest league starts for any club since he warmed the Chelsea bench for the first half of 2014/15.

The prompt for checking these figures was the latest episode of the Distance Covered podcast. Guest Mo Stewart highlighted how little Rio Ngumoha has played with the club’s principal centre forwards. “Before the Ekitike injury, I think 32% of Rio’s minutes this season have been with either Ekitike or Isak, which is not enough,” he said.

Too right. Ngumoha has spent more time on the pitch for Liverpool with Tyler Morton than Isak, Wataru Endō over Ekitike, Joe Gomez rather than Salah. His left-back split has been roughly 75/25 between Andy Robertson and Kerkez; useful for his development, less beneficial as we contemplate life without the Scot.

Another pertinent fact is that Ekitike, Jeremie Frimpong, Isak, Kerkez and Florian Wirtz have yet to grace a Premier League pitch together. Maybe performance this season would have been stronger if they had. We might have a better idea regarding the direction of travel for the next iteration of Liverpool at the very least.

As that has not been possible, it’s worth reviewing how the Liverpool jigsaw has slotted together this term. Even a simple look at the points won when certain pairs of players have both started is insightful.

This chart shows which games each player has started in all competitions, sorted from most to fewest. Generating an interactive version sadly lies beyond my skill level so it’s worth opening the image in a new tab (here) to get a better look.

The early rounds of domestic cups grant inclusion for several players who would otherwise be omitted (though perhaps not Freddie Woodman after the forthcoming match with Crystal Palace). Here’s the league-only version, with the separate tab image here.

This again broadly reiterates the earlier point about rotation. Most of the players you would’ve expected to have seen starting most weeks when the season began have largely done so.

Isak is the most obvious exception. Or is it Salah? As six of the matches he missed were thanks to participating in the Cup of Nations, his row wouldn’t have looked wildly different even if he’d enjoyed another campaign from the gods. Maybe he’d have spent longer in Morocco had that been the case anyway, dragging Egypt to the title (before the hosts took it back on a technicality of some kind).

Most fans might have predicted some of Kerkez’s green squares to be in Robertson’s row. At least the two players have aligned to ensure a career left-back has always started in that position; you can see many matches without any of Conor Bradley, Frimpong or Gomez. That in turn weakened the midfield, even if it kept likely starters like Curtis Jones or Dominik Szoboszlai in the XI.

FBRef has long provided points-per-match averages for games in which players appeared. If we apply this to league starts only (and ignore small samples) then it could be argued Ekitike has been the Reds most important player. Not great news for the remaining five matches but a badge honour for the Frenchman.

Liverpool have won 2.00 points-per-game when Ekitike has started. Jones is next - maybe start him more, Arne? - on 1.92, with Alisson Becker (1.84), Wirtz (1.77) and Ibrahima Konaté (1.74) filling out the top five. As the team averages 1.67, you don’t have drop much lower to start finding below-par players.

Let’s assemble our jigsaw. There are 55 pairs of players who have started at least 14 times together in the league. This shows how many points-per-game the Reds averaged in those matches.

Two things stand out. If you start your strongest goalkeeper and most effective centre-forward, you’ll probably be alright; who knew? At the bottom of the chart, it’s eye-catching that Cody Gakpo and Kerkez have generated the fewest points on average when they seem to have little relationship on the left flank.

We’ve got some cornerstone pairings. Let’s add a third player to their respective puzzle and focus on those that have averaged two-points-per-game. While the sample sizes shrink, we can see which trios have performed at the level to which the Reds aspire.

Mac Allister’s presence in the top threesome seems odd in light of his struggles. But then this is a measure of results, not performance, plus the outcome of a match never rests with any three players either. This is just a glimpse.

As Virgil has started every game, adding him to a pair makes no difference to their points-per-game. Underneath his marker with Becker and Ekitike sit that pair with Konaté. We can therefore say that Liverpool have started (effectively) half of their games with their first choices at goalkeeper, centre-back and striker, going at 87-point pace when they have done so.

We could keep adding players with the aim of finding the optimum line up at the cost of rapidly diminishing sample sizes. The Reds’ most recent Champions League-winning XI didn’t play a single other match together, to prove as much.

The more important point is that there are groups of players with whom Liverpool have performed at title-challenging level this season, just not often enough. Retaining these pieces while adding the missing ones this summer should solve the Reds’ squad profile puzzle.

They have far greater need for the points this season too. Their victory was made all the more remarkable by the fact that Everton covered more distance than the Reds during the game.

What? You didn’t hear about that? I didn’t think so. Why would you? Physical data only ever seems to get aired in relation to Liverpool when they are outrun in their defeats, regardless of how relevant or not the kilometres they covered are to the outcome of the game.

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The physical data should not be dismissed entirely. A recent Bluesky post by Reds fan Dan Kennett showed there has been some correlation between the extent to which Liverpool’s opponents have logged more distance and their results this season.

With timing that can chop down any statto (trust me), the Reds then won their next league match against Fulham despite Marco Silva’s men covering 7.43km more of the Anfield turf than they did. The distance numbers that both teams ran in that game were near identical to those in Liverpool’s preceding Premier League match, a limp defeat at Brighton.

Even the word ‘ran’ is somewhat misguided when the data is broken down into walking, jogging and sprinting. Does it matter that a team has a higher distance covered if most of the difference was conducted at walking pace?

Ask Everton; 2.57 of the extra 2.69 kilometres they covered at the Hill Dickenson Stadium was at the lowest speed setting. Most of that was probably spent trudging back towards the halfway line after Liverpool scored.

So, what does affect how much ground a team covers? What is the impact? Put your trainers on. Pop a calculator in your pocket. It’s time to dig into some running numbers.

Possession is a reasonable starting point. Your team keeps the ball, the other side has to run around trying to get it back. The connection is obvious.

Sorry, no. There’s no link, it’s random. We can plot the distance Liverpool have covered against their share of the ball in the 29 league matches since the home Merseyside derby, the first fixture for which BBC Sport posted the data. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient suggests it’s borderline impossible for there to be less of a relationship.

Start with a blank chart. Throw a few darts. It might make more sense.

Liverpool’s top six matches for distance covered stretch across the possession scale from lowest to (almost) highest. You can eke out a touch more correlation if you use the opposition’s figures instead, just nothing of any significance.

Another thought: maybe the kilometres logged by both teams combined are related to how much time the ball spends in play? The dead ball, meatwall Premier League involves a lot of standing around waiting for set pieces to be taken these days.

Te relationship is a little stronger. It’s still only 0.20 on the Spearman scale that goes from 0 (no correlation) to 1 (perfect relationship) though. Keeping the ball in play does not result in teams running further.

This chart brings something into focus: the distance that two teams collectively cover can vary wildly. The range goes from 204.1km to 235.7km, it’s huge.

Find the home game with Everton and the defeat at Crystal Palace on the above graph. Those games were just one week apart yet are at opposite ends of the spectrum for total ground covered .

Remember how Jürgen Klopp famously challenged his teams to log 120km in matches? The Reds have seen three teams hit that mark against them without getting close to it themselves.

But if you review the chart again, you’ll see that three of Liverpool’s four highest match distances occurred in those games. The first of them, at Selhurst Park, was preceded by a Carabao Cup tie with Southampton. Arne Slot made 11 changes from his Everton line-up for that game, then 10 more for the league match against Palace. It seems logical that the Reds could then cover more ground.

However, two of the other examples of Liverpool breaking 114km (against Brentford and Brighton) were following Champions League away games in midweek. In tiring circumstances in which you’d assume a team’s ability to log distance would be hindered, it appears it was not.

If we take the post-European league games as a set, we find that the gap in distance covered between the Reds and their opponents grows. That seems reasonable enough.

What will surprise you is that Liverpool’s sprint distance and percentage of total distance at top speed goes up in league games that directly follow Champions League encounters. It doesn’t feel that this can be possible, especially in a season in which the Reds have looked off the pace physically so often.

As Liverpool have covered less distance than their opponents in 27 of the 29 games in the sample, the sprint numbers - for which they lead the opposition 15-14 - are more interesting. While the differences for individual games inevitably fluctuate, the Reds have been outsprinted by just 60m per game this season, six metres for each outfielder at any given time. It’s nothing.

Sprinting further appears to help. Liverpool have won seven of the 15 matches in which they led the highest speed running distance, averaging 1.67 points-per-game; they won five of the other 14 with a 1.29 ppg rate.

There are also 14 games in the sample in which the Reds lost the distance covered battle but sprinted further than their opponents. That feels like a positive without there being the correlation of games won to back it up. If seeing your side being outran feels instinctively bad, the data shows what a muddy picture it is.

Like any stat, nothing it tells you for a single game means all that much. And remember: Liverpool finished 16th for distance covered in 2024/25, first in the league table.

“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 to them staying up). Senesi is battle-hardened to English football with over 100 Premier League appearances, not that the Argentinian equivalent in which he cut his teeth will have been a cake walk. He is well-known to sporting director Richard Hughes, who signed him for Bournemouth, and best of all, he won’t carry a transfer fee.

The idea of a move to Liverpool passes the eye test by these benchmarks. Does Senesi?

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His availability record is decent. The four months missed with a hamstring injury last season represent the only reported absence that has cost him more than six matches (per Transfermarkt).

From the perspective of picturing him at Liverpool, it’s a pity the Argentine international missed a chunk of 2024/25. Bournemouth’s win rate was 54 per cent in the 13 matches in which both Milos Kerkez and Senesi started last season, compared with 33 per cent when either or both were not in the XI.

More importantly, the Cherries saw the xG they allowed drop by 0.32 per game in the Premier League when the duo comprised the left half of Andoni Iraola’s starting back four. They appear to work well together.

He also knows Alexis Mac Allister, alongside whom all three of Senesi’s international caps have been earned. The matches were won too; take that, Estonia, Mauritania and Venezuela, the trio swept aside.

Most significantly in terms of relationships, Senesi made 49 appearances for Arne Slot at Feyenoord. If the news that the club continues to back the under-fire Dutchman is accurate, the pair could be reunited in 2026/27.

Despite rarely spending time in the treatment room, the potential Liverpool target hasn’t played too much football. It’s something that would possibly be a concern when picking up a player who will have just turned 29.

However, Senesi has logged 260 per 90s in the FBRef database, 286.4 with Transfermarkt (as they have more data for South American football). Even the higher number is over 9,000 club minutes fewer than Jamie Carragher had played at the end of his age 28 season, before we get to the likes of Rio Ferdinand (418.4 per 90s), Sergio Ramos (425.8) or Harry Maguire (427.4).

Senesi has roughly 1,750 minutes of experience in European competition; Willian Pacho may get within about 200 of that this season alone. The Bournemouth man is not old in football for his age.

The Transfer Flow recently described Senesi as “the best passing center back in the Premier League this year,” also noting that: “Bournemouth’s attack starts with the line-breaking passes and long balls of Marcos Senesi, who’s also farming defensive action stats thanks to their style of play.”

The boy truly can pass. Senesi has played as many through-balls as Florian Wirtz in the league this season for gawd’s sake (10). He has four assists in the competition this season, half of which came in open play. Do you know the most league assists by any Liverpool player if we exclude set pieces?

Three.

The Argentine set up a winner at Tottenham as well as equalisers in the last 10 minutes (against West Ham) and stoppage time (Leeds). Oh, and another goal against Spurs because everybody else is doing it, so why can’t he? A couple of his assist passes have been utterly delightful, the kind of line-breaking defence-splitters that Liverpool have lacked all season.

Here’s an example in north London:

Another, in a home game with the Hammers:

The latter was one of the six Opta-defined big chances the 28-year-old has set up this season. That would put him fourth in the Liverpool standings, plus he’s level with the likes of João Pedro, Iliman Ndiaye and former teammate Antoine Semenyo.

This helps explain why Senesi is second in the league for Statsbomb’s On-Ball Value (OBV) metric this term. That’s seriously impressive for a centre-back.

He’s ranked sixth for the passing element. A standing of 15th among defenders for dribbles and carries is decent going when many of the men above him are full-backs, wing-backs or essentially midfielders. Jan Paul van Hecke (on 3.34) and our old friend/nemesis Marc Guéhi (2.78) are the only central defenders who’ve offered more OBV in this sense than Senesi (2.31).

And nobody in any position is ahead of him on the defensive action side of the metric. This won’t be a surprise to Fantasy Premier League enthusiasts, who are likely aware that Senesi has amassed the most defensive contribution points in the game this season. Whatever this may or may not prove, it shows he will defend when defending needs to be done. The present iteration of Liverpool could benefit from a dose of this outlook at times.

The Reds’ potential transfer target is not too prone to making costly mistakes either. By Opta’s definition Senesi has made five defensive errors that led to shots in four seasons in the Premier League. James Tarkowski has made seven in 2025/26 alone.

So far, so good. We’d better consider the downsides.

The number that stands out furthest is Senesi’s poor record with aerial duels. He has the worst win rate among the 30 defenders who’ve contested at least 100 this season. There may be context which makes this look better - as I found for Guéhi - but it’s a concern on the raw numbers alone.

Senesi has also lost possession 16.3 times per 90 minutes this season according to Football Critic, the highest average among defenders with at least 500 minutes on their ledger. The same source reveals his rate has gone from 10.4 through 12.7 onto 14.8 and now at a new peak with each passing season.

To some extent it’s the cost of doing business when you’re a centre-back playing through-balls in the final third. The groans of the Anfield faithful will be louder and angrier than their counterparts at the Vitality offer at the sight of wasted passes though.

His long passing is the best way to frame this. Senesi has completed 155 long balls in 2025/26, the most of any outfielder in the Premier League. That sounds great for a Liverpool team that is missing Trent Alexander-Arnold’s ability.

But Senesi tops the standings for delivering unsuccessful long balls too. The additional 26 long passes he has completed over Virgil van Dijk have come at the cost of an additional 117 that went astray. As much as this is a consequence of the Cherries’ direct tactical style which is unlikely to be fully repeated at Liverpool, the Reds’ structure would need greater solidity to guard against what happens after the long balls that turn over possession.

One other red (and yellow) flag is the question of discipline. Senesi was joint-top of the Premier League in 2023/24 for yellow cards, with 13. Equally, he has ‘only’ collected as many in the two seasons since. Iraola’s high-intensity, high-press style will inevitably lead to tactical fouls on occasion.

No player is perfect. What is telling in terms of the Reds’ potential interest is that this defender has been showing up favourably in the data for years.

Opta Analyst were talking Senesi up as far back as the 2020/21 season. It would be a textbook Liverpool tactic to pick up on his strengths, allow him to gain his Premier League legs on someone else’s pitch before making a move. Whether they do or not, it’s easy to see why Macca’s international teammate would be on their shortlist.

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 doesn’t become the Premier League blueprint for the next few seasons...”

It’s a great time to consider this question. Arsenal lost their last match 2-1 at home to Bournemouth. Bookmakers had given them just shy of a two-in-three likelihood of winning the game beforehand.

And they deserved a victory, at least according to the expected goal data. The Gunners missed four Opta-defined big chances. It can happen.

But three of them were headers, which are hard to convert. The same number came through set piece situations, the goose Mikel Arteta hopes will lay the golden egg of the Premier League title.

His side laid an egg in a different way on Saturday. Arsenal mustered 0.18 expected goals in open play with 52.4 per cent possession in a must-win home match against a mid-table side. Liverpool essentially matched that (0.17) with 26 per cent possession in their widely-panned performance in Paris versus the European champions. Adam Bate noted earlier this week for Sky that it isn’t especially strange for Arsenal to be so blunt in open play:

The Gunners need more than a goal per game over the final six matches to equal Liverpool’s record tally of 26 set piece goals, set in 2013/14. Whether they manage that or not, they won’t get 25 more in open play to match Brendan Rodgers’ Reds in that regard.

A team could be the most potent set play side ever seen, they’d still need probably double that amount of goals elsewhere. Even when set pieces are accounting for their highest percentage of Premier League goals since 2010/11, it’s still only roughly a quarter of the total.

This is a long winded way to say I don’t think Arsenal’s strategy will definitively become the Premier League blueprint for years ahead. Even if they win the title, this way of playing is certainly not flawless.

We’ve seen extreme examples of what can happen. Chelsea’s 2-1 defeat at the Emirates saw all three goals come via corner scrums. It was an utterly depressing match between two of England’s Champions League representatives. The 22 starters averaged around £130k per week each in salary; they should be capable of so much more.

I do wonder if high profile sludge-fests like this are carrying a little too much weight when shaping the view of the quality and/or approach in the Premier League at present.

If Arsenal win the title, as still looks likely, their fans won’t care how they played. Nor should they. Equally, Arteta’s methods will be questioned, panned and dismissed if the Gunners finish second for a fourth consecutive season. Even they might have to move beyond dourball before long, especially if the natives become mutinous.

As for what comes next? The leading eight players for open play expected assists in the Premier League include Bruno Fernandes, Rayan Cherki, Enzo Fernandez (who are the top trio), Adam Wharton and Florian Wirtz. It’d be nice to think that creative midfielders/number 10s can thrive. The football would be more watchable, for starters.

“I would love to know from a data-based perspective how Isak & Ekitike would fare in a two-man strikeforce.”

This is an interesting one as Liverpool haven’t played consistently with a front two for what feels like decades. Indeed, that might be accurate; would Gérard Houllier’s pairing of Emile Heskey and Michael Owen be the most recent example?

We haven’t seen much of Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitike in tandem. They had 45 minutes in Frankfurt, which was rare enough to prompt me to write a whole article on how they dovetailed that night.

That might be a better answer than I can provide here, simply because they haven’t played together very often since then. Only twice have the summer striker signings been on the pitch for more than 13 minutes, both in Champions League away games. It’s hardly a fair weighting for the potential of their partnership.

What can be said is that the goal total during their shared pitch time is 5-1 to the Reds. They’re up 2.9 to 1.2 on expected goals, 21-18 for shots. The team works.

One pertinent statistic stands out a long way. The duo themselves have exchanged just three passes in their 168 minutes together. Unrepresentative fixture difficulty sample be damned, that’s no connection whatsoever.

The Frankfurt match showed how the pair could work, with Isak the spearhead remaining high with Ekitike dropping deep or wide the more often of the two. Whatever the plan, they will still need to link up more often.

We can set them a target of sorts. I found five matches in 2013/14 in which Daniel Sturridge played with Luis Suárez as a front two with one assisting the other for a goal. While the sample is biased towards their more productive games, they exchanged an average of 14.3 passes with 2.3 chances created per 90 minutes.

Ekitike and Isak are at 1.6 and 0.0 respectively. There’s work to be done.

“I watched Barca play in the champions league and was once again amazed how many players come from their academy, La Masia.

I would like to see a comparison of the six seven top clubs in the PL with Barca and Real Madrid how much success they have with their academies and their own homegrown players.”

We’ll have to bow to Transfermarkt’s definition of academy players here, as we’ll be using their data. They “must have played for the youth teams in the past (minimum U17) and must also be in the current squad of the first team.”

The findings raise an interesting question. In measuring the success of your youth program, is it better to provide multiple players of reasonable standard or would you be better served with one superstar?

Liverpool had effectively ticked both boxes for a while. Then Trent Alexander-Arnold left.

The Reds currently have eight academy graduates in their senior squad, the most of any team in the Premier League. However, it would take an injury crisis for the ages before several of them would be chosen to start a game by Arne Slot.

Real Madrid (with nine academy players) and Barcelona (10) are only marginally ahead of Liverpool in volume. Their more significant edge is in how many league appearances these homegrown heroes have made; 52.6 and 71.3 per player respectively.

Madrid exactly match the average across Europe’s big five leagues for this, which is slightly ahead of the Premier League (48.7). Liverpool are below that (28.9) with Curtis Jones accounting for almost two-thirds of the total league appearances by the current crop of youth team graduates.

He is also worth about a third of the Reds’ players’ combined market value, albeit Transfermarkt have yet to catch up with the reality of Rio Ngumoha.

The figures make clear how much difference a superstar can make. If Liverpool still had Trent they’d be in line with Real, while Barcelona would be dragged back closer towards the norm without Lamine Yamal.

How you measure academy success may come down to personal choice; I’d say Liverpool have done reasonably well of late. Let’s meet back here in five years time to see how the figures look once Ngumoha has fulfilled his enormous potential.

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 rough for Liverpool when it comes to facing the Cityzens (a club so dislikeable they can’t even spell their own nickname correctly). Deflections, one-off City goal scorers who flatter to deceive, needless penalties and a couple of goals scored within seconds of the Reds’ own throw-ins. As poorly as Liverpool (mostly) played in the three encounters, the aggregate scoreline of 9-1 still feels a little harsh.

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A lot of the metrics were reasonably even for the two teams across the 270 minutes. While some of this will be thanks to City happily containing Liverpool in the second half of their home games, most numbers don’t suggest Pep Guardiola’s side merited their six non-penalty goal advantage.

One issue that plagued these matches was also apparent in Paris. Liverpool averaged 2.9 penalty area touches for each of their shots in the box in the 2024/25 Premier League. Let’s call that baseline Arne Slot output. His side posted a figure of 3.6 at Anfield against City, 4.4 in the league meeting at the Etihad and 5.0 in last weekend’s drubbing. The one shot within their nine touches in the European champions’ 18-yard box obviously gave them a mark of 9.0 last time out.

Shots vary in value, these numbers needn’t matter in themselves. What will worry Slot are his three players who are proving particularly inefficient in the box.

It’s never a good night when the opposition’s centre forward has more touches in your box than your whole team has at the other end. Liverpool players have likely inflicted this treatment on minnows in the past; Ousmane Dembélé, with 10 penalty area touches, achieved the feat against the Reds on Wednesday.

Florian Wirtz’s three made him Slot’s top man. They all led to relatively productive moments on a desperately blunt night for Liverpool too. His first came after receiving a delicious backheeled nutmeg from the otherwise disappointing Hugo Ekitike.

Wirtz was able to retain possession as PSG were kept relatively penned in, with Jeremie Frimpong and Dominik Szoboszlai each attempting a cross in this passage of play. By the standards of the match, this represented a Liverpudlian onslaught.

Less than three minutes later, Wirtz teed up Alexis Mac Allister for a shot.

The former Leverkusen man later had Liverpool’s only shot in the box and final goal attempt of the night. It followed decent work (including the only penalty area touch) by Milos Kerkez.

You’re in trouble when your team’s attacking highlights can be shown in full within two gifs. Yet this was actually a productive outing in box terms for Wirtz, as small a sample as it was. He had one shot from three touches in the box, perfectly in line with the Premier League average over the past two seasons.

This chart shows the players with at least 100 penalty area touches in either 2024/25 or this campaign, plus how many goal attempts they’ve fired off in the box. One eligible player is absent but more on him shortly.

Wirtz is averaging 4.6 touches in the penalty area for every shot he takes within its white lines. That’s the most of the 49 Liverpool players who’ve recorded at least 100 box touches in any of the last 15 Premier League campaigns. The closest to him is the Adam Lallana of 2015/16, whose average was 4.04. Florian is a distant outlier.

He isn’t unusual in Premier League terms. Jeremy Doku’s figure was 8.9 last season, 7.5 this time around. Former Slot player Yankuba Minteh has averaged at least 5.3 in each of his campaigns with Brighton.

Wirtz isn’t likely to be recording take-ons at the same volume level as those players though. His chances created map (below) shows that key passes won’t account for too many of his 108 box touches that were not shots, so what has he been doing in the penalty area?

Alas, it is impossible to know without full access to Opta’s data. Some of the touches will be successful passes that didn’t create chances, or unsuccessful ones that didn’t achieve anything more than eliciting groans from Kopites.

The player not included on the above Premier League chart is the 2024/25 edition of Mohamed Salah. He had an absurd 394 penalty area touches with 119 shots in the box, which broke the scale of the chart. Salah, so far ahead of the competition, forced almost every other player into a tight ball in the bottom left of the graph.

His rate for converting box touches into shots has only dipped by a negligible amount since last term. Salah’s issue is the volume, which has fallen from 10.5 penalty area touches per 90 minutes down to 7.8 in what is now his final Liverpool campaign.

We must also consider Cody Gakpo. Despite his baffling fondness for shooting badly from outside the box, he is averaging more touches per 90 within it this season. His shot frequency has remained stable too. The issue is that his conversion rate for efforts in the penalty area is 12.8 per cent when it was 18.6 per cent in Slot’s first campaign. The diagonal passes from Salah have dried up.

It is the combination of the above factors and players that are proving problematic.

Since the summer of 2011, Liverpool players have averaged 3.03 penalty area touches per shot. Their goal attempts within the 18-yard box have been converted at a 15.5 per cent clip. If you search for Reds who were worse than these parameters, there are over 100. If you limit yourself to players who also had at least 100 touches within the box you only have 11, three of whom are the 2025/26 vintages of Gakpo, Salah and Wirtz.

Whole seasons have passed without a Liverpool player meeting the above criteria. There hadn’t been more than one in campaign since 2011/12, yet three will probably start a must-win game against Fulham on Saturday evening. And remember, the benchmarks for converting touches to shots and shots into goals aren’t remarkable for entry here, merely worse than club average.

Liverpool have taken 4.5 per cent of their touches in opposition penalty boxes this season. It puts them in the 94th percentile of Premier League teams over the last 15 seasons for this particular proportion. This is not a volume problem.

But no Reds team in that period has averaged fewer box shots per touch. They are below league average for the conversion rate of their goal attempts in the penalty area (13.2 per cent versus 14.5), likely in part as their proportion of box shots that are in the six-yard box is also below par (11.9 per cent versus 13.2).

There’s every chance it will not be Slot’s responsibility to fix this problem. Salah’s influence upon it is even more certain to end soon too. Unblocking this penalty box stodginess - itself no doubt impaired by opposition low blocks - would be a significant win for whoever is in charge of Liverpool in 2026/27.

“I’d be interested to understand how much squad depth contributes across the league. E.g. how many results were positively changed by substitutes or deputies. Maybe even going further, looking into if rotation reduces injuries or significantly improves performances of key players compared to previous seasons.”

Quantifying the impact of any of this is not easy. There are, however, some pertinent numbers for Liverpool which tell a tale about the problems they have had to endure this season.

We’ll begin with injuries. Leaving aside the construction of the squad, fitness issues ultimately shape what a manager can realistically change from week-to-week or in-game.

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Arne Slot delivered a positive impact in this regard last season (as you can read in detail via the link below). Premier Injuries measure time-loss injuries, which are “any injury that results in a player missing at least one competitive fixture”. Liverpool suffered 4.3 per 1,000 minutes played in 2024/25 after being at 6.7 in Jürgen Klopp’s final campaign.

This improvement combined with Arsenal and Manchester City seeing their figures rise to 6.9 and 6.5 respectively last term likely helped the Reds win their second league title in six years.

Liverpool are at 7.9 this season.

That’s my calculation; it may be different with Premier Injuries, who provide their figures in an end of season summary rather than throughout the campaign. Their number shouldn’t be wildly different, with the Reds having collected (by my count) 34 time-loss injuries across 48 matches (4,320 minutes).

Despite losing players more frequently from what most would consider a weaker squad, Slot has been making fewer changes to his starting XI.

Rotation is not easy to assess across the Premier League, as clubs with European commitments play far more often. Manchester United will contest 40 games in 2025/26 whereas Liverpool will finish with somewhere between 57 and 60 on their ledger. Probably 57.

Managers also frequently make more changes for domestic cup games, especially if facing lower league opposition. The fairest method for comparing clubs is to look at the number of line-up amendments they make from one league game to the next.

The figures for Liverpool are a touch misleading. Slot averaged 1.9 changes per league match before the title was won last term, then raised that figure by giving some of his lesser lights a run-out.

Either way, these numbers suggest that rotation alone has no correlation with success. Brentford have improved after making the joint-third most changes per game; Newcastle and Wolves are lower in the table despite making even more. Nottingham Forest have maintained the most stable line-up in 2025/26 despite having four ‘permanent’ managers who could collectively be responsible for relegation.

While Slot is making essentially as many line-up changes between league games this season as he did in his rookie year, the numbers have shifted more notably for substitutes. That’s true for the volume of them, their average time on the pitch and the tangible output they have delivered in goals or assists.

When comparing Premier League managers, the analysis has to start in 2022/23. This was the first full season in which teams were permitted to make five substitutions. It also makes for an interesting time frame for analysing Liverpool, as both of their managers in this period had a poor season and a title challenging/winning one.

A remarkable coincidence occurred in Slot’s first campaign. His rates for subs per game (4.34) and the minutes they averaged (19.7) were identical to Klopp’s across his final two seasons. It’s why the Dutchman’s 2024/25 dot is not visible on this chart.

Slot’s numbers have dipped to 3.97 and 19.1 respectively this term, both of which are below league average. You can also see from the size of his 2025/26 marker that goal contributions off the bench have not been overly forthcoming.

The Reds’ squad is unquestionably weaker this term. This is highlighted by Slot’s goal scoring substitutes in the 2024/25 Premier League being Diogo Jota (with three goals), Darwin Núñez (two), Trent Alexander-Arnold and Luis Diáz (one apiece), none of whom remain at the club. The majority of the nine sub assists from last season have also disappeared from the squad, albeit Curtis Jones (two), Conor Bradley and Alexis Mac Allister (both one) remain.

Even with Mohamed Salah delivering a season for the ages, contributions by the bench were still important last term. Jota scored equalisers against Fulham and Forest. Goals from Darwin and Trent earned road wins at Brentford and Leicester respectively. It took less than six minutes after his introduction for Jones’ to assist Salah for the Anfield winner against Brighton. Here are eight additional points that kept the title train on track.

Slot’s changes early in 2025/26 were having an impact too. The decisive goals in the first two league games came from the bench, with Federico Chiesa adding to his strike against Bournemouth with one at Crystal Palace that should have been worth a point. He also assisted an equaliser against Manchester United in another game that should not have been lost.

This well has been dry since Christmas. Alexander Isak’s opener at Tottenham on December 20 was the last Premier League goal contribution by a Liverpool substitute. The others this season, for the record, were assists from Salah and Wataru Endō for goals in matches that the Reds were already leading.

The total of four Premier League goals by subs puts Liverpool joint-14th in the division. Tripling their total would only put them one ahead of Arsenal, with Fulham (10), Aston Villa and Brighton (both nine) also over twice as productive.

The situation could be worse, the bench less impactful. The only goal a Manchester City substitute has scored saw Rayan Cherki put them 4-0 up at Wolves on the opening weekend. It was academic.

And although Liverpool haven’t had many goals by subs this season, no team has taken the lead thanks to a non-starter scoring on more occasions.

The Reds are the only team to have completed the set of the three types of this contribution. Chiesa’s goal against Bournemouth proved decisive - Salah added to it in stoppage time - then Rio Ngumoha struck a winner at Newcastle the following week. Isak’s effort in north London put Liverpool 1-0 up in a match they would later win 2-1, so as important as it was, it did not determine the outcome of the game.

Slot hasn’t summoned too many goal contributions from his Reds bench but they have tended to be impactful. Harvey Elliott’s goal to secure a win in Paris has been the most important of the 12 strikes by substitutes in cup competitions, for instance.

At worst, the Liverpool head coach appears to have the ability to make positive changes from the bench if he has quality options available. The make up of the squad and the injuries they have suffered are counting against Slot this season though.

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?

Before we get to the data, an inevitable note on the system. Having stressed the importance of a large sample, we’ll have to slightly go against that here.

There are eight Premier League goalkeepers in 2025/26 who’ve yet to face at least 50 post-shot expected goals in their careers in England’s top flight. They have to be considered average shot-stoppers at this point as we can’t be certain either way, even though the limited data appears to match perception of their abilities. We should have a much higher bar but this would be a pointless exercise if we had to exclude almost everyone.

Alisson will be our test case to explain the concept. As he has performed at 8.6 per cent above expectation, anyone who nets past him will be rewarded with 1.086 goals. Here are the 18 scorers with at least nine goals in the Premier League this season.

You won’t need reminding that six of the top seven have bagged against Liverpool this season (with Giorgi Mamardashvili also rated better than average, albeit not at Alisson’s level). While Antoine Semenyo scored twice at Anfield on opening night, his braces against Karl Darlow and Guglielmo Vicario have helped dragged his score back down. Nobody said this was fair.

We can assume that Graham would not have made a transfer move for Viktor Gyökeres. Would he have gone for Darwin Núñez, who also built his reputation by beating Primeira Liga goalkeepers of (presumably) lower standard?

In fairness to Gyökeres, if the table included players with eight goals then Jean-Philippe Mateta (-1.96%), Zian Flemming (-2.43%) and Bruno Fernandes (-4.37%) would all be below him. You’d hope a peak-age £64m striker playing for the league leaders would produce more against better opponents, nonetheless.

We’d have to lower the bar to just six goals to find any other Liverpool players. Let’s move onto goalkeepers rather than doing that. The scorers are rated by how they’ve performed against xGOT, as these are the only expected goals that concern shot stoppers.

We again have to mark some of the players as average; I’ve gone with those who have taken fewer than 50 Premier League shots in their careers. As there are far more scorers (258) than goalkeepers (34) this season, there is inevitably a greater chance of variation between goals conceded and their weighted value. It would also make this analysis better to include every saved shot too, though sadly there is no quick way to gather this data (as far as I know).

You have to have some sympathy for Lucas Perri, who has lost his place in the Leeds side to Karl Darlow. Only five of the goals he has conceded have been to sub-par finishers, meaning he has been heavily punished by the better marksmen. Equally, this could suggest he’s out of his depth.

Mamardashvili’s record is more heavily affected in this way than Alisson’s has been. Combined with the findings in the previous newsletter, we can say that the Georgian has faced higher quality chances and been beaten by stronger finishers than Liverpool’s number one.

Or at least he has according to this system, which is nowhere near flawless, far less robust than Graham’s model. We’ll finish with a combined look at the performance of the top 10s of current Premier League attackers for shot volume and the goalkeepers who’ve dealt with the most xGOT. I’d say the order passes the eye test for the shot stoppers better than for the forwards but you can argue about that in the comments.

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.

It would be easier to make a case for Mamardashvili to become first choice if he had enjoyed a better season. He doesn’t yet seem trusted by Liverpool supporters, even though his form in La Liga was at times spectacular.

Saving an Erling Haaland penalty aside, the 25-year-old has done little to impress Kopites. Losing seven of Mamardashvili’s 10 starts in league and Europe won’t have helped his case either, irrespective of his role in those defeats. Clean sheets against Real Madrid and Aston Villa are soon forgotten when losing to Brentford, Brighton and PSV, among others.

Mamardashvili also has a lower save percentage in the league than Alisson, both in total (63.3) and with non-penalty big chances (36.4 against the Brazilian’s 43.3). It is telling that the former Valencia goalkeeper has a career low for the former metric though. For both men to be in that position suggests it has to be a team issue to some extent.

We can get a handle on this with Opta Analyst’s xG on Target (xGOT) metric, also known as post-shot expected goals. Gut instinct says the figures can sometimes be a little off for a shot in isolation, but as with any data analysis the wrinkles should be ironed out over a larger sample.

The average shot faced by Alisson in the 2025/26 Premier League has been worth 0.32 xG on Target. I didn’t record the figures for last season before they vanished from FBRef unfortunately, but that the number is higher than it was in five of his first six seasons in England. Suddenly Becker’s low save percentage doesn’t seem so odd.

Neither does Mamardashvili’s, seeing as his xGOT figure is 0.34. That’s at least three percentage points higher than it was for any of his four seasons in La Liga.

We can plot this number against save percentage for the goalkeepers in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain this season to highlight a trend you would expect to see.

As much as the link is obvious, you’d hope to see Liverpool’s shot stoppers north of the trend line. The goalkeepers of Barcelona and Milan show what can be possible when facing shots of even higher average difficulty than their Reds counterparts.

We can also factor in Champions League data. Alisson will be grateful for this, Mamardashvili less so. Becker has conceded in line with the xGOT he has faced across the two important competitions whereas his deputy is 2.5 goals below par.

Something notable stands out with even a quick glance of the data though. Mamardashvili has faced roughly half as many post-shot expected goals as Alisson despite only playing approximately a third of the minutes. The younger man has had to deal with 29 per cent more shots on target and 38 per cent more xGOT per 90 minutes than the veteran. That’s going to make a difference to their performance figures as it hasn’t been a fair comparison.

There’s a stunning statistic in this simple chart. Liverpool’s collective opponents have improved the value of their chances through finishing when facing Mamardashvili. Every one expected goal they muster has led to 1.19 in the post-shot model.

That’s absurdly efficient. The ratio for the 2025/26 Premier League is 1 to 0.95, way below what Mamardashvili has endured. The nine players who’ve hit double figures for goals in the competition have collectively converted 21.4 per cent of their shots, over double league average. Even they have only improved their xG by 0.38 per cent as a group once finishing is applied.

For Liverpool’s Georgia international to have faced a 19 per cent xG improvement is ridiculous. To put it another way, it would be easier as a goalkeeper if every shot you faced was from 2024/25 Salah, whose xG improvement was 13.2 per cent.

The difference between Alisson and Mamardashvili here is fascinating. You’d understand if an attacker was put off when facing Becker thanks to his reputation as one of the best goalkeepers in the world. The shot stoppers themselves must play a part too, through narrowing angles, speed off their goal line and so on, but that’s impossible to measure with available data.

It leaves Liverpool with a very difficult decision ahead of next season, the last of Alisson’s contract. The data says he’s only performing at about average level yet that’s still above what his successor has offered. The latter has been tested more harshly but how much of that is down to his abilities? There are no easy answers for Richard Hughes, Slot or whoever holds their positions next season.