“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 2-1 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

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Top Five Stats

• 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.

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Liverpool maintained a very settled line-up last season, with 10 of their players starting at least 28 of their league games. The only club with more such men in the preceding nine seasons was the Leicester City side of 2015/16. Magical things can happen when you keep your best players on the pitch.

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.

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Liverpool won the first Merseyside derby at the Hill Dickenson Stadium in dramatic circumstances. Having dropped two points in stoppage time in their final match at Goodison, the Reds picked them back up in the 100th minute on Sunday.

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.

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The BBC transfer gossip page led with a tidbit concerning the Reds on Thursday morning.

“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.

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There is an open message thread in the chat section of the newsletter for anyone to submit a question. You can view and add it to here.

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.”

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Liverpool have six Premier League games left. Maybe Arne Slot does too. The outcome of these matches will have an enormous bearing on next season. There can be no cruise to the finish line as there was in 2024/25.

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.

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It’s been a bad week for Liverpool. Far from the first in the last nine months.

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.

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In an attempt to break out of the doom spiral of following Liverpool in 2025/26, I opened a thread where anyone could ask football questions which I would attempt to answer (here, feel free to add to it). This query, from Butty, is essentially a three-parter:

“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.

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Liverpool’s 4-0 defeat at Manchester City was a demoralising afternoon for anyone of a Red persuasion. Not that their morale regarding the team was likely that high beforehand.

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.

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Premier League goalkeepers are rubbish. The data says as much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Back in the early days of amateur football analysis, it was hard to learn much about goalkeepers as the data was very basic. The demise of FBRef’s offering has somewhat returned us back to the dark days of the early 2010s. Have you seen that new show Luther, it’s silly but great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As the ball came back to Giorgi Mamardashvili, he was closer to the centre circle than his penalty area. With an opponent closing in, he had to launch the ball forward.

It would have been executed more in hope than in expectation. The ball reached a defender, maybe 10 yards in front of his penalty box. Under no pressure, he headed it back to his goalkeeper.

Hang on a second. Who’s this appearing out of the shadow that covers half of the pitch, like a miscreant emerging from a dark alley? It’s Milos Kerkez, on hand to hit the ball first time over the stranded goalkeeper into an unguarded Brighton net. 1-1, game on.

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It should have been but was not. The Hungarian left-back’s instinctive brilliance was the only Opta-defined big chance Liverpool had in their 2-1 loss at the Amex Stadium last weekend. No shot they created thereafter was worth more than 0.08 expected goals, falling shy of even the average quality mark of 0.10.

The Reds’ standard for producing big chances depends on the context you apply. Their total of 82 in the Premier League is only seven shy of Arsenal, 13 behind joint-leaders Chelsea and Manchester City. They’ve not been a chasm adrift of the best in class across 31 matches.

Their current rate per game suggests Liverpool will finish with 101. That looks less impressive once you realise they had at least 125 in each of the last four seasons. More worryingly for Arne Slot, their peak for this period was 150 in his first campaign. Essentially a third of that tally has vanished one year on.

The Kerkez Opportunity is not only a good name for a Frederick Forsyth novel, it’s also emblematic of a problem that has dogged the Reds all season. Their conversion rate is poor but the former Bournemouth defender was able to brilliantly put his opportunity away. It’s another aspect of big chance shooting that has been downright odd for Liverpool this season.

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Mohamed Salah is leaving Liverpool. It may be the best ever example of how quickly things can change in football.

Fans would’ve been walking up the Walton Breck Road bearing flaming pitchforks had he been allowed to leave the club on a free transfer last summer. Yet his exit, less than a year later, has already felt inevitable for quite some time.

This doesn’t change that Salah is without question one of the Reds’ best ever players. Only 22 men have made more appearances for the club, most of whom pre-dated the Premier League era. Nobody with a decent sample has made goal contributions more frequently. If Sir Kenny Dalglish will never be dethroned as Liverpool’s greatest ever, he has an Egyptian king at his shoulder.

And although 2025/26 will go down as Salah’s worst campaign with the club, it’s remarkable how good a bad season can look once you stop to check. His nine assists are the most of any Liverpool player, with his per 90 minutes rate for the metric in line with his average for his career with the Reds. Salah has also created the most Opta-defined big chances, with Hugo Ekitike his only colleague who has taken more shots in such moves.

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Only five players with at least 1,800 minutes are averaging more shots per 90 in the Premier League. A 33-year-old winger who is clearly still grieving a lost friend is ranked 15th in the strongest league in the world for non-penalty expected goals per 90 minutes. What any of us would trade to be one per cent as good as what has been a slump for a man with the highest of sky-high standards. We can only dream.

There are players with better goal averages in Europe’s big five leagues in 2025/26. Plenty have set up colleagues to score more frequently. If you want someone with north of Salah’s playing time who can at least match both his figures of 0.30 assists and 0.20 non-penalty goals per 90, you’ve only got six options though.

With his 34th birthday less than a month after what will be his final match in a Reds shirt, Salah is in an elite dual-threat septet that includes Arda Güler, Michael Olise and Lamine Yamal. One still a teenager, another barely 21 and the other not 25 until you’ll have your Christmas decorations up again. They are not as old now as Salah was when he joined Liverpool, never mind when he leaves the club.

How do you possibly replace even the supposedly finished version of the Reds’ number 11? Forget about peak Salah, even the battered, bruised and heartbroken 2025/26 edition will be a stretch. Yan Diomande is making an excellent case that he could be the man to follow the man, but he’s been covered in a previous edition of this newsletter. Let’s see who else is out there.

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The Liverpool of 2025/26 are like a box of chocolates you might pick up at Gump and Son’s. You never know what you’re going to get. Inept and anaemic in attack against Tottenham, they were rampant against Galatasaray.

Not just incisive but also record equalling. The 16 shots on target fired off by the Reds equalled their previous Champions League high, notched in their 8-0 thumping of Beşiktaş in 2007. As bad as Liverpool usually play in Turkey, they make up for it when their sides visit Anfield.

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The shots on target count also matched the most any side has recorded in a knockout phase match in Europe’s top club competition since 2017. The table of the top eight (below) is interesting as five of the instances took place this year. Is the Champions League more unbalanced than ever?

Arne Slot’s men should probably have secured the above records outright, as Mohamed Salah thumped a close range shot against the crossbar. Nobody except the referee thought Virgil van Dijk had fouled goalkeeper Ugurcan Çakir before Alexis Mac Allister put the ball in the net either. Hey ho; in the book of Liverpool problems this season, this is buried somewhere in the appendix.

There’s also no question that Galatasaray were very accommodating visitors on Wednesday, especially once qualifying was no longer their business. Even so, shooting on target has been a real problem for Liverpool in 2025/26, as this chart from ‪@christina6ys demonstrates. They’ve needed 56 shots for every 16 they’ve mustered on target in the league, making their midweek performance a notable outlier.

It is unusual to shoot so erratically when dominating the ball as much. None of the nine Premier League teams with a lower shot accuracy percentage than the Liverpool of 2025/26 finished above 11th in the table. Their average position was 16.7 and five of them were relegated. These are not teams to emulate.

Yet we find Slot’s side fifth in the table despite being unable to hit the proverbial barn door. For all that late defensive lapses have cost them, their attacking misfires are the bigger issue. Some of the player figures are extraordinarily bad.

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English teams had a terrible three days in Europe last week. The media couldn’t believe it. As always, headlines blow this way and that depending on the outcomes. The eternal demand for content makes such rollercoaster analysis an inevitability.

“Champions League - why are Premier League sides dominating?” was a BBC Sport article in late January. They followed it with “The 24 hours that damaged the Premier League’s best-in-the-world reputation” after the first legs of the Champions League Round of 16.

Three English clubs lost by three goals. Liverpool have more of a chance of advancing but struggled to string three passes together. Arsenal needed an 89th penalty to secure a draw while Newcastle may regret not hanging on to their one-goal advantage to take to Barcelona. It was little better in the other European competitions, with Aston Villa the only victors (1-0), Crystal Palace drawing (0-0) and Nottingham Forest losing 1-0 at home.

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If the subsequent media catastrophising was inevitable, little seemed to be made of the league results that followed for those clubs in gameweek 30 of the Premier League season. This is not as simple to unpick in the sense that four of them played each other.

Nonetheless, the league leaders needed two goals after the 88th minute to beat Everton (who have been notoriously poor away to big six sides for decades under David Moyes). Across town, Newcastle won 1-0 at Chelsea. None of the other sides who were in European action won, with five involved in draws and Villa losing at Old Trafford.

Just as it can be hard to separate Arne Slot’s shortcomings from the difficulties Liverpool’s players have experienced with form and grief this season, so something of an opposite effect is happening with Michael Carrick at Manchester United.

The Red Devils will play a total of 40 matches this season when the nine Premier League clubs in European competition have all gone past that already with an average of 45.3 games on the board. Whatever improvements Carrick has made at United, freshness of squad is very advantageous at this stage of the campaign.

Especially as the standard of opposition in England has never been as high. The collective Elo rating (which is an “estimation of [team] strength based on past results”) for the 20 clubs has risen above the already lofty vantage point of 2024/25. It’s why the champions this season and last will have had lower points tallies than those to which we had grown accustomed. Competition is too fierce to get into the mid-90s or higher.

As this weekend showed, it’s very hard to win matches in a hugely competitive Premier League following a match in Europe. This is not to excuse Liverpool for their performance against Tottenham, who themselves played away in the Champions League while having a more injury-ravaged squad.

Once you look at the data across the whole campaign, you realise it isn’t just the Reds who have struggled with domestic games after European adventures. Liverpool have had similar issues in previous, far better seasons too.

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Liverpool are rumoured to be interested in activating the buyback clause they included in the deal that saw Jarell Quansah move to Bayer Leverkusen last summer. Wherever the truth lies in that story, it’s an interesting prospect.

The 23-year-old fits into a theory that came to mind when the Reds signed Jérémy Jacquet, namely that the club might be moving towards a system with three central defenders.

To briefly recap: Rennes use that formation, as did Parma during Giovanni Leoni’s time there. Liverpool almost plucked Marc Guéhi out of Crystal Palace’s back three during the transfer window in which they signed a wing-back called Jeremie Frimpong. They’re now being linked with a Leverkusen defender who has started every game this season bar three in a 3-4-3 system.

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It would be easy to assume there’s no chance of Quansah returning. He was frozen out by Arne Slot after he infamously substituted the youngster at half time in his first match in charge. Yet that major omission of popular perception didn’t really happen. Liverpool played 56 matches in all competitions in 2024/25 and the only man who was in the match day squad for every single one was Jarell Quansah.

He played 1298 minutes across the campaign; not loads of pitch time, perhaps, but not nothing. It was over 400 minutes more than the likes of Federico Chiesa, Harvey Elliott, Wataru Endō and Joe Gomez managed, about 90 fewer than Conor Bradley.

What would Slot have given for a consistently available player who can play in the centre of the defence or at right-back this season? From when he made his debut at Newcastle in August 2023 to the day he left the club, Quansah didn’t have a single reported injury that caused him to miss a game.

He’s only missed a week of action so far this season, with Leverkusen conceding 10 goals in two games in his absence (not that the 7-2 loss to Paris Saint-Germain is likely to have been wildly different had he played). Their goal difference has been 0.20 per 90 minutes better when Quansah has played compared with when he hasn’t, for whatever that is worth.

There have been conflicting reports regarding when the buyback clause in his contract can be activated. The fee seems to fluctuate too. Both CIES Football Observatory and Transfermarkt rate Quansah as Leverkusen’s most valuable player, they’re just the small matter of €30.8M apart in what they perceive that value to be.

We don’t have to worry about that. What concerns us whether it would make sense for the Reds to exercise their right to reclaim their former centre-back. Quansah’s data makes a decent fist of selling the case that they should.

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Top Five Stats

• Galatasaray are the only team Liverpool have failed to score against this season. This is despite amassing 3.12 expected goals across the two matches. They have seven goals from 3.09 xG versus West Ham in 2025/26, six from 3.14 against Bournemouth.

• The Reds had six shots on target without scoring for only the second time since the start of last season. The other instance was also a 1-0 away defeat: at Tottenham in the 2024 League Cup semi-final (in which they had seven efforts on target).

• Mario Lemina’s goal almost doubled the xG total from set pieces that Liverpool have conceded in the Champions League this season. They were on 0.53 before this game; Galatasaray had 0.75 in the match.

• The visitors saw 18 of their passes intercepted, their most in league or Europe under Arne Slot. They last conceded more away from Anfield in the 2022 League Cup final, which included extra time.

• Liverpool were penalised for five fouls in the opposition box, all of which occurred within a 35-minute period. They averaged 1.8 box fouls per match in the league phase.

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Match Review

Liverpool have a very poor record against Galatasaray. Coming into this game they had won only one of the five Champions League meetings. Among teams they’ve faced more than four times in the competition, Chelsea are the only one they had as low a win rate against.

They may yet meet the Blues in Europe this season. For that to happen, they’ll have to beat the team against whom their win ratio has just got even worse.

When 2025/26 is over, there will be many games that will be good candidates to provide a snapshot summary of the campaign. Many of the common plot points of the season were on show here.

Some good moments among more bad ones. A catastrophic performance from Ibrahima Konaté, a midfield muddle with Alexis Mac Allister off the pace and Mohamed Salah on the periphery. A set piece goal conceded. A lack of recognisable attacking patterns. Some very random officiating. I mean I could go on?

As Galatasaray had lost just two of their 22 home matches in the knockout stages of the European Cup/Champions League, it was encouraging that Liverpool started the match so well. Their pressing looked better than it has for much of the campaign, forcing mistakes from Okan Buruk’s defenders.

The match ultimately followed a very similar pattern to when the teams met last September though. The Reds went behind in avoidable fashion before struggling to recover in a hostile atmosphere.

One of the many strange quirks of this season is that Liverpool’s set piece defending has not improved since Aaron Briggs left, goals have just stopped being scored. They were one of the best teams in the Premier League for the rate of expected goals conceded per 10 opposition corners in his time and they still are.

On Understat’s model, the Reds allow 0.38 xG for every 10 corners their opponents take. Galatasaray were able to generate 0.74 expected goals from their seven corners, with the first of them responsible for over a third of the offence they generated in the match.

Going behind so early was always going to be problematic. Based on average age, Gala are the oldest team left in the competition. The Turkish Süper Lig isn’t viewed as a retirement home for former Premier League players without reason. While this might have meant they would run out of gas, their knowhow proved invaluable. The referee didn’t bother to barter for what they were selling, he gladly paid over the odds any time one of their players hit the deck.

Liverpool’s greater issue was an inability to exert any form of control. The Reds’ average number of passes per possession sequence has been consistent this season whether in the league phase of this competition (4.33) or the Premier League (4.22).

In this match it was down at just 2.8. Where they had averaged 14.5 sequences of at least 10 passes in their first eight Champions League matches of 2025/26, here they mustered just two. It makes the complete exclusion of Curtis Jones, even off the bench, a mystery. Whatever deficiencies he may have, the ball isn’t turned over very often when he has it.

Which leads us to another problematic statistic: 20 turnovers of possession through poor control against an away average of 16.1 in the league. That doesn’t sound like a wide margin, but Liverpool’s share of the possession was 6.7 per cent lower here than on average on the road in England, so they had fewer opportunities to give the ball away.

That clearly didn’t prevent them from doing so, despite facing a side that Opta would rate as only the 17th best in the Premier League if they happened to play within it.

Speaking of our supercomputer friends, they gave Liverpool a 79 per cent chance of advancing before the tie began. Since the away goals rule was abolished, there have been 17 Champions League ties in which the home side won the first leg by one goal.

They qualified for the next round nine times with the away side going through on eight occasions. This tie is on a knife edge. The Reds will need to play much better at Anfield next Wednesday to turn the odds in their favour.

Source for graphics: markstatsbot, Opta Analyst.

Recent Posts

The previous edition of this newsletter looked at the distance covered by the teams in Liverpool’s Champions League matches. It’s now time to look at the sprinting numbers.

We have an issue here that the previous article did not. The distance a player covers isn’t up for debate. It is fact. What constitutes a sprint seems to vary between data providers. Here’s a list from a recent Driblab newsletter

We can see that Hugo Ekitike averages 11.3 sprints per league game. Yet based on the below figures from a Sky Sports article that was published earlier the same week, Liverpool’s number 22 had averaged 11.9 per match.

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That difference could be down to the data being cut off at different times, not that the Reds played between the two dates. The below figure for Cody Gakpo also suggests he should be on the Driblab list when divided by his games played (assuming he’d be classed as a forward).

Regardless, sprint data drips out here and there without much in the way of a regular source or any context. Another recent example was provided by CIES Football Observatory, who posted the top 20 Champions League players for maximum speed for five different positions. Liverpool had a man in four of the categories, shown here:

It’s unsurprising that ‘Side midfielders/wingers’ is the one classification in which the Reds have no representative, as it has been the most problematic position. The area of an Arne Slot team that most needs pace and trickery has largely lacked it in 2025/26.

Having started on the wing against Galatasaray in the league phase, Jeremie Frimpong could arguably be counted, albeit four of his five Champions League starts have been at right-back. Wherever he plays, only three men in the study - Gonzalo Garcia, Oleksii Kashchuk and Anthony Elanga - have covered a higher percentage of their distance in the highest speed category.

Have the likes of Cody Gakpo and Mohamed Salah been strolling down the flanks this season? We’ll need to interrogate the match-by-match data on Fotmob.

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A lot of football fans don’t care about a lot of football metrics. Who can blame them? Who’s bothered about tackles or pass completion or possession regains when football is solely about winning the six-yard scrum on a corner?

One thing that seems to generate interest is physical data, at least based on tweets I’ve received over the years. People want to know who ran the furthest or the fastest. Is there anyone who failed to put in the hard yards who we can blame for the latest defeat?

I think the clamour for these statistics is why Josh Williams chose the handle Distance Covered. Fans want the numbers without necessarily understanding how to interpret them. Running stats are viewed as the answer to solving football when the numbers that drip out into the public domain are usually shorn of context. The possession share and the game state are just two factors that affect how far or how fast a player has to run.

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We at least know Jürgen Klopp would set his team a collective target. Players from both Mainz and Dortmund revealed what the German demanded ahead of him taking over at Liverpool.

“In his first year he said he wouldn't guarantee anything apart from that when we reached 120km per game then it would be much harder for us to lose,” said Patrick Owomoyela, who played under Klopp at Dortmund. “He actually offered us a day off when we reached that target. He thought that if we reached that then we would win the game. And from then on it became easy because we understood that his plan would work.”

Klopp may have dialled down his benchmark in later years. Squawka revealed after his final campaign in England that the Reds had averaged 111.3km per Premier League game in 2023/24.

Sports scientist Simon Brundish recently noted that “across his final three seasons, Liverpool averaged around 116 kilometres per match,” suggesting Klopp’s last dance may have been the most restrained one. He did look exhausted, in fairness.

There’s clearly no correlation with success. Burnley went down with a whimper two seasons ago despite topping the above chart while Aston Villa (who were 20th for distance covered) unexpectedly finished fourth. Run smarter, not harder?

Arne Slot appears to think so. A Sky Sports article from February 2025 on Nottingham Forest included the Premier League distance covered per game figures for last season to that point. The Reds had eased off compared with the preceding campaign, though maybe that was just a result of having to chase far fewer matches. Liverpool were more often able to play on their terms.

Fotmob proudly announced ahead of 2025/26 that they would be carrying physical data this season. Then they withdrew it, at least for the Premier League. However, the Champions League statistics remain available. With Liverpool returning to the competition next week, it’s a good time to run through some distance numbers. Sprints will be covered in the next edition of the newsletter.

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