2025/26 Pre-Season Review and Premier League Predictions
The Reds have attacked well and defended poorly at times this summer. Where will Liverpool finish in the 2025/26 Premier League?
Liverpool’s pre-season campaign has veered from the sublime to the ridiculous, often very quickly. It has largely depended upon at which end of the team you are looking.
The summer signings look very exciting. Some of the interplay involving Hugo Ekitike and Florian Wirtz has been gorgeous, erotic, X-rated, Late Night Hollyoaks-level stuff.
The defending has at times been comical, laughable, peak Arrested Development. Too easily countered, notably by Milan and Crystal Palace, with set piece concerns thanks to the decreasing height of the team exploited by Athletic Club.
Are the Reds ready to defend their Premier League crown? It’s reasonable to have concerns given the transformative nature of this summer combined with the devastating loss of Diogo Jota. Grief isn’t linear, it won’t affect everyone who knew and loved him or his brother in the same way.
Several regular goal scorers plus an elite assist provider are no longer at the club. Virgil van Dijk isn’t just the captain, he’s now the third top scorer of Liverpool goals in the squad. Change is afoot and soon the game will be too.
Let’s assess the pre-season campaign before predicting how the Reds will fare in the 2025/26 Premier League. Here’s the playing data for the summer programme.
Thirty-seven players saw action. Some have already left, some will probably depart in the next couple of weeks and some you probably still couldn’t pick out of a line up. It’s not ideal that the likes of van Dijk and Ryan Gravenberch missed games at the business end of the preparations. Getting the Dutch pair into the team together should immediately make the side look more solid.
The attacking has been great to watch. Two of the top goal contributors across the seven games won’t be key this season, for contrasting reasons, while Mohamed Salah only scored once (with no assists) across his 379 minutes of playing time.
The Egyptian is the leading scorer and deliverer of goal contributions in the opening games of Premier League seasons, so is always ready come day one. Bournemouth had better beware, no matter how little Salah delivered this summer.
Only two players produced a bigger tally of shots and chances created, after all. However, few of the squad got as much playing time.
Data was not available for the training ground game against Stoke or the match with Yokohama. The cabbage patch quality of the pitch for the latter must have scrambled even the most hi-tech tracking and stats gathering technology Opta, NASA and 5G can provide. Here are the pro-rata numbers for the summer’s five other fixtures.
The most interesting fact discovered when compiling this data? The top chance creating combination was Wirtz to Ekitike, with three. It’s plausible Salah won’t be part of the team’s most important duo any more, even if he remains the top dog overall. We shall see. A certain Swede might quickly shake things up further.
It is time to look forward. The Reds have not retained the league title since 1984. It’s been a minute. Arne Slot did not manage to go back-to-back with Feyenoord either, albeit they earned more points the season after winning the Eredivisie than when lifting the trophy aloft. The same could feasibly happen to Liverpool in 2025/26.
You have probably seen by now that Opta have installed the defending champions as the team likeliest to win the Premier League this term. Before getting excited at the Reds’ 28.5% chance of triumph, bear in mind that Manchester City were at 82.2% when last season got underway. They didn’t get close despite being almost three times as likely to finish first as Liverpool are now. Things can change very quickly with a bad run.
We can also average the prices offered by 26 bookmakers to see what they make of things. For what it’s worth, they currently make Liverpool more likely to win a 21st league title than Opta do, with Arsenal further ahead of the chasing pack too.
Long-term subscribers will know I track a model of my own. It’s relatively simple, derived using Opta expected goal data via FBRef. The projected final points tally chart is one of a number which is regularly updated on the newsletter’s data page:
At this point I’m using the numbers from last season, there’s no supercomputer here. It means the newly promoted sides have to take over the data of their relegated counterparts for now. The Championship xG for 2024/25 implies Leeds are markedly superior to the teams that came up with them, but we’ll have to see if that proves the case.
The other flaw is that there is no accounting for transfer moves this summer. Will Jeremie Frimpong suitably replace Trent Alexander-Arnold, in his fewer passes/more sprinting kind of way? Are Ekitike and Wirtz going to deliver more than Luis DÃaz and Darwin Núñez offered? Will Milos Kerkez tackle anyone with his head in a competitive game?
Those questions are just for Liverpool, other teams will have their own posers to answer. There’s a lot of moving parts of play, changing every day.
As data is added for the games that are played in 2025/26 the above prediction will be updated to become more accurate. Nonetheless, whether you go with my system, Opta’s 10,000 simulations or the collective mind power (and punters’ money) of a multitude of bookmakers, it’s clear the Reds are the team to beat in this season. Let’s hope so.
No reason to believe we won’t be challenging on every front, grand national & boat race included. UTFR