Alexis Mac Allister Sums Up Liverpool's Problem This Season
Alexis Mac Allister had perhaps his best game of the season at Arsenal but has been below par in a way that has spread throughout the team in 2025/26
There are many ways to measure what a player or team does in a match. As the saying goes, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. But even if you hadn’t watched a second of Liverpool in either season under Arne Slot, the data would highlight the two ‘teams’ from each campaign are not at the same level.
Statistics are more useful at assessing attackers than defenders. Mohamed Salah’s output has crumbled into the sea since 2024/25 whereas Ibrahima Konaté looks at about the same level in the numbers. Neither man will be proud of their campaign as things stand, although the latter has been much better of late.
What about the men in the middle? Dominik Szoboszlai has been the Reds’ player of the season so far, with Curtis Jones growing in importance almost weekly. The one central cog last season who has disappointed throughout 2025/26 is Alexis Mac Allister.
It is hard to pinpoint the cause. Injured at the end of last season, he then lost some fellow South Americans through transfers, another teammate in tragic circumstances and became a father for the first time. Nobody could blame him if his head was scrambled in the second half of 2025.
Data can put Mac Allister’s downturn into context, whatever the explanation. Hudl Statsbomb have a metric called On-Ball Value (OBV) which measures player’s performance in four aspects: defensive actions, dribbles and carries, passing and shooting.
Salah was unsurprisingly Liverpool’s leading man last season, with an OBV score of 16.84, ahead of Trent Alexander-Arnold (11.50) and Luis Díaz (9.11). Mac Allister, with 7.88, was next.
Where the Argentine truly shone was in being an all-rounder. To assess this, it makes sense to weight the figures by how involved each player was. Mac Allister hit a minimum of 0.06 OBV per 100 touches for all four aspects of the metric last season. As low as that bar sounds, only seven other players in the Premier League did likewise. Two of them barely played while only Bryan Mbeumo of the other five got within 750 touches of the Liverpool midfielder’s total.
If you’re looking for the best footballers in the Premier League, this won’t show you. If you want to find players who were integral to their team in every different facet of the game, it should put you in the ballpark. The key men without being the star men, perhaps.
Mac Allister does not fare as well in this data this season. He has been largely peripheral, unable to influence games. He is not alone among the Reds’ squad in seeing an OBV drop, though, with one aspect pointing to exactly where Liverpool need to improve.
