Arne Slot proved Availability is the best Ability

Liverpool's injury record in 2024/25 was so impressive that data from across the Premier League merits a deep dive.

It doesn’t feel appropriate to write about players or transfers or anything like that right now, but I wanted to keep occupied. Life continues, even if it feels impossible to contemplate 2025/26.

I hope people appreciate this article, though my tribute to Diogo Jota is far more important. It’s a free read which shows where he stands in the pantheon of Premier League finishers/scorers (spoiler: really near the top).

Diogo Jota, Legendary Striker

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A strength which helped Arne Slot get the Liverpool head coach gig was keeping his players fit. For all the numerous positives Jürgen Klopp brought to the club, injuries were a significant problem at times.

“One of the reasons Liverpool appointed Slot was the sort of injury record that he’d had at previous clubs. Of course, Feyenoord in particular, I think it was sort of a 90% availability rate that he’d had among the squad,” said Andy Jones on a podcast for The Athletic.

“Crucial to that was a guy called Ruben Peeters, who he brought to Liverpool,” he added. “He’s lead physical performance coach. He plays a big role in sort of periodisation, which is basically mapping our training sessions and workloads and individual workloads and individual time tables for players.”

Gut instinct says that Liverpool’s record for availability markedly improved in 2024/25, so it’s time to put the Reds’ figures into the wider context of England’s top division. We can do this using data from Premier Injuries, who recently shared their findings in an excellent summary article.

They have a metric called ‘Time-loss Injury’, which they define as “any injury that results in a player missing at least one competitive fixture.” This is a sensible method of measurement, as a player might be substituted due to an injury problem then feature in the next match. To count, a game should be missed.

Liverpool suffered 22 injuries by this measure in Slot’s debut campaign, second fewest behind Nottingham Forest (20). Here’s Premier Injuries’ graph of the data, which indirectly reveals that the average was 29.7 per club.

They also share statistics on the cumulative totals of days lost and games missed to injuries, though these inevitably follow a similar pattern for most clubs. While there were some exceptions to these correlations, Liverpool didn’t provide one; the Reds were second best for days lost (764 versus the league average of 1073), third for games missed (88 versus 130 average).

Injury records sit somewhere between the axes of luck and judgement. How much is down to Slot, Peeters et. al can only ever be guessed. The Reds dropped their possession-adjusted pressures rate by just over eight per cent per game on 2023/24, suggesting a tactical choice may have helped maintain squad fitness.

But then contact injuries are a matter of bad luck. All a coaching team can do is minimise the likelihood of absenteeism to the best of their ability. The data suggests the current crew at Liverpool deserve serious credit.