It's The Attack, Stupid

Not the economy. Liverpool's expected goal difference has declined since 2024/25. No shock there but the attack being more to blame than the defence is a surprise.

Liverpool have had the hardest fixtures of any team in the Premier League this season, at least according to the table. It’s reasonable to assume that they should improve over the next two months, with nine reasonable looking league fixtures before they travel to Arsenal.

This was the subject of the previous edition of this newsletter. The article noted that the Reds have taken six points fewer than they earned from the corresponding fixtures last season. As they gained two against the Gunners, they’re eight points down if we disregard the dead rubber games after the title was won.

As bad as that sounds, the expected goal difference has only gone down by 3.4, or 0.31 per game. Those figures drop to 2.6 and 0.24 if we exclude penalties, as Liverpool have conceded an extra one this term. You probably assume the drop off in performance has been worse, or that a dip of such relatively small size wouldn’t make as much difference to the results as it has.

While the Reds’ results are likely to improve in the next few weeks, it will be hard for them to better the corresponding numbers, underlying or actual. The forthcoming run includes trips to Tottenham and West Ham, a pair of fixtures in which Liverpool scored 11 goals with two of the 11 best xG difference performances by away teams in the 2024/25 Premier League. Most Kopites would be happy with 1-0 victories this time around, thank you very much.

To win those games will not be easy. Thomas Frank and Nuno Espírito Santo will be plotting long-ball, aerial assaults upon the Liverpool back line having seen the difficulty such tactics have given the Reds. Uh-oh, Arne.

Are you having nightmares already? Nobody would blame you if you were. Except for one thing: Liverpool’s defence has improved on expected goals against the corresponding fixtures. The drop in the xG difference is explained entirely by the attack. We’d better dig into this, it can’t be right.

To keep things fair, penalties will be excluded from here onward. The slight worsening of the Reds’ defending on the road has been overpowered in the numbers thanks to improvement at Anfield. The problem is that Liverpool’s own expected goals have decreased everywhere to more than outweigh any change at that back end.

It’s worth reiterating here that only around 40-50 per cent of results repeat from one season to the next. That’s at the basic level of home win, away win, draw too, never mind scorelines. It would not be realistic to expect the underlying expected goal statistics to match too closely.

There has also been turnover and tragedy at the club. An attacking unit undergoing this level of change is almost destined to fail early on. Liverpool needed a little luck with the fixture computer that they didn’t get. Being able to host a few bottom half teams who aren’t from the same city as Anfield - current count: 0 - would have helped confidence and cohesion bloom.

It was not to be. Here’s how the non-penalty xG has changed against the same fixtures last season.

There are several notable takeaways here. The matches with Newcastle, Arsenal and Aston Villa saw Liverpool and their opponents both lose very similar figures on their expected goals. The chaos calmed down, even though 2025/26 has felt more frantic overall.

In only two matches did the Reds improve at both ends, with one not really counting as Burnley replaced Ipswich. As Chelsea away was a dead rubber last season and Liverpool played like it, one could argue that this seasons improvement at Stamford Bridge should not count either.

Then there is the Reds’ recent loss at Manchester City, a statistically similar encounter to last season except that it swung from 2-0 to 0-3. The less said about Crystal Palace and Brentford the happier we’ll all be.

As bad as those matches were, they were the only two in which the Liverpool defence allowed over 0.6 non-penalty xG more than they did in the corresponding fixture. The attack has dipped past that benchmark on five occasions.

Why has that happened? It’s hard to say using numbers. The Reds’ attack has taken 26 fewer shots than in the same 11 fixtures last term, but the Brentford match accounts for 19 of them. It accounts for 26 of the 57 touches in opposition penalty boxes that have disappeared too.

The numbers aren’t all bad. Passes (eight) and open play crosses (11) into the box have collectively risen by 19 on last season. One possible cause of the attacking downfall rests with carries into the box. They have fallen by over twice as much in percentage terms as touches in the penalty area and shots.

That stands to reason; a player who dribbles with the ball across the white lines will do something once they’re in the box. Maybe they’ll shoot or create a chance for a teammate.

Cody Gakpo’s rate for carries into the box per 90 minutes is consistent between this season and its corresponding fixtures from 2024/25. However, Mohamed Salah’s has almost halved (1.7 versus 3.1), while the rest of the top five with a decent sample of playing time - Luis Díaz (3.1), Diogo Jota (1.6) and Darwin Núñez (1.3) - no longer contribute.

Gakpo and Salah aside, no player with more than 86 minutes on the pitch this term has an average to match those three men that have been lost. Picking up this pace might solve quite a few problems, from the overall attacking level of the team through to Florian Wirtz’s lack of output.

The difference in how the two games at Brentford played out perhaps indirectly explains everything here. Liverpool spent the match last season giving everything to find an opening goal, which eventually came in stoppage time. Last month, they were a goal down inside five minutes, most of which time had been spent drying the ball.

The defence often looks better on a spreadsheet because once the team goes a goal down there is less impetus for the opposition to attack. The pressure lessens. Even if the Liverpool frontline can no longer play with the freedom of knowing there’s a rock-solid backline behind them, you would still expect them to generate shots at a decent rate as more results need to be chased.

It isn’t really happening though. Dribble, boys. Fly like the wind. Carry the ball into the box more often to see where it takes you. It should be somewhere good.