Liverpool are Premier League Champions. When did you know?

Arne Slot, his players and Liverpool fans have been asked when they knew the Reds would win the Premier League this season. They should've known months ago.

Apr 28, 2025

Liverpool are Premier League champions for 2024/25. When did you know?

You knew officially at about 6:24pm UK time on Sunday. When Cody Gakpo put the Reds 3-1 up against Tottenham just after 5pm the title looked very much in the bag.

But Liverpool winning the league has been firmly on the cards for weeks. Months, even. You can’t only sing “and now you’re gonna believe us” when you’re 3-1 up, needing only a point to seal it. When did you know, deep in your heart, that they were going to get over the line?

Maybe you thought they’d do it before the season began. I didn’t. My pick of Arsenal was a relatively common one. Eleven of the 30 pundits asked by the BBC ahead of the campaign opted for the Gunners, with the other 19 selecting Manchester City. The prediction by the fabled Opta supercomputer was a third place finish with 74 points for new head coach Arne Slot.

Subscribers will have seen the Predicted Final Points chart I update on my Liverpool Data page. Having started it mid-season (much like this newsletter), it’s interesting to see what the forecast would’ve been in August using the xG data from 2023/24. I’ve used the promoted teams’ numbers from this season as it makes little difference now that they’re heading back down.

Look at Manchester United; seventh bottom here yet on track to finish with four points fewer than even this damning forecast gave them. Notable movers include Tottenham falling away badly, unlike Nottingham Forest, who are overachieving against this prediction. Once we start feeding in data from this season, the standings begin to take a more recognisable shape.

Matchweek 10 is a good point to have a check-in. It was during this weekend that Liverpool went top (thanks to a 2-1 comeback victory against Brighton), never to relinquish the lead again. With every team having played five games at home and away, we’re also getting a good feel for how good or bad they are. Here’s our new predicted final tallies.

The Reds were now favourites. Their margin over City in the actual table was just two points, with the teams having not yet met. The defending champions suffered their first defeat of the season in their 10th game, going down 2-1 at Bournemouth.

Everyone would have assumed it was a blip. City will recover to win near enough every game in the second half of the season, right? As natural an assumption as that would have been, some wounds were already there, bleeding into the data.

Losing the expected goal count by a relatively small margin at Chelsea and Newcastle wasn’t that unusual, but going down 2.6 to 1.6 on xG against Fulham at the Etihad (when they won 2-1) absolutely was. If not quite foreshadowing their complete collapse, it showed they were not the force of old.

It was around this time that Liverpool’s credentials were dismissed as they had not played many strong teams. They promptly won their next five games in all competitions, a run which included an 8-0 aggregate against the reigning champions from Germany, Spain and England.

Our next checkpoint for assessment is following the 6-3 win at Tottenham, the 16th league match of the campaign for Liverpool (who were one behind due to the postponement of the Merseyside derby). Their form was looking very ominous for the competition.

It was at this point I put my cards on the table, writing the following in a post-match analysis for The Tomkins Times:

“This team is going to win the title. The gap to the competition might not confirm that but this performance (combined with the Fulham game) does. There are too many players playing too well for them not to. They could get a little worse, points-per-game wise, and hit 90 whereas everyone else has to go at 100-point pace to hit that mark.”

I discussed the title race with Josh Williams on his Distance Covered podcast the following day. The Reds only had a four point lead, plus a game in hand, yet he suggested Liverpool were going to win the league. I was happy to agree, thanks to the simple maths of the equation as hinted at above. Here’s what I said in reply to Josh:

“If we assume 90 points is what it takes to win the title, Man City can now only do that by winning every single remaining game, which they're simply not going to do, obviously.”*
“There's no way that's going to happen with the way that they're playing. If we use that as a target… Liverpool can still afford to drop 15 points and they'll hit 90. For Chelsea, they've only got eight to play with. Arsenal, they've got only six.”
*There were people who said they would. There probably still are.

Everyone loves being seen to be correct on the internet, with bad takes quietly forgotten. Keep your receipts, delete the junk. Getting in first with a shout which proves accurate down the line is never a bad thing either.

So, welcome to a very smug conclusion to this article. Not really. There’s no Golden Cleric award speech coming your way.

Two months after the win at Tottenham, my broad prediction regarding realistic points totals had come to pass though. The Reds won at Manchester City after Arsenal had lost to West Ham the previous day. With 12 matchweeks remaining, Liverpool were the only team who could reach 90 points.

With four to go, they still could.

This was the state of play in mid February. However, people were firmly on board with the idea of Liverpool winning the league the month before, even though the gap to Arsenal was only six points (from one fewer match played):

The above estimate for when Liverpool would win the league was posted three months ago yet proved to be just one week out. Predicting the future will never be spot on, whether that’s with 10,000 simulations of every match or a much simpler system using expected goals.

But the question remains: when did you know Liverpool would win the league? The chances are that the data ‘knew’ sooner.