Liverpool's Big Big Chance Hole

Just when you thought the statistical oddities of Liverpool's 2025/26 season had dried up, here comes another.

As the ball came back to Giorgi Mamardashvili, he was closer to the centre circle than his penalty area. With an opponent closing in, he had to launch the ball forward.

It would have been executed more in hope than in expectation. The ball reached a defender, maybe 10 yards in front of his penalty box. Under no pressure, he headed it back to his goalkeeper.

Hang on a second. Who’s this appearing out of the shadow that covers half of the pitch, like a miscreant emerging from a dark alley? It’s Milos Kerkez, on hand to hit the ball first time over the stranded goalkeeper into an unguarded Brighton net. 1-1, game on.

It should have been but was not. The Hungarian left-back’s instinctive brilliance was the only Opta-defined big chance Liverpool had in their 2-1 loss at the Amex Stadium last weekend. No shot they created thereafter was worth more than 0.08 expected goals, falling shy of even the average quality mark of 0.10.

The Reds’ standard for producing big chances depends on the context you apply. Their total of 82 in the Premier League is only seven shy of Arsenal, 13 behind joint-leaders Chelsea and Manchester City. They’ve not been a chasm adrift of the best in class across 31 matches.

Their current rate per game suggests Liverpool will finish with 101. That looks less impressive once you realise they had at least 125 in each of the last four seasons. More worryingly for Arne Slot, their peak for this period was 150 in his first campaign. Essentially a third of that tally has vanished one year on.

The Kerkez Opportunity is not only a good name for a Frederick Forsyth novel, it’s also emblematic of a problem that has dogged the Reds all season. Their conversion rate is poor but the former Bournemouth defender was able to brilliantly put his opportunity away. It’s another aspect of big chance shooting that has been downright odd for Liverpool this season.

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Like any standard of chance, those deemed to be ‘big’ by Opta can come about in all manner of ways. An opponent may make an error, as Lewis Dunk did last weekend. A deflection on an attempted pass may fall kindly, as could a shot rebound off the goalkeeper or woodwork. Penalties are determined by thought processes of a referee as much as anything else. Randomness is everywhere.

The mark of a strong team is an ability to create (big) chances through their own brilliance. An incisive passing move, a perfectly delivered set piece, a counter attack that covers the pitch within a few seconds.

In this sense, the Liverpool of 2025/26 have done well. They have directly created 79.4 per cent of their Premier League big chances (in terms of one player passing to another for a shot), an increase of 4.6 per cent on last season and 5.4 above league average.

Their volume issue is likely a result of multiple new signings needing time to forge relationships. Low blocks combined with a relative inability to turn final third recoveries into shots hasn’t helped either. But despite the way in which their best opportunity came about in their previous match, the Reds haven’t leant on luck too heavily to produce their big chances.

Which is a pity. It’s their golden opportunities that have come along through a degree of good fortune that have proven far easier to convert than those which have been created by two players in the statistical sense.

That a gap of this nature exists isn’t that strange, as it also occurred for Liverpool in four of the previous seven seasons. Their conversion rate for created big chances wasn’t as low in any of them as it is in 2025/26 though.

While the Kerkez goal served as a timely introduction to this concept, the initial idea came around after Mohamed Salah scored at Wolves in the FA Cup. The soon-to-be-former Liverpool forward steered Andy Robertson’s cross into the goal at very close range, three days after he pounced on an opposition error to score at the same end of the ground.

Salah has long been good at exploiting defensive blunders, calmly slotting home earlier this season after Emiliano Martínez mysteriously passed to him in the Anfield Road end penalty box. He had squandered his previous eight big chances, all of which had been laid on by teammates, then went on to miss another five such shots before Jean-Ricner Bellegarde served him the ball at Molineux.

Liverpool’s number 11 was then delivered three big chances by the combined efforts of Hugo Ekitike (two) and Florian Wirtz against Galatasaray. They were all missed, Salah seemingly preferring to wait until he could unleash a trademark curling strike to add his name to the scoresheet. Who needs an easy opening when you have the skill to do that?

It means that chances fashioned by teammates that were collectively worth 5.4 xG have led to just two goals for the 33-year-old. Bear in mind that nobody else is more than 0.6 above or below par, with 3.4 of the team’s four-goal underachievement resting solely with Salah.

Seven of his misses occurred in defeats to Crystal Palace, Chelsea, Brentford, Bournemouth and both Manchester clubs. The campaign could have been quite different had even a few of these shots gone in.

Salah has never been the most efficient finisher. Even so, the former Roma man scored 10 times from 10.4 expected goals-worth of big chances that his colleagues provided last season. What has occurred this term is an aberration that will colour how Salah’s final season in red will be viewed. It hasn’t helped Slot’s job prospects either.

Another Dutchman whose reputation has been hindered by Liverpool’s big chance conversion rate is Cody Gakpo. He has created five of them worth a total of 1.08 xG for Ekitike, three (0.86) for Salah and seven (2.43) for the combined talents of Conor Bradley, Alexander Isak, Curtis Jones, Ibrahima Konaté, Dominik Szoboszlai and Florian Wirtz. His reward? Zero assists.

Only countryman Virgil van Dijk has converted a big chance that Gakpo has set up in 2025/26. Fellow Netherlands international Jeremie Frimpong has been unfortunate in respect of his highest value key passes being converted too.

When the season is over, I’ll have to review the various newsletters that could be categorised as suggesting that ‘well, Liverpool haven’t been very good but this statistical anomaly is weird’, as this article belongs on the pile. On such margins can a stuttering team score a few goals, win a few extra points, generate confidence. The direction of a season can hinge on these moments.

The hope for the remaining 10+ games has to be that clarity regarding his future will help Salah play with freedom. He will want to sign off in style too. The veteran won’t want to end his Liverpool career with big chance xG having gone to waste.