Myths #3: Hodgson's Liverpool Record Compares Closely To Dalglish's

I have recently been reading tweets that suggest that Kenny Dalglish has barely improved on Roy Hodgson's record for Liverpool, despite having a lot more money to play with.

MoosaMUFC14 pointed out: "LFC under Dalglish (PL, FA and EL): Played 33, won 16, drawn 9, lost 8. Hodgson: Played 29, won 13, drawn 8, lost 8."

Whilst DylanMUFC14 (I assume they must be teenage brothers) said: "Dalglish has improved #LFC's League, FA Cup & European results by just 6.8% on the Roy Hodgson era,despite spending £91.85m more.."

Blimey, and I thought Dalglish had been doing a much better job than Hodgson. How wrong I was.

Or was I?

For starters, it seems a little unfair to compare their records in all competitions, doesn't it? Hodgson's one domestic cup tie was at home against Northampton Town of League Two; Dalglish had to start away at Old Trafford, and has still yet to have a home cup tie (even if the standard of opposition has been kinder since that match with Manchester United).

Also, Roy had the virtue of managing Liverpool through the qualifiers and group stage of the much maligned Europa League. Four of his thirteen wins (or 31% of them) came against FK Rabotnicki and Trabzonspor for pity's sake.

The only fair way to compare their records, to my mind at least, is to look at their points-per-game figures in the league for their spells in the managerial hotseat at Anfield:

Dalglish is a long way ahead, who would have thought it? Certainly not the people who take great joy in tweeting stats without a hint of context.

To illustrate how far Dalglish is ahead, he would still have a better points-per-game average than Hodgson finished with even if Liverpool lost their next twelve games in a row! Roy's Liverpool record of 1.25 points-per-game (25 points from 25 league games) was simply never going to be good enough.

By all means debate if Kenny has made the most of the money he has spent, or if he has the team playing better football than Roy did, but to try and suggest their records are comparable is way off the mark.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to start tweeting these facts...

Update 21st November 2011 - unfortunately the distorted statistics for Hodgson and Dalglish have now entered the mainstream media; James Lawton of The Independent wrote a piece on the 19th November using statistics to try and show that the gulf between the two men's records isn't that much, even though the figures he used to support his argument showed that it is. Not Lawton's smartest move. Read more analysis of his poor article in this free piece on The Tomkins Times.

You may also be interested to know that following Liverpool's fine win at Chelsea, Dalglish would now have to lose fourteen league games in a row to lower himself to Hodgson's points-per-game average. Hardly anything in it, eh Mr Lawton?

Please take a look at my other articles, a list of which can be found here. Update 01/05/12: Now that he has been appointed as England manager, I have also compared Roy's record to his predecessors here.