The Cost of Aerial Duels

Liverpool have an elite aerial duels record in 2025/26 but the ones they lose are mattering more than those they win.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could solve football through data? If you could identify a metric or action which meant your team would win, you’d probably destroy the sport. At least you’d make a few quid first.

Attempts were made in the early days of statistics in football, most (in)famously by Damien Comolli at Liverpool. We have The Guardian’s Secret Footballer to thank for sharing this snippet of information in 2012.

“At Liverpool Comolli has relied more heavily on the so-called “Moneyball philosophy” (which, irritatingly, has also infiltrated my club), which argues, among other things, that a team that wins more than 40 headers, or crosses the ball more than 30 times or makes 12 regains in the final third, will nearly always win”.

If anything is irritating here, it’s the misuse of the term Moneyball. The misunderstanding between correlation and causation is not far behind. Comolli’s line of thinking led to a tactical blueprint of Stewart Downing crossing to Andy Carroll ad nauseum. The Reds of 2011 are still playing Swansea at Anfield in an alternate universe and it remains 0-0 to this day.

A look at the relationship between aerial duel win percentage and points-per-match shows there isn’t much of one. Why would there be? Southampton were fractionally better than the Reds in the air last season, for all the good it did them in the league table.

The Spearman rank correlation for this data is 0.451 on a scale that runs from 0 (no relationship) to 1 (perfectly correlated). If there is a finding that seems surprising, it’s that the figure is 0.355 for the Premier League versus 0.472 across France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

However, despite England’s reputation for being an aerial battle ground, it has tended to be the weaker teams that have leant on winning duels. Burnley own four of the top eight team campaigns for aerial wins per game since 2017/18, with Vincent Kompany nowhere to be seen.

There are 876 individual club seasons drawn from the big five leagues across the previous nine campaigns. If we sort them by aerial duel win percentage, we find the Liverpool of 2025/26 sat fourth.

That four of the top five (and eight of the leading 12) are from this season points towards an inevitable cooling off once more games are played. Even so, the fact the Reds are so highly placed doesn’t sit right against a key fact of their recent 2-1 loss at Selhurst Park:

Palace won two aerial duels in the Liverpool box across the whole match; at 96:57 and 96:58, to fashion the 13th big chance of the game which duly became its winning goal.

Are Liverpool good in the air or not? We need answers, damn it. Okay, I need answers. Given the importance he places on set plays, Arne Slot will be keen to find out too.

His first choice centre-backs are unquestionably strong in the air. Among players with at least 250 aerial duels won in the Premier League since 2021/22, Virgil van Dijk is top for win percentage (on 76.6) with Ibrahima Konaté (71.7) tucked in behind him. You can lower the barrier for entry to just 60 wins, you still won’t shift the number four from number one.

Virgil is also the only player in the top flight this season to have won every aerial duel when contesting at least eight in a match, as he did at Burnley. Yet it is Konaté who owns the division-wide record for this since 2017, as he once recorded a perfect 14 out of 14 against Sheffield United.

The Blades were blunt in the air that season, which probably helped. Statsbomb created a model for evaluating this called HOPS (Header Oriented Performance System); expected headers, essentially. It’s based on the probability of a player winning an aerial duel against an average opponent

While I can’t access that data, the locations of the duels that Ibou won against Sheffield United is notable. They’re all outside the box so would be unlikely to have proven costly had he been beaten. Either of Rio Ngumoha or Curtis Jones winning their duel in the Liverpool penalty area at Palace would have been far more valuable. Maybe even worth a point for the league table.

The match against the Eagles again shows the difference between a good record and the importance of the duels themselves. The Reds’ 66.7% success rate at Selhurst Park is the third best by any team in the first 60 matches of the 2025/26 Premier League season. Yet two they lost cost them the game.

It would be insightful to know how successful Liverpool have been in the air in their own penalty area and the one belonging to the opposition. If only someone around here was nerdy enough to research those statistics for a chart.

The Reds have been a little weaker in their own box than as a whole this season, though not by much. A concern is their score for aerial duels lost in Alisson’s penalty area versus those won in the other box is 14-9 from a cross count of 94-115 at the respective ends. Long throws are also a factor but data on them is hard to find.

Liverpool are at least more frequently productive when winning a duel in the box compared to their collective opponents. The Reds have produced five shots for 0.85 expected goals, having conceded seven for 0.81. The problem is that a sizeable chunk of this offence came via Konaté’s 0.49 xG chance at Turf Moor, with Slot’s side not yet scoring thanks to a box duel in the way they have conceded from one.

As they create more expected goals than they allow, the opposition’s duel-powered xG makes up a higher proportion of their total too. Cutting this out - if impossible to do entirely - would keep Liverpool’s defensive rate of expected goals per game broadly in line with last season.

This being football in 2025, it’s time to play the blame game. Who’s been letting the back line down more than anyone else in the Reds’ penalty area this season? It’s got to be Ibou. It has to be. He’s delivered error-strewn performance after gaffed-filled game.

Nope. It’s Virgil.

The skipper has lost four aerial duels in his own box so far this term. It’s one more than Milos Kerkez and, um, four more than Konaté. Context is required, as ever with data. Not one of the battles lost by van Dijk led to a shot. For three of them he was up against Dan Burn; it isn’t just Alexis Mac Allister who struggles against the Geordie giant.

And besides, maybe aerial stats aren’t worth worrying about anyway. It didn’t register as a duel when Kerkez was outmuscled by Bruno Guimarães when he scored a header against Liverpool. Nonetheless, winning more duels in their box would benefit the Reds, how ever you choose to measure it. Come on, Virgil, keep up.