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.