The Hole in Liverpool's Corners
Liverpool have started scoring from corners in the Premier League. A post-Briggs shift or random chance?
An uncomfortable truth for those that wish to see Arne Slot sacked by Liverpool is that his side have the best open play expected goal difference in both the Premier League and Champions League. A data-driven organisation is unlikely to dispense with a coach that has delivered that.
Leaving aside the uncontrollable factor that their penalty difference is -2 in the league when it was +7 last season, the real issue in 2025/26 has been with set pieces. The Reds haven’t scored enough while paying a heavy price for the 14 they’ve conceded in the league.
Someone else who paid a toll for this failure was Aaron Briggs. The set play coach was dismissed at the end of last year, with Liverpool’s dead ball goal record improving in the aftermath.
This was highlighted by Sky Sports after a Mohamed Salah corner enabled Virgil van Dijk to score the only goal of the Reds’ win at Sunderland. Their central point was that Liverpool have used in-swinging deliveries far more often in recent weeks.
The implication is that this explains the upturn in output. Yet the Reds have been incredibly streaky with their set play goals under Slot.
After scoring nine times via set piece situations in their first 49 matches in all competitions in 2024/25, Liverpool then netted in six games in a row. They recently repeated that in the sextet of matches prior to the FA Cup victory over Brighton, after scoring eight times in the opening 32 matches of this season.
It’s also dangerous to assume that in-swinging corners are automatically better. Just 18.5 per cent of the Reds’ deliveries went that way in 2021/22 when they netted 15 goals from corners, the joint-most of any side in the Premier League in the preceding eight campaigns.
The demise of FBRef’s detailed data makes their recent improvement harder to analyse. We can still dig around in Liverpool’s corner numbers on Understat. Briggs will be interested to see if the uptick in goals has been reflected in the underlying statistics.
