The Madness of Liverpool's Season
Barely a Liverpool game goes by without something extraordinary happening, so here's a list of them for 2025/26.
Liverpool set an unwanted new record in their 2-1 defeat at Molineux. They conceded their fifth stoppage time winner of 2025/26, the most any club has allowed in a Premier League season.
Barely a game seems to go by without something unusual occurring. Sachin Nakrani and I have discussed this phenomenon on Bluesky in the past but with the Wolves game providing yet another crazy, record-setting ending, the time feels right to compile the moments of madness.
The Premier League will be the focus. There have been numerous examples in the cups though. Atlético Madrid scored two deflected goals to equalise when they’d created next to nothing. Hugo Ekitike was sent off against Southampton through his own stupidity. Galatasaray received the softest penalty you’re ever likely to see, before Virgil van Dijk conceded a stranger one via a needless handball in the disastrous PSV loss.
Perhaps the pinnacle was Dominik Szoboszlai backheeling the ball to a Barnsley player in the six-yard box in front of the Kop. The only surprise is that there hasn’t been an incident with a pigeon.
Some bizarro moments will have been missed, so feel free to leave a comment if you’re a paid subscriber or message me on Bluesky. This will need updating at the end of the season anyway. You can be sure of it.
Liverpool 4-2 Bournemouth
Having conceded two league goals to Opta-defined fastbreaks in 2024/25, the Reds allowed two in 12 minutes to throw away a 2-0 lead. They found time to win, with Mohamed Salah scoring the first of what would surely be another bucketful of goals this season. Ahem.
Newcastle 2-3 Liverpool
Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool allowed a single opposition goal when playing against 10 men during his tenure. That was half as many as the class of 2025/26 conceded in the second half of this match.
The latter of them at St James’ Park gave us our first OPLGOTSWAL of the campaign. That’s an ‘only Premier League goal of the season was against Liverpool’, netted by William Osula.
But wait. Who’s this to save the day? A 16-year-old with a 100th minute goal. Obviously.
Liverpool 1-0 Arsenal
This match was uneventful. A typical Mikel Arteta big game, you might say. Or at least it was until Szoboszlai scored what isn’t even his best direct free-kick goal this season. “August will be the least fluent month for [Liverpool’s] new look attack,” I wrote after the game. Nobody knows anything, least of all me.
Burnley 0-1 Liverpool
Liverpool had taken 26 shots without scoring. That’s an outcome that happens in a game roughly twice a Premier League season on average. To any team, not just to the Reds, no matter how it feels at times when they’re struggling.
They were then awarded a stoppage time penalty for handball, the most random of infringements in the box.
Liverpool 2-1 Everton
This might be the most normal game of the season. Everton failed to win at Anfield with fans, David Moyes failed to win away to any of the big six clubs. As textbook as 2025/26 has been at any point. We should have savoured the feeling.
Crystal Palace 1-2 Liverpool
First half bad, second half not so bad. The inversion of Sven-Göran Eriksson’s analysis of almost all of his England matches would become a running theme of Liverpool’s campaign.
Opta’s big chances are those opportunities where “a player should reasonably be expected to score”. Both teams missed five of them in this match. The score line could’ve been anything.
As it was, the Reds lost to a long throw-in after equalising late on. Oh, look, another running theme has been birthed. There’s mess everywhere.
Chelsea 2-1 Liverpool
Chelsea are four shy of having had the most big chances in the Premier League this season. They didn’t have any in this game until the 91st minute. Then they had another four minutes later which settled the game.
Earlier in the match, the Reds went behind to a Moisés Caicedo goal hit from 26 yards out. It was only the sixth time in league or Europe since 2017 that a strike from so far (or further) had put them 1-0 down.
Liverpool 1-2 Manchester United
Liverpool conceded the first shot they faced for the third league game in a row. The head injury suffered by Alexis Mac Allister in the build-up to it in this match sprinkled salt into the wound.
Purely in non-penalty expected goal terms, this was the Reds’ best attacking performance of the league season, with 2.75 xG. Yet they came away with nothing thanks to Harry Maguire walloping them with both his OPLGOTSWAL and his slabhead.
Brentford 3-2 Liverpool
This was relatively routine; Liverpool played badly, Liverpool lost. If there was a potential rarity, it was that the Reds conceded goals to a set piece, a counter attack and a penalty within the same game.
It also featured an amazing Salah finish that is destined to be forgotten as it was part of a defeat. Any such goal will struggle to top Daniel Sturridge in the 2016 Europa League final but there’s a couple of months of the season left so don’t count on it.
Liverpool 2-0 Aston Villa
Another fairly humdrum contest by the standards of 2025/26. That said, Salah was on a run of eight non-penalty big chances missed before Emiliano Martínez passed directly to him in the box while offering an open goal. The Reds have occasionally profited from the absurd this term.
Manchester City 3-0 Liverpool
Limiting Erling Haaland to one non-penalty shot sounds like a good day. It’s a shame when the effort in question bounces off his head into your goal, isn’t it?
If Haaland scoring feels an inevitability, to concede not one but two OPLGOTSWALs, both of which were from outside the box, seems deeply unusual.
Remember how everyone said Jérémy Doku had finally arrived as a serious goal threat after he scored in this game? Nah.
Liverpool 0-3 Nottingham Forest
A fourth Premier League defeat at Anfield by three goals, only the third with fans in the stands. This combined with the City defeat meant that Liverpool had lost both halves of consecutive league matches for the first time since English football was rebadged in 1992.
Maybe the weirdest thing was that the Reds started the match well. Honestly, rewatch the first half hour. But once Murillo opened the scoring with his OPLGOTSWAL, defeat felt inevitable.
West Ham 0-2 Liverpool
The great reset to a more boring controlled style of football delivered a routine win. Except that Lucas Paquetá talked his way off the pitch with two yellow cards for dissent following the award of a free-kick to Liverpool. Why did he do that?
The craziest thing? Paquetá wasn’t the player who committed the foul.
Liverpool 1-1 Sunderland
Chemsdine Talbi scored from further out than Caicedo had for Chelsea, aided by a deflection off van Dijk. Alisson Becker has only been beaten by two longer-range strikes in his Reds career.
While Liverpool battled back to earn a point, they would’ve lost had it not been for a late block by Federico Chiesa? Federico Chiesa. He’s a Kopite now.
Leeds 3-3 Liverpool
The Reds have had Premier League matches other than this one that featured six second half goals. Only one other was also 0-0 at half time though. It was a 4-2 Anfield win over Newcastle in 2024 in which they set the English top flight record for expected goals.
This was very much not that. A needless penalty and a goal in the 96th minute ensured what should have been three points became one.
Liverpool 2-0 Brighton
Liverpool scored within the opening 60 seconds of a game for the first time since Salah did so against Midtjylland in 2020. Stranger still, Ekitike added another goal from a corner. Aaron Briggs in?
Tottenham 1-2 Liverpool
Tottenham have been poor all season. Tottenham might yet be relegated. Tottenham collected two red cards in this match. Tottenham outshot Liverpool 15-8.
What, wait?
The trio of Ekitike, Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz linked up to fashion a goal for the first time to give the Reds the lead. However, the Swede suffered a bad injury in the process and hasn’t been seen on the field since.
Liverpool 2-1 Wolves
Two first half goals in the space of a minute had threatened to deliver a regulation win for Liverpool. And it was, really. It’s just that conceding in a corner situation makes everyone connected with the 2025/26 Reds nervy.
Liverpool 0-0 Leeds
Too boring a game to even recollect. It’s fair to categorise Ekitike turning the Reds’ highest value chance away from goal as a bit bloody odd though.
Fulham 2-2 Liverpool
A match defined by the king of the OPLGOTSWALs. Harrison Reed has played 27 Premier League minutes this season. He hasn’t started in the competition since May 2024 nor found the net in any game for three months shy of three years prior to this.
If you needed someone to score a 97th minute equaliser from 26 yards out to save your life, you’d obviously pick Reed, wouldn’t you? Marco Silva certainly did.
Arsenal 0-0 Liverpool
One of the better performances of the season given the context, this is remembered for Liverpool failing to have a shot on target in the league for the first time since March 2010. Nothing happens in an Arsenal match aside from corners if they can possibly help it, so what are you gonna do?
Liverpool 1-1 Burnley
One of the less obvious things that has thwarted the Reds this season compared with in 2024/25 is that they have had seven fewer penalties. Their two this term have both been against Burnley, weirdly, with Szoboszlai thumping the crossbar with one of them in this match.
There was much red ire unleashed after two points were dropped thanks to Marcus Edwards’ OPLGOTSWAL. Liverpool still had more than enough chances to win, though. Equally, their 57 non-penalty shots against Burnley this season produced a solitary goal. Bleurgh.
Bournemouth 2-3 Liverpool
An excellent midweek victory at Marseille was followed by defeat to a team that had won just once in their previous 13 league games.
As against Palace, Chelsea and United, the Reds equalised in the second half only to then lose. The winner didn’t match Richarlison’s goal for Tottenham in the sense of the sequence featuring four opposition shots, but there were three in the mayhem in this instance.
And as often when Liverpool have been beaten this season, we had a OPLGOTSWAL. Álex Jiménez did the honours, albeit without using his rare goal to score the winner for once.
Liverpool 4-1 Newcastle
Ibrahima Konaté scored in the match in which he returned to action following the death of his father. He cried, we cried. Nothing else matters.
Liverpool 1-2 Manchester City
Manchester City hadn’t won at a full Anfield for over two decades. With 83 minutes and ‘1-0 Liverpool’ showing on the score board, they didn’t look likely to end that run here either.
Cue a Bernardo Silva OPLGOTSWAL before Haaland scored the latest opposition winner at Anfield since Shane Long in the League Cup semi-final of 2017. I knew the Nordic meat shield was good, but Shane Long good?
There was also time for another goal that was disallowed thanks to a red card offence by Szoboszlai. Nobody on either side was happy with that outcome.
Sunderland 0-1 Liverpool
A dominant performance against a newly-promoted team that hadn’t lost at home all season. It shouldn’t feel weird for Liverpool to do this, yet in 2025/26 it does.
Nottingham Forest 0-1 Liverpool
The Reds ran the scale from delivering their poorest half of the campaign to scoring a 97th minute winner. The echoes of the match at the City Ground two years earlier were clear. The only difference was Alexis Mac Allister scoring rather than assisting the decisive goal.
Liverpool 5-2 West Ham
Liverpool had been so bad with set pieces this season that they had to fire the coach responsible for them. Their uptick since then has been somewhat oversold in that some of the set play goals came via direct free-kicks or short throw-ins.
Nonetheless, in this game the Reds became only the second team to ever score three corner goals in the first half of a Premier League match. Football is so, so random.
Wolves 2-1 Liverpool
Some would argue that Liverpool deserved to lose after Szoboszlai unveiled a new cornrow hairstyle. Red eyes would later be even more offended by what unfolded.
After 77 minutes, the shot count read 13-0 in favour of the visitors. Wolves were only level thanks to Cody Gakpo clearing what had looked a certain Liverpool goal early in the second half.
The shot margin had increased further by full time. The problem was that Wolves had joined the short list of sides to score twice against the Reds when having no more than four shots.
One-time reported Liverpool target André scored his first goal for Wolves in the 94th minute to claim the three points. It was therefore the 10th OPLGOTSWAL conceded in 2025/26.
Where 12.4 per cent of Premier League goals have been bagged by one-goal men, 25.6 per cent of the 39 scored against the Reds fit this bill. Double the league average and then some.
It shouldn’t be possible, should it?
Perhaps much of this madness was inevitable. History suggests as much. Whenever Liverpool have finished first or second in the Premier League they have - with one brilliant exception in 2019/20 - tumbled down the table the following year. A lot has to go right for them to fly so high, so regression feels hard to escape.
It may also be years before we learn the full extent of the toll that Diogo Jota’s death has taken on the squad and Arne Slot, if we ever find out. They are repeatedly accused of being mentally weak, but wouldn’t you be?
Whatever the cause, a lot of unlikely events have occurred in Liverpool matches this season. Some for good, far more for bad. They’ve flown far too close to the margins far too often, leaving results open to chance. It just feels like they’ve also been bitten far more times than feels reasonable.
So... what have I missed?