The Trent Alexander-Arnold Trait that Arne Slot Will Not Miss

The Premier League champion Liverpool side are one of the best attacking sides of the advanced data era, thanks to tweaks Arne Slot has made.

Are you familiar with Montpellier’s attacking midfielder Téji Savanier? Probably not, but you will be soon.

Football is an exercise in counting. Goals, most importantly, with shots next in line. A team can’t have improved by taking fewer shots, can they? They can if they do it the Arne Slot way.

Liverpool had shots by the bucketload last season. They took 20.6 per match, the most any team has registered in the last nine years in the big leagues. Some of that was down to going behind more times than is ideal - e.g. lots - but there was no questioning their ability to generate chances no matter the game state.

Slot has dialled things back. His Reds average 17.1, a shot volume dip of 17 per cent on his predecessor’s final campaign. With one game to go, the two iterations of Liverpool are only one league goal apart, despite the champions firing off 156 attempts fewer than the side of 2023/24.

The key? Patience. The Reds’ average shot distance was 17.2 yards from goal last term, their second furthest in the previous seven seasons.

It’s down to 16.0 this season, the club’s new nearest mark since Mohamed Salah joined the club. If you strip out penalties, only a handful of big league sides in the advanced data era have averaged so many shots from so close. Setting a bar of generating two non-penalty expected goals per game drops the sample to just three, with Slot’s side part of the elite club.

The outcome of this shift towards focussing on chance quality after the shot volume barrage of last term was hinted at in an Opta Analyst article earlier in the spring:

“That brings us back to Liverpool, who actually have the third-lowest percentage of non-penalty goals from outside the box, while just four of their 60 non-pen goals have come from beyond the area (6%). Their 56 non-pen goals from inside the area are at least 14 more than any other team.”

Those trends have largely held as more games have poured into the sample. Alexis Mac Allister added long range strikes against Fulham and Tottenham to slightly lift the proportion of outside the penalty area goals, with the Reds remaining 13 ahead of the pack for non-penalty goals from within the box.

As they have had at least two shots per game more in the area than any other team in the 2024/25 Premier League, their goal advantage there is almost inevitable. Liverpool will end the campaign among the top five teams for box shots over the last 16 seasons.

This is where Trent Alexander-Arnold comes in. Or, rather, goes out.

The Opta shots article made reference to the soon-to-be-former Reds right-back, noting at the time that his “36 shots at goal in England’s top flight this season have been from an average distance of 20.8m (22.7yds).”

The situation has not improved in the weeks since, with his eight additional efforts pushing his distance average out to 23.4 yards, per FBRef. While it’s not easy to establish if there were better options available when efforts were hit (though PFF FC try to do this), it’s reasonable to assume there often were. Alexander-Arnold’s Opta shot map is littered with barely visible dots, with a solitary long-range goal courtesy of a deflected effort at West Ham.

Slot is a pragmatist, not a zealot. He won’t clamp down entirely on shooting from distance as it’s important for a side to have variety in how they attack.

The Liverpool head coach mentioned encouraging Dominik Szoboszlai to shoot more after he scored in the defeat at Brighton. Even though the player later admitted his goal was an attempted cross, Slot was keen to talk him up:

“I definitely feel Dom meant to shoot that ball on target because he has a great shot and we ask him, 'Use it more, use it more, use it more' because in training sessions he scores from every angle. But if he is playing he is always looking where is Mo, which is not always a bad idea because Mo can score a goal as well.”

He certainly can, even if he failed to at the Amex. Per Understat’s database, Salah’s second half miss entered the top five off target Liverpool shots by expected goal value during his time with the club. The 32-year-old fired off six attempts in the match, all of them from no more than 16 yards out and an average of 11.7.

Salah’s shots per 90 minutes rate has never been lower for the Reds, yet his shots have never been closer either. This trade off means his chance quality was last higher in his debut campaign.

Some players have more shots while others take them from closer to goal. Very few can outdo the Salah of 2024/25 for both. Nobody in the Premier League has managed to across the previous eight years, with most men who have done so on the continent being Robert Lewandowski at Bayern Munich.

We obviously cannot measure Alexander-Arnold in the same way. Instead, we must look to the opposite end of the chart. Who are the players who shoor regularly from a long way out?

Trent is at least letting fly slightly closer to goal than in any of the previous four seasons. But if we set his 2024/25 stats of 44 shots from an average of at least 23.4 yards as qualifying benchmarks, only Téji Savanier has had more such campaigns since 2017/18.

Trent Alexander is not the only Arnold afflicted in this way

The names on the list are not surprising. When fans would urge Rúben Neves to shoot from a different postcode thanks to the occasional rocket he would deliver, nerds would question what the hell he was doing.

The below shot covers the 10 Liverpool players with at least 30 shots in the two main competitions this term, showing the proportion of their efforts at goal which came past different distance markers.

Alexander-Arnold is an outlier. He takes more of his shots from at least 24 yards than Szoboszlai does beyond 18. The odds are significantly stacked in favour of the defending team at either distance.

Based on the shots Liverpool have taken this season, one from at least 19 yards out carries an average value of just 0.04 xG. That drops to 0.03 when you go past 23 yards, and 0.02 once you hit 29 and beyond.

Slot might be encouraging to Szoboszlai to shoot but his choice of when to do so is better. Whatever value is lost following Alexander-Arnold’s departure - there will be plenty - the Liverpool head coach is unlikely to miss this aspect of his game.