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.