Turning The Signal From Green To Red

And with you, I can see a traffic jam. Straight up ahead.

The previous edition of this newsletter concerned Arne Slot’s bed habits. He pulled his Liverpool blanket up over his head to keep it warm when the cold air around the club was threatening to plunge 2025/26 into ice. Tightening up the Reds’ defence has come at the cost of fluency going forward but after three consecutive heavy defeats, what realistic choice did Slot have?

As discussed in the above article, Liverpool have a much better record this season in low event games - those where the combined non-penalty expected goals is less than two. The games that have got out of hand have tended to remain tantalising out of reach.

Think about the start of the season, the games with Bournemouth and Newcastle. The Reds only needed late winners after they had thrown away two-goal leads. Dialling down the chaos after reaching that point would’ve likely saved a lot of hassle. If easier said than done in the maelstrom of a match, Liverpool are at least now showing that the current crop can limit the chances of their opponents.

And from there, they have a platform on which to build. It will be fascinating to see how the match with Brighton unfolds on Saturday. Their visits to Anfield in recent years have been wild. The Reds came from behind to win the previous two clashes 2-1, after each side threw away a 2-0 lead to draw in the two encounters prior to that.

A similar match is the last thing Liverpool need, before we get to whether Mohamed Salah starts, plays, remains on the bench throughout or sits with his family in a box. The eyes of the world - except the UK - will be on Anfield at 3pm.

In trying to figure out how the Reds have started to restrict opposing teams from causing so much havoc, I inadvertently created a traffic system of sorts using FBRef’s passing data.

The first stage is ‘xA - Expected Assists’. These are defined as follows: “The likelihood each completed pass becomes a goal assist given the pass type, phase of play, location and distance.” In simple terms, it’s a pass value model.

While a team would want to prevent their opponents compiling a big figure here, it’s the cost of doing business. The opposition are going to move the ball up field to try to score at various points in any match. This figure is green in the traffic light as it is fine in a broad sense for this to happen. Inescapable too.

We then have orange, passes which create chances (‘xAG: Expected Assisted Goals’). This is the total of “xG which follows a pass that assists a shot”, so is more important to stop. Once these rise up for the other team then your side is in danger, if not quite chuckling about it like Ralph Wiggum.

Until they become assists, our red light. Goal conceded, damage inflicted. Billy Ocean had it right years ago. These numbers don’t automatically shrink as each step grows more costly despite the three stages flowing in a logical order. Looking at the defensive traffic lights for the 2025/26 Premier League shows why Liverpool have been stuck in a jam though.

Here are the figures. Watch how the Reds veer from cruising along nicely to being in all sorts of trouble as the traffic light changes.

Liverpool are allowing the second least xA behind Arsenal. The Gunners have been throttling matches all season, there’s no point in expecting the Reds of 2025/26 to match them.

Only three teams have a lower xAG than xA, so in that sense it isn’t odd to see that the former number is the higher of the two for Slot’s men. However, only three other teams have seen it grow by more than Liverpool, with only Chelsea seeing it increase by a larger proportion.

The Blues have an advantage as they have allowed fewer assists than expected goals from passes, unlike the Reds. As much as luck plays a part there, Liverpool are ahead of just four teams for assists conceded this season, with three of those clubs currently sat in the bottom five of the league table.

By allowing their opposition xA of 8.9 to become 16 assists, Liverpool have seen the first figure grow by 79.8 per cent. This isn’t just bad in the context of the Premier League average since the summer of 2018 being 11.5 per cent, this is at least 22.4 per cent worse than any other side in the 180-team sample for this period.

The Marks and Spencer of calamitous defending is wearing Standard Chartered on its chest. Liverpool’s 2020/21 vintage are one of the five worst for this in a completed campaign, at 50.3 per cent, Finding a parallel between that season and the present one is hardly surprising given how both unfolded.

This may be the wrong way to assess the issue. Assists are a flaky, unreliable, somewhat random metric defined by finishing and goalkeeping. The gap from xA to xAG is more telling as it shows if you’re allowing more expected goals via passing than you should be.

This feels a better fit for the Liverpool of 2025/26 as they remain bad, just not the worst by a country mile. Their growth of 34.8 per cent on xA is not quite as terrible as what they delivered in 2022/23 (37.0) or two seasons prior (40.4). The defensive process hasn’t been consistently horrendous this term, just far too susceptible to ghastly mistakes.

They still have time to turn it around too. The last four matches in league and Europe all saw no more than 0.6 xA, a maximum of 0.5 xAG. In none of these games was the opposition’s average chance created worth more than 0.06 expected goals. Maintaining these three numbers at those low levels will keep Liverpool’s light turned green as we head into Christmas.