You Can't Spell Arne Slot without elo
Liverpool are the best team in the world according to Opta and ClubElo. Arne Slot is the best football coach in the world too, at least by one statistical measure.
Yes, Liverpool have started well, but let’s reserve judgment until they’ve faced the top teams.
Words to that effect were the preserve of pundits and rival fans in the early weeks of 2024/25. They’re now a joke shared by Liverpool supporters every time they see their team top of the leagues, Premier and Champions.
Even by the remarkable standards of this season - 18 wins from 20 games - the Reds have had an incredible week. They delivered a pair of 2-0 wins against past nemeses, with the score lines flattering the defending champions of Spain and England respectively.
Adding the recent victories over Bayer Leverkusen and Aston Villa means that Liverpool have won their last four games against Champions League-qualified teams by an aggregate score line of 10-0.
The triumph against Real Madrid took the Reds to the top of Opta’s Power Rankings, crowning them as the best side in the world. They have played 12 matches against other clubs in the current top 40, winning 11. The 2-2 draw at Arsenal gives them 34 points from a possible 36 against this elite bracket of opponent. Liverpool will travel to two more such sides before Christmas, so let’s reserve judgment until they’ve faced the top teams, eh?
By beating Manchester City, the Reds overtook them to ascend to first place in the ClubElo ranking system too. A full explanation of their methodology is available, but essentially teams win or lose points from each other when they play, with opposition strength taken into account. The advantage it holds over Opta is that it stretches back to before the dawn of the European Cup. If you want to rate the Liverpool of today against their predecessors from before even Bill Shankly arrived at Anfield, you can do it.
According to this model, the Reds of Arne Slot are about as good as anything which occurred at the club prior to Jürgen Klopp making them champions of everywhere five years ago. Another advantage of using ClubElo is that you can also check the history of managers. Slot’s record makes for very interesting reading when stacked up against his contemporaries.
Pep Guardiola unsurprisingly leads the table of active coaches (where ‘active’ is defined as having worked in the last four years), with a ClubElo rating of 2,181. He is followed by Antonio Conte (2,104) and Klopp (2,069), with Slot in 15th (1,934). The Liverpool head coach stands 10th among those currently employed in management.
It is interesting to reflect on the first time I took a detailed look at the coach rankings. Back in March, about a month after Klopp had announced he was resigning at the end of the season, I wanted to see how Xabi Alonso rated. His impressive campaign with Bayer Leverkusen combined with his history at Liverpool inevitably made him the favourite with bookmakers and fans to take over at Anfield in the summer.
Alonso was ranked 178th at that point. Had I bothered to look closer at the higher end of the table, I would have seen Rúben Amorim at 29th. Lest we forget, he might now be Manchester United manager, but he was hotly linked with the Reds once Alonso announced he was staying put in Germany. Two places above him was Slot.
Even though I only had eyes for Xabi at that point - he is very handsome - an important thought occurred. No matter how well he was doing last season, a manager with such limited experience couldn’t hope to compete at the top end of a career-wide ranking system.
Alonso had 108 games in the database when I copied down the data, with the top 10 coaches collectively having seven times as many on average. Limiting the search to bosses with no more matches than the Leverkusen manager gave him the fifth best rating among the relative rookies.
The average Elo in the above table is a manager’s total Elo divided by the number of jobs (Stints) they have had. To account for the limited records of coaches like Alonso, it makes more sense to divide that figure by the number of games they have managed, to see what impact they have had on a pro-rata basis.
This has the effect of helping the less experienced managers. Where Klopp and Guardiola had near identical Elo per game figures of 0.48 and 0.45 respectively back in March, Alonso was up at 1.02. The veterans would challenge the younger Spaniard to come back for a recount when he has logged another 600 or 800 games on his managerial CV.
With Leverkusen unsurprisingly unable to continue their ridiculous form from last season, Alonso has since dipped slightly. Even so, he remains in the top 10 current big five league managers with at least 143 games (his total) when viewed through the Total Elo per Game stat.
Oh, hello, Arne. The Liverpool boss is the top dog. We could remove the filters of being currently employed in England, France, Germany, Italy or Spain to allow all of the top 500 current managers into the debate regardless of games managed, and Slot would still be sixth. He’s first among the 357 men with 200+ matches in the database, third on the all-time list by this measure.
As Slot’s Elo history displays below, he is accustomed to making an immediate impact when taking charge of a club. This is another aspect of this study which arguably favours underdogs, as they have more opportunities than top teams to score heavily by beating better opponents. Nonetheless, the Liverpool head coach has proven his worth with all three teams he has led. He can do no more than that.
A manager’s ability is near-impossible to assess. In How to Win the Premier League, Liverpool’s former director of research Ian Graham noted that “a good manager can add a few points per season. This is about the same value as a good player brings”.
Guardiola is a genius, but his chances of success are inevitably aided by managing Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City, as he himself freely admits. Most coaches won’t have sole control of their club’s transfer strategy these days either, with player quality such an enormous factor in whether a team wins more than it loses.
“I will tell you a secret, the main thing is the quality of the players… I try to figure out things but at the end the players…this is the success we had is because we have top players this is the secret, no more than that.” PEP GUARDIOLA, October 2022.
But with the tools at his disposal, Slot has been consistently excellent. That’s true whether you measure it with Opta, ClubElo, or the old fashioned method of looking at the league table.
ClubElo and Opta standings correct on December 3rd, 2024
Imagine they would have gone for Magath, nicknamed Quälix (the torturer). We would be running everyone into the ground, including ourselves.