How Liverpool Can Beat Man City and Arsenal to the Title

🚨FREE READ🚨 on how the season is unfolding wonderfully well for the Reds

Irrespective of who is the better team, and who would seem to have the bottle and indeed energy for it (as well as the fewest injuries), the fixtures for rest of the season suggests Liverpool can outdo Man City and Arsenal.

I expect Aston Villa to remain very competitive, but not challenge for the title; although I wrote that sentence, and most of this article, yesterday afternoon, before Villa tore the absolute living daylights out of City.

Talk about Blue Moon, Trent.

Maybe that changed the landscape, with City facing the final 18 shots of that game, with their own measly two coming in the 11th minute. It’s the most one-sided game I’ve seen this season, and City were shambolic.

Villa need to be taken seriously, but look good for the top four, and likely to expend European energy they’re not used to later in the season (as they start to taste UEFA silverware), and unless enough teams collapse like 2015/16, they won’t ‘do a Leicester’.

Relative Performance Index

As I’ve kept noting, Liverpool have already gone away to City, Spurs, Newcastle, Brighton and Chelsea; and no top side (apart from that new-look Villa, who were dismantled 3-0) has come to be tested Anfield.

But it’s not like Liverpool have only had easy games at home either: none of the promoted clubs (who would be the bottom three but for Everton’s points deduction) have arrived yet.

It’s been mostly tough games away, and medium games at home (including West Ham and Brentford in addition to Villa), with a derby thrown in.

But if City look jaded now, before the two extra games in the World Club Cup, I’ll point out (as I did a few weeks back) that they and Spurs were having generally easy fixtures until this recent run that would test both. Wait and see what happens, I kept saying.

Both have failed to win any of their last four games. Spurs lost three and drew one; City drew three and lost one, albeit the ones they drew were from winning positions.

But now, as things even out, most teams are converging on opposition points-per-game (generally between 1.3ppg to 1.5ppg), as 14 or 15 have been played (so everyone has basically played three-quarters of the teams).

Yet Arsenal are somehow total outliers now, despite having just scraped past Luton. The 15 teams they’ve played have a tiny 1.10ppg so far.

I colour-coded the opponents’ PPG for the table below, for the Big Six, plus Newcastle, Brighton, Villa and West Ham, to show just how ‘easy’ Arsenal’s games have been on paper. They still had to win them, of course, but things get tougher now. (Brentford have faced the toughest 15 games.)

The next three league games will seriously test Arsenal: Aston Villa away, Brighton at home, Liverpool away. And then West Ham at home straight after could have a bit of edge to it.

For about two months now I’ve been using the Relative Performance Index table (which I used to use on the old TTT several years ago when Liverpool were emerging as a stronger side than the league table suggested) to show that Liverpool were the real deal; but in fairness, Aston Villa had doggedly remained 2nd this season, and now have drawn level at the top. You can see the chasm to City, Newcastle and Arsenal.

PPDA

I had been focusing on passes per defensive action (the metric for measuring pressure on opposition defences), in order to work out why Liverpool concede far more free-kicks than all other high-pressing, high-possession teams since 2019 – the answer was: no idea.

But it struck me that City have basically stopped pressing from the front, based on the data. It didn’t seem to be troubling them a month or so ago when I first highlighted the data, but they rank mid-table for presses from the front, whereas in their peak years they were at truly elite numbers c.6.5 (the lower the ‘better’), whereas now they’re c.12.5, half as ‘high’, having dropped to c.10.5 last season. They’re just not as intense.

As you can see below, Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs and Brighton are all under 10. (Source: Understat.) Obviously the outliers are Villa, down near the bottom, but their away form is fairly poor, with the biggest home-to-away variance. Their point of difference is the offside trap that catches almost twice as many players offside as any other team, with Liverpool in 2nd place.

(Liverpool have also had trickier away games, and played 150 minutes with nine or ten men.)

And of course, as a league team, City’s points-per-game is markedly down since Erling Haaland joined; tons of goals for him, but less to worry about from the rest of the team.

Look at Haaland’s off the ball work and compare: Cody Gakpo ranks top at 99th percentile for tackles from forwards; just like Roberto Firmino used to. Gabriel Jesus also ranks 99th percentile at Arsenal. No strikers do more work.

Haaland ranks way down in the 2nd percentile, with basically one tackle every 11 games. In other words, 98% of strikers work harder than he does for their team, if tackling is used as a metric. (And he’s poor in all the other defensive metrics too.)

Darwin Núñez is 64th percentile, and on blocks, 70th percentile; Haaland is not above 29th percentile on any of the defensive side of things.

Haaland is clearly a far better finisher than Núñez, Gakpo, Firmino and Jesus, but it’s interesting to see how little he actually does off the ball.

Now, you may not want Haaland wasting his energy tackling, but City’s regular 90-to-100-point tallies have fallen down to 85 since the start of last season (89 last season, and currently 30, or pro-rata 76, from 15 games). They seem easier to play against.

Again, you’ve gained the best finisher in world football, but at the expense of dominating games (and in fairness, they obviously won the treble last season, but unlike Liverpool when reaching the 2019 and 2022 Champions League finals, they did not get into the 90-point zone in the league.)

City Weaker

As I noted before the Spurs game, City aren’t even doing half as well against strong opposition this season compared to last.

They’ve now played eight games against ‘Big Six Plus Newcastle’ clubs in all competitions; taking 1.5ppg in the league and just 1.25ppg if you add the cups with a points system, given that they lost to Newcastle.

(And that’s not including Aston Villa, who have emerged as a top team in 2023. That would make the City ppg even worse.)

Last season City took 2.08ppg from such games, and if you add cup games against the elite sides, it rises to 2.35ppg, with all five won.

Or, 12 of 17 of those games won (71%), compared to two of eight so far, or 25%.

(And as previously noted, they lost just one league game last season to someone outside the ‘Big Six Plus Newcastle’ group, and they’ve already doubled that this season, having lost to Wolves and now Villa, who are admittedly pushing to make it a Big Eight; albeit once it gets beyond a Big Seventeen we may have to stop that kind of thinking.)

We saw Liverpool run out of steam after their Quadruple effort, and City had the luxury of going out at the quarter-finals of one of the domestic cups, while the Reds played every possible game in 2021/22.

Conversely, City are liable to finally have some “we’ve done it all” complacency, or even depression, as sportspeople often feel a sense of loss after achieving a long-held ambition. Add fatigue, and then the group dynamic can start to shift. (Jack Grealish is still hungover, it seems; the lad likes a party.)

While both City and Arsenal are through to the last 16 of the Champions League, that also means two important games in the late winter. If they win those, it’s the quarter finals and things get messy.

And when you look at their schedules, it’s brutal. They may well both face relatively weak teams as group winners, and have the tie won in one game, but if not, they have periods of 15 and 19 games respectively where I would think the wheels would come off any team.

City, in particular, have an insanely “dense” period that I can’t recall seeing before.

For the three main contenders (assuming City don’t totally fall away) I’ve highlighted in yellow the clearly tough fixtures, including the Champions League rounds for the two in that competition.

First, Arsenal’s:

Then, Man City, starting in mid-February:

City’s is a shorter period, but the idea that they’ll go on a 15-game winning run in the spring, as I’ve heard constantly recently, seems unlikely based on the above. They’ve got a run of winnable games up until February, albeit visit Newcastle in January, and the atmosphere at Everton just before New Year’s Eve could be tasty.

I always go back to 2003/04, when Arsenal were due to become Invincibles, with 26 wins and 12 draws to become Premier League champions.

But it always stuck with me how, as firm favourites, they failed to beat Claudio Ranieri’s Chelsea home and away in the quarters of the Champions League in March.

They also failed to beat Manchester United in between, in what often seems to be a season-defining week or two; a situation that can arise again at the semi-final stage, as well as the quarters.

Arsenal were miles better as a team than Chelsea; but Chelsea drew one and won the other. Arsenal’s title tilt didn’t falter, but they’d won nine league games on the spin when United arrived at Highbury.

I first wrote about this back in the spring of 2004, and by the spring of 2005, I had my theory in place. Indeed, in February 2005 I wrote that Liverpool would win the Champions League, and included in that was a guess at meeting Chelsea in the semi-finals, and Chelsea doing an Arsenal from the year before (feeling the pressure).

Chelsea, who’d spent what would be over £1bn in 2023 money with our football-adjusted inflation model, were miles better than Liverpool that season overall, but Liverpool drew one and won the other, with a goal that narrowly crossed the line (and if it didn’t, the ref said he’d award a penalty and send off the keeper, three minutes in).

There was no tough game in between for Chelsea, but that’s still often a league-breaking point; Liverpool under Rafa Benítez could win the Champions League knockouts but the squad wasn’t big enough to have an easy weekend in between; or the same XI would be fatigued.

Go back to 2005, and Chelsea got past Bayern over two legs in the quarters, but failed to beat Birmingham and Arsenal in the league games that immediately followed – both at home. They’d just won 13 of 14 home games in a row.

And I’ve always felt the league games before big Champions League games are also a point of vulnerability, as players look to conserve energy and avoid injury. The bigger the game, the more players play it safe.

The teams Arsenal and City can face in the round of 16 presumably includes anyone who finishes 2nd and wasn’t in their group, and isn’t from their country; so that currently includes Napoli, PSG and Inter; another group could present Lazio or Atletico Madrid.

Arsenal also aren’t used to juggling the Champions League and the Premier League over the course of a season. They had the Europa last season, but rotated, and went out at the quarters. They’re clearly a ‘proper’ team now, but they’ve not been as tested as other teams in the league this season.

A lot will also depend on City and Arsenal’s injuries in the spring (and any January signings), but in both cases we’re talking about insane runs of fixtures that will be risked if rotating, and risked if going hard with full-strength XIs.

Once it gets that dense, I think league points being dropped a greater than usual rate is almost inevitable (and if not, then you’re super-special, or super-lucky).

Liverpool need to focus on their own form, of course. But even if the Reds fall behind in the coming weeks, as could happen given their own fixture challenges, the two main rivals have those massive periods on the horizon.

Jürgen Klopp will take the Europa League ‘seriously’, but not seriously enough to jeopardise a title tilt. So he doesn't have to field his best team in the last 16. Or quarters, or semis, if he doesn’t need to.

And of course, having easy games on paper does not make them all winnable; not every easy game ends with three points.

But a cluster of gruelling matches is almost impossible to win at a normal rate; in stark contrast to even a schedule of easy game, hard game, easy game, hard game, where the rotation points are obvious. When it’s hard game, hard game, hard game, hard game, every 3-4 days, it takes a huge toll. I would think that if you go 100% in all those games, you’ll also get more injuries.

The Reds have their own testing cluster on the immediate horizon, and that’s why I think they could fall a few points behind. That said, they are all at home, and suddenly have a four-point advantage over City anyway, that I didn’t foresee a few weeks ago when pondering all this.

Between 17th December and the end of January, Liverpool will have home league games against Manchester United, Arsenal, Newcastle and Chelsea. (Then, Arsenal away in early February.)

But only four of the final 15 league games are against the Big Six And Newcastle, with the Brighton at home in there too. A difficult derby away game is there too. And two of those five are in the final three games, and that could be like the best penalty taker due to take the fifth in a shootout and not being needed. Obviously the season ends with Wolves at home, as why wouldn’t it?

After the coming weekend, Liverpool will also have played a near 40:60 split home and away, due to forgoing an Anfield game at the start of the season.

Again, the Reds still have to do their job. But after February 3rd, Liverpool only face three top teams until early May. That’s three months of mostly winnable games.

Of course, the ACL injury to Joël Matip is a reminder of what injuries can do, albeit the Reds have won both games without Alisson Becker. A lot can go wrong by the time you get to the crunch points, but the Reds had over half a dozen out for the past two games and still got the points.

With the peak-challenge periods for City and Arsenal, and Liverpool’s entire remaining league campaign, it feels like the Reds – if they are truly the real-deal again (and despite four harsh and often early sendings off, have the best goal difference and the best defence, all from tougher games) – have have a chance to benefit from the remaining fixtures clearly being in their favour.

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