Liverpool Are “Better” Now Than In 2019/20 – By Some Distance

Based on results AND underlying numbers in main competitions, this is off the charts

Why Liverpool Could Drop Points, But Shouldn’t Drop Away

Eight points is a lot, until it is not. The jump up to 11 is huge; the drop to five is ‘back in the pack’.

But Liverpool are a properly good side; a bit like Bayer Leverkusen last season, it’s clicked and it’s working to unexpected levels, but deservedly so, on expected goals (at both ends).

As you’ll see later in the piece, Man City’s xG for and against looks more like the most chaotic Jürgen Klopp sides, when things were too open and the balance wasn’t there; while Arne Slot’s Liverpool continue to channel the 2020 vibes, albeit with actually better underlying numbers, and better actual numbers.

It’s worth making further comparisons with 2019/20, and with Man City this season, as I will do later in this piece. Combining the league and Champions League, Liverpool’s underlying numbers under Arne Slot are off the charts. Top of both tables, and again, deservedly so.

Indeed, the lack of summer signings mirrors 2019, and even the absence of Alisson links to the two seasons together, as Jürgen Klopp’s most restrained Liverpool team walked the league, but City had started to fall away domestically a little earlier in the season five years ago, where a chasm opened once they lost, in November, at Anfield.

(Also, Liverpool’s League Cup heroes against Arsenal in 2019? Some kids called Curtis Jones, who scored the winning spot-kick as a sub, after Caoimhín Kelleher saved a penalty from now-Real Madrid’s Dani Ceballos. Whatever happened to Jones and Kelleher? If only Liverpool developed their own players over a number of years.)

The weeks ahead will be gruelling; perfection will be difficult when it gets so chaotic. But having carried 4-6 injuries all season (not that any of them counted, apparently), any team can unravel if it’s gets to ten or more. Liverpool may end up losing to City, as football is strange.

But this is about how the data suggests this season is not some lucky blip, if 2019/20 is anything to go by, as well as the difference to this year’s rivals.

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