Liverpool Fans and Neutrals – Stop Being So Stupid!

Don’t fall prey to bad thinking about a great Liverpool team having an incredible season

Here are some ‘facts’ I’ve contended with and countered all season.

• Arne Slot is the next Erik ten Hag.

• Arne Slot is the next David Moyes/Unai Emery, as it’s impossible to replace a legend.

• Liverpool made a HUGE mistake not signing anyone.

• Not signing a new left-back will cost Liverpool the chance of winning anything.

• Liverpool haven’t played anyone good yet.

• Liverpool haven’t had any injuries.

• Ryan Gravenberch is not a no.6.

• Liverpool won’t finish in the top six (re Gary Neville, in August).

• The league is weak.

Weak!

Again, look at the Top 25 sides in the Club Elo Index. This league has probably never been stronger, and you can’t hold up clubs like Fulham, Forest and Bournemouth as being so difficult to play against, and exceptional in many ways, and full of great players, then lose for the first time in the league in 27 games and say the league is weak.

This is more than twice as many English sides than a decade ago.

Forest and Fulham, who Liverpool have lost to, are good teams. So are Newcastle, who beat the Reds in the cup final.

(Liverpool also beat Bologna, Leverkusen, PSG and Real Madrid this season! – the four non-English sides they’ve faced who are in the top 25, with a 1-0 defeat to PSG the only defeat. A lot of those games saw Alisson out injured as part of 20 games missed overall, Diogo Jota out injured, and other long-term injuries, including up to three right-backs out at once, and three centre-backs at once, and various others who don’t get mentioned, as they’re not called Bukayo Saka, and Slot doesn’t keep going on about it.)

You can’t also say that these mid-level clubs also going a long way in the FA Cup is a sign that the league is weak too?!

Are clubs like Forest, Villa, Fulham, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Brighton making the cup quarter-finals a sign that the league is weak, or that … they are good?!

Normally when teams do well in the league AND the cup, it’s a sign that they are good. That’s called basic football logic.

Man City are weaker. That’s it. No one seemed to mind Man City winning the league when there were no challengers.

(Edit: Man United and Spurs are also doing worse, but Man United have generally been rubbish for years now, and Spurs are hardly the model of consistency in the last half-decade either. As noted elsewhere in this piece, they’re still both doing well in Europe.)

Arsenal, and Aston Villa (who aren’t even in the top five in this supposedly weak league of ours) have been very strong in the Champions League.

Liverpool’s Champions League season involved beating Real Madrid, AC Milan, RB Leipzig, Bayer Leverkusen, Bologna, Girona, Lille, and PSG; but ended on penalties to the most in-form team in Europe – winning a staggering 80% of the games, and going out by the barest margins.

There was then a bit of a crap cup final, when Liverpool were coming off the back of 210 minutes against PSG in a week.

In fairness to Newcastle, they beat Forest, Chelsea, Brentford and Arsenal twice before beating the Reds, so they thoroughly deserved it, even if they only beat a heavily rotated Forest side on penalties, and the League Cup is a very uneven competition as a result of such B-team experiments.

Had Forest not rested their best players (Milenković, Elanga, Hudson-Odoi, Wood, et al), Newcastle, whose XI looked more full-strength, may have gone out at the first hurdle. You don’t get teams doing that in the league in midseason. That, along with only six or seven games, is why the League Cup is a minor trophy, but obviously it must feel nice to win anything after 70 years.

As I’ve said many times, the lower-middle reaches of the Premier League are dominating the Europa League. So far it’s a stroll in Europe for Man United, Spurs and higher up, Chelsea, in the lower competition.

What does all this evidence suggest?

That the league is weak?!

Really?

English teams doing brilliantly in Europe overall, and even below-mid-table clubs like Crystal Palace (one of only two clubs to match Liverpool’s four league wins from the last six games, along with Villa) are ranked amongst the best 25 in Europe?

Ten years ago, when Jürgen Klopp first arrived, Liverpool were ranked 33rd; now they’re ranked no.1 in Europe.

The 2015/16 season, as I have proven, saw very few English teams ranking highly.

I doubt it’s very often that roughly half the best teams in the European Elo Index are from England. This seems a basic fact that people should know by now. I feel like I say all this stuff and no one pays attention, maybe as I’m not on social media, Sky Sports and TalkSport shouting about it all.

What is this delusion that the league is weak? I tried to read something on the BBC about what Arne Slot had said, and just found stupidity from the comments they shared.

I know that these are just stupid people on the internet, and why I avoid the internet mostly, apart from here.

And even places like the BBC like to shit-post, spread negativity and dismay, and just get cheap clicks that, one by one, kills the soul of the world.

Seasons often unravel a bit if you’ve been going full-tilt for eight months. It’s a lot of emotional, psychological and physical pressure, leading from the front, with, at various times, Chelsea, Forest and Arsenal all closing the gap; until recent weeks when Arsenal finally fell away.

All teams have blips, and sometimes they come nearer the end of the season. Teams may not consciously ease off, but the reality of league titles for most of football history are that perfection will be a long way away. Even now, Slot’s league win percentage is over the elite 70% in the league, as it is in all competitions.

That’s a remarkable body of work, and a penalty shootout away from progressing past a petro-doped behemoth.

A truth of this league this season, bar the bottom three, is that anybody can beat or take points from anybody else.

That Liverpool have been the only team to suffer this fate rarely is an achievement, not a sign of a weak league or poor champions-elect.

Rotation Stupidity

Now the latest stupid idea is that Arne Slot should have rotated more.

And to achieve what, exactly?

Maybe get a two or three point lead (or deficit) in the title race, but be in great shape for the run-in? It’s great to peak in the spring, but better to all but win the league before then.

Here’s the factual: Liverpool are 11 points clear with seven to play.

Here’s the counterfactual: more rotation could have made that better; but of course, it could have made it worse.

What’s realistic is that no one expected Liverpool to be top, let alone 11 points clear.

Eleven points! Try going back to August and thinking about that. Eleven points!

Ergo, to do something different, and still expect such a spectacular outcome seems ... unlikely.

While I’d have liked to see more of certain players (as I like those players), and appreciate that rotation can obviously work, rotation also sometimes doesn’t work; and if keeping a settled side with its increasing understandings enabled Liverpool to pull so far ahead – as reality suggests is the case – then why are people worried about rotation this season, or maybe even next season?

I’d love to see Harvey Elliott or Federico Chiesa get more minutes, but it’s not about what I’d love; it’s about winning the league. I’d have sold Mo Salah last summer, so what I want isn’t always the best. The reality, again, is that Liverpool have won over 70% of their matches, in a strong Premier League and a strong Champions League and a strong League Cup.

I wasn’t Brendan Rodgers’ biggest fan initially (and then again by the end), but the talk of how he should have changed his gung-ho approach in the final few games of 2013/14, to be more cagey, is not what that team was about. He got the team to within one game of the title by it being the way it was. And this was a team that didn’t win the league, not one that’s 11 points clear. You could maybe nitpick as it fell short, but again, it was still more than anyone expected at the outset.

It would have been nice had Rodgers known how to switch his team to peak ‘80s Milan, but he didn’t have the players for it, and to throw away what had succeeded up to that point would have been just as risky, if not more risky.

Similarly, if Slot got Liverpool here, by doing things his way, then his way is the way.

Everything else is moot. He’s shown great variety in his tactics, a superb use of subs. He hasn’t used every member of his squad as much as he might have, but the underlying numbers and the actual results show the proof is in the pudding. It’s a fucking lovely pudding.

We haven’t even had the joys of getting over the line in 2024/25 (it’s close!), and anyone worrying about what might go wrong next season is sucking all the joy out of the thing we’ve had once in 35 years and even that had the joy sucked out of it by lockdowns.

The aim is to win the league title – albeit the original aim was to challenge for the top four, and bed-in a new manager, which, while a smart appointment as I said in the summer (and that Liverpool could have a great season if it clicks), is not always something that clicks immediately.

If 11 points ahead with seven games to go isn’t good enough, then it’s hard to understand why we even bother.

If you win the league by a few points with a late flurry of wins (via some barnstorming late run, like Arsenal in 1998), it’s more exciting, granted, due to the peak-end rule; but if you do so by being miles and miles and miles ahead, and then tiring a little, then it’s the same end.

The peak-end rule is messing with people’s minds now. I talk about so many psychological and mental models that people don’t understand, and thus fail to process their thoughts and emotions properly.

The peaks were August to February, where the masses of points were racked up.

But even so, Liverpool have won four of the last six league games, including Man City, and Newcastle and the Anfield derby; and Arsenal have won only two of the last six, Forest only three, Chelsea only three, City only two, Newcastle only three (with three defeats), and the hitherto in-form and hard-pressing, all-action Bournemouth, full of players the big clubs want, none of the last six.

In the last six league games, the normal form guide, Liverpool are still the best team.

So if Liverpool are collapsing, bottling it, falling off a cliff, what the hell is everyone else doing? Perhaps playing against other good sides?

If you don’t believe me when I say the league is stronger, then maybe I have steered you wrong all season, by addressing the fact that Slot was nothing like ten Hag; that Liverpool could click under him; that Liverpool had played teams that were good; that Liverpool’s underlying numbers were twice as good as anyone else’s, and in the elite zone; that Liverpool were not top by luck.

I stated that very early in the season as proof that Liverpool were the best team, no matter who people think they’d played who wasn’t any good (and this doesn’t include battering AC Milan and Leverkusen on the xG, and never losing the xG by more than 0.2 in any competition up until the spring; this is just the league this season).

Want to see the latest on that?

Still in the elite zone.

Still better xG Difference than any of the top three last season (all were below +1.3 per game).

I wrote recently that I’d totally forgotten how many points the amazing, record-breaking, Barnes-storming 1987/88 side dropped in the final quarter of the season, before (and after) wrapping up the title; and while I remember these more recent examples, I don’t really think about the 3-0 defeat at Watford or the draw at Everton in 2020, before the title was sealed. I don’t think of games drawn and lost after the title was sealed.

Once over the line, this will be forgotten, just as no one fixates on what prove to be meaningless games. Which is why people need to chill out; unless Liverpool fail to win the league, then anything else is good enough.

Mo Salah has looked jaded in recent weeks (ever since the beginning of his fasting period, as with Ibou Konaté), but the table below is the reality of his league contribution, and as such, if he is kept on the pitch a bit longer than seems necessary, then … really? Are we really bothered?!

Whether or not he can do the same next season is not my concern right now.

If Virgil van Dijk has a couple of weaker games towards the end of a gruelling season for club and country, as he approaches 34, then would the Reds have won as many points by resting him, especially when Ibou Konaté was out for ages?

Then when Joe Gomez came in and got badly injured again? And when the excellent but raw Jarell Quansah is on a steep learning curve, and lost his confidence?

Slot’s impressive injury prevention record is partly based on the fact that you actually keep playing players. That playing games is the best way to stay ready to play games. Hamstrings need to be constantly loaded, as it’s when players are coming in from the cold, or coming back from older injuries, that injuries are more likely.

Some players have still got injured, but muscle injuries have been kept pretty low; albeit with repeated ones for the two excellent right-backs, who get injured when they get fit again, and the other one comes in and gets injured, before the other one comes back and gets injured. (Conor Bradley is still young and should grow out of the injury issues soon, and to me, is a world-class “force of nature” right-back in the making.)

You do your resting within games where possible, and train hard, but not too hard, if you’re playing a lot of games. Obviously sometimes you’ll look jaded; it’s a long season.

Your form and fitness will ebb, regardless of how much or little football you play. No player has a perfect season, no team has a perfect season.

Mediocre?

While Barney Ronay, a fantastic prose writer, can sometimes talk nonsense, he’s smart enough to hit the nail on the head a reasonable amount of the time, as he did in midweek.

“Has any other team ever been so roundly blamed for how mediocre everyone else is? It is a really strange dynamic. Stop winning the league so easily. Make everyone else better. Find some jeopardy for us. Everton came here to defend, violently at times, but skilfully too. Liverpool found a way to win.”

Except everyone else is better. Liverpool are just better still.

So it’s not that everyone else is mediocre; far from it.

Chelsea are seen as having a bad season, but only by the context of having spent a gazillion pounds on players since 2022; again, they’ve spent all that money, on all that talent, and it’s difficult for them as a lot of smaller clubs are not rolling over for anyone.

I would say that every team down to and including Wolves in 17th, with the exception of Everton, have half a dozen or more players the top clubs would like to have.

They wouldn’t all start for the top clubs, but look at Fulham: Bernd Leno, Joachim Andersen, Antonee Robinson, Sander Berge, Rodrigo Muniz, Raúl Jiménez and Adama Traoré (as a specialist sub), plus several others who have already played for or developed at the Big Six, like Harry Wilson.

Wolves? João Gomes, Boubacar Traoré, Jørgen Strand Larsen, Matheus Cunha, André, Rayan Aït-Nouri, José Sá, Santiago Bueno, Pablo Sarabia and Nélson Semedo. And others.

Palace? Maxence Lacroix, Marc Guéhi, Ismaïla Sarr, Eberechi Eze, Daniel Muñoz, Jean-Philippe Mateta, Cheick Doucouré, Tyrick Mitchell, Adam Wharton and more.

Bournemouth? Dean Huijsen, Milos Kerkez, Marcos Senesi, Evanilson, Kepa Arrizabalaga, Justin Kluivert, Antoine Semenyo, Tyler Adams and more.

That’s just three clubs. It applies to the others too.

So many of those players have been linked to the Big Six, including a dozen or more ‘liked’ by or heavily linked to Liverpool, even if they didn’t and/or still won’t move to the Reds: Antonee Robinson, João Gomes, André, Rayan Aït-Nouri, Dean Huijsen, Milos Kerkez, Tyler Adams, Antoine Semenyo, Marc Guéhi, Ismaïla Sarr, Cheick Doucouré, Matheus Cunha, Adam Wharton and others. (Kerkez seems the most likely to sign.)

That’s before doing the same with Brentford, Brighton, and others, who have stockpiled and developed the kinds of talents that would be unthinkable for clubs of their size a decade ago. Or West Ham, who again, have a core of excellent players, who would grace better sides.

(At Everton, I can only think of one player, Jarrad Branthwaite, but admittedly I’m not trying too hard. Some clubs might want Jordan Pickford, but most of their better or more well-known players are way past their best now, and/or well into their 30s – the ones with pedigree are aged 31, 32, 32, 35, 36 and 39! Before his injury woes, I thought Dominic Calvert-Lewin had become an excellent striker, and Beto is starting to look like a good centre-forward.)

And that’s before looking at the external investment in Aston Villa (overspending dangerously on wages), and Newcastle, to take them from mid-table teams to Champions League outfits, with loads of great and/or very effective players.

What top club wouldn’t want to raid Villa or Newcastle if they could for a few of their gems? Yet neither is in the top five right now.

Obviously as bad as Man United and Spurs are doing, you’d still say that there are 5-10 top players at each club that would interest others; just that they’ve been bogged down in various issues, including injuries and an adherence to styles of play that seem all-or-nothing.

And at Man United in particular, they bought loads of big-name players who lost their way as soon as they entered that dysfunctional arena. Some were good players who were bad buys, as the wrong players at the wrong club at the wrong time under the wrong manager, as seen by how they do better once they leave.

Look at it like this. The teams in 13th and 14th in the Premier League are easing through the Europa League; when does that usually happen?

The teams in 13th and 14th in the Premier League have squads valued at €836.10m and €694.25m by the handy but obviously not infallible Transfermarkt?

If you play against a team like Man United or Spurs, they still have a lot of individual quality, if they are up for the fight. They just won’t be up for the fight most weeks, but they will if it’s Liverpool or Man City they’re playing.

This is what people are missing. The smaller clubs have bought shrewdly, year after year, and employ bright managers. They now have strong squads.

They are buying from clubs like Barcelona, PSG, Juventus, Atlético Madrid, Porto, Marseille, Lazio, Benfica, Sporting CP, Villarreal, Ajax, AC Milan, Roma, Wolfsburg (and Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea, Man City, Man United and Liverpool) – not third-tier English outfits or backwater leagues.

They are richer than many of these foreign clubs.

They are buying internationals for Spain, Portugal, Uruguay, Brazil, France, Colombia, Holland, Belgium and more, while quite a few now play for England. (Eze, Wharton and Guéhi as three examples at Palace, which again, shows how good Palace are, not how bad the league is, as even then, Palace are only 11th, but doing well in the cup.)

Debates may rage about trickle-down economics in general, but you have three current Brazil players in the Wolves team, as well as players as renowned as Pablo Sarabia (Spain and PSG) and Nélson Semedo (Portugal and Barcelona). How many teams in 17th have had that many good players?

Even if the English league was weak now, as it was in 2015/16 when Leicester won the league, it would still be an achievement.

But the English league has become, by far and away, the strongest league with the best managers and the most wide-ranging styles, and where the greater physicality makes it extra draining and demanding, as the extra money generated allows for squad depth across the board now.

Liverpool were also drawn with eight tough Champions League games (rated the 2nd-most difficult at the outset by Opta), won the group with style, then got drawn against the most in-form (and fastest!) team around.

Seriously, if you thought ahead of the season – in addition to Liverpool being 11 points clear in April – that the Reds would be drawn against Real Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen, AC Milan, RB Leipzig, Girona, Bologna, PSV and then two games against PSG, how many wins would you have expected?

Eight? No chance!

And the only game not won in the group stage was when Slot did rotate, and rested virtually everyone, as the group was won early.

When the Reds beat Leipzig when Leipzig were top of the Bundesliga, no one said anything; when they played anyone who wasn’t in great form, it was “Liverpool haven’t played anyone good yet”.

So, please stop this nonsense.

Apart from thinking it might be time to sell Mo Salah last summer (my bad!), virtually everything I wrote in the summer, and then in the early part of the season – and then on and on, when teams like Chelsea and Nottingham Forest, and then Arsenal, were “hunting Liverpool down” – stands the test of time.

I’ve called out bullshit that has proven to be bullshit.

If anything, I wasn’t positive enough, when saying that Liverpool were better than those teams, as proven by the underlying numbers across a sample size that improved week after week, across Europe and England.

You don’t use a form guide at the end of a hard season as proof that it’s somehow the true level, and the 71% of 49 games won is not the correct metric, just the most recent blip. Let’s forget the games where Liverpool ran up the 11 point lead and focus only on the Fulham defeat?

That’s like saying the 1987/88 team “wasn’t that great”, and rather than look at the demolitions of the best sides, from August to April, going unbeaten until March 20th, you should focus only on this eight-game sample, which had two wins (one an outlier in how good it was) until the third sealed the league on 23rd April:

1. 16-Mar-88 – Derby County, Drew 1–1

2. 20-Mar-88 – Everton, Lost 0–1

3. 26-Mar-88 – Wimbledon, Won 2–1

4. 02-Apr-88 – Notts Forest, Lost 1–2

5. 04-Apr-88 – Man United, Drew 3–3

6. 13-Apr-88 – Notts Forest, Won 5–0

7. 20-Apr-88 – Norwich City, Drew 0–0

8. 23-Apr-88 – Spurs, Won 1–0

If that was now, people would be making equally stupid assessments. People would also lose their shit over the Reds losing the FA Cup Final to lowly Wimbledon. Yet that Liverpool side transformed football.

It elevated the domestic game to new levels.

Most of that impression, bar the legendary smashing of Forest, occurred prior to mid-March. And it remains valid, just as going 5-0 up in a Champions League final and winning 5-2 would be great, regardless of the late conceded goals.

Think of it like this. At Old Trafford, Liverpool were superb, and went 3-0 up from 1.4xG before Man United had even had a chance. Their xG was 0.1 at that stage. United then had nothing to lose, and created 1.0xG late on. But it didn’t matter. It was too late. The later they created that xG, the less an actual goal would have mattered.

That’s like the season now. Liverpool did the hard work, and now may have to suffer teams coming at them, with nothing to lose.

And so here’s what concerns me.

There’s something beyond mere analysis (which is fine) that has moved into entitlement, and the failing of most football fans – never to be happy for long – is always at the door, as there’s always something to worry about.

Which is just tiresome, especially as most seasons, there’s not a lot to win, and most seasons, you don’t in the big prizes. I can’t deal with people’s worries about next season.

If your worries are being eleven points clear with seven games to play, in a strong league, and you’d have preferred it to be 14 points, and are very very angry, then these are luxury worries.

By all means think ahead to next season if you must (and I did so during the international break), but if you’re worrying about next season – when we’ve yet to have the full joy of this one – I think you’ve got dysfunctional thinking, and could do with giving your head a wobble.

This is a free read, for all those whose heads need a wobble, or for people to share with those whose heads need a wobble. Comments are for paying TTT Main Hub subscribers only, but no head-wobblers need apply.