Liverpool’s Record Against the Better Teams Is Sensational

*Great data doesn’t guarantee greatness, but it helps*

Whilst continuing to look at the underlying numbers for Arne Slot’s 21 games, as the same size grows, it struck me that there is a remarkable consistency across types of game, including quality of opposition – as well as home versus away – that wasn’t in the underlying numbers of last season, even when the Reds were flying and not playing as many difficult matches.

The 3-3 draw away at Newcastle this week was another xG “loss” – only the second of the season; and the second by a mere 0.1xG, which came in the 2-2 and 3-3 draws away against current/recent Champions League teams.

(I use FBRef data for all xG analysis, whose data is from Opta.)

So in 21 games, the biggest xG advantage an opponent has had over Liverpool remains 0.1 (twice), by Arsenal and Newcastle, on their home grounds, where they are hard to beat in big games (albeit only Liverpool have gone to the Emirates out of the strongest teams this season).

That’s astonishing.

I had read that Liverpool’s underlying numbers haven’t been as good as last season, but everywhere I look they are much better.

And last season was pretty damned good!

While it may not have been peak Kloppian, it was a team that battled it out for the title for three-quarters of the season, as well as on three other fronts.

It’s almost worth mentioning Spurs here, whose cumulative xG data difference is still pretty good (ranking 4th), but it fluctuates from amazing to horrible; higher highs than Liverpool, but much lower lows, with half their league games not ‘won’ on xG, while the other half range from narrow advantages to the huge +3.4 in the game at Old Trafford … but lost by a similar xG margin last night at Bournemouth. They also turned a 0.4 advantage over Man City into 4.0 scoreline.

In the past I’d have just gone on the overall data as that’s all I had, but breaking it down game by game, week by week, as I’ve been doing this season, seems more telling in terms of pattern spotting; as does game-state analysis in a recent article (link below), that shows Liverpool tend to concede most of their xG against when the game is ‘won’.

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Vital Data That Shows Liverpool Are Über-Elite By Top-5-League Standards

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Last Season vs This Season

A year ago, Liverpool had 31 points after 14 games, and a GD of +18; the same GD as this season, only now have 35 points. That’s not a huge swing, but four points is a big difference if it can be extrapolated.

However, the Reds’ underlying numbers are far better this season, with none of the wild variations of last season.

Arsenal were two points ahead of the Reds a year ago, Man City a point behind.

Even with the gnawing creep of dropped points at Newcastle (where a draw is a fine result, but the manner was frustrating via the peak-end rule), the Reds remain seven clear of Chelsea and Arsenal, and nine clear of Man City.

My anxiety at a big lead that may slip is somewhat obviated by just how good the Reds’ underlying numbers are in virtually all 21 games, whatever the situation.

But of course, you can also start producing bad underlying numbers (albeit you could do that and win, perversely; something the Reds have yet to do this season is win luckily).

Bar the absent Sven Botman, midweek felt like Newcastle’s best XI, fit and very physical.

This was their Champions League team, almost, who at home could beat the best teams in recent years. They got stuck into Liverpool, and yet somehow won twice as many free-kicks (17-9) and the Reds have five times as many bookings.

By contrast, Liverpool lacked Alisson, Ibrahima Konaté and Diogo Jota, who would all have started, as would Trent Alexander-Arnold if he hadn’t been coming back from a muscle injury, (or Conor Bradley as his understudy, had he not just done his hammy); while Harvey Elliott and Federico Chiesa are not fully match-fit, with a similar number of Premier League minutes this season to Vítězslav Jaroš.

Even Kostas Tsimikas would have played this game, to rest a ragged and rusty Andy Robertson, who is having a tough time of it, after no preseason, and who could be in terminal decline (he has to prove otherwise at his age, especially with all the games for Scotland too). He’s a weak link on the ball these days, and also making more defensive errors.

Once injuries at a club go over six, you can start to struggle to fill gaps, but it seems several are on the mend (just not in time for the Newcastle game). Right now, injuries to defenders have been the main issue.

Liverpool had just given a hell of a lot against Real Madrid and Man City, and this was precisely what my Density and Intensity system of last season would have flagged as a game where you will likely hit the wall, where match difficulty and frequency compounds until you ‘snap’. (Interestingly, I’d used Newcastle last season as a key example, of how they hit the wall.)

By contrast this week, Newcastle had played just three games in the past month, and none were against strong opposition. They were fresh and fired up at home.

They could treat this like their cup final; a free-hit against the league leaders, despite fielding numerous expensive signings.

Alexander Isak, Sandro Tonali, Anthony Gordon, Bruno Guimarães, Joelinton, Tino Livramento and Lewis Hall were where a lot of their investment has gone, often in the £40m-£60m price range, for a cumulative cost in the hundreds of millions. Unlike last season, the mostly-Saudi investment was in the XI.

They are all excellent players, most of whom would get into some of the Big Six sides. Fabian Schär was a bargain several years ago.

(I would have taken, and still might take, some of, Isak, Gordon, Guimarães, Joelinton, and Livramento as a sometime left-back, albeit Guimarães and Joelinton are not needed now. Gordon is a great player, but one who continues to get away with the most outrageous diving in the Premier League, as he’s English; Mo Salah gets kicked up in the air and he’s told to get on with it.)

Liverpool actually fielded far fewer expensive players, with only Virgil van Dijk and Darwin Núñez over the £35m mark*, and ‘cheap’ or homegrown players in Caoimhín Kelleher, Joe Gomez, Jarell Quansah, Andy Robertson and Curtis Jones.

(*Some can rise beyond that with add-ons, but not to high levels.)

A lot of Liverpool’s squad investment was out injured or benched for essential rotation after the mad run of games, at over £270m even before inflation. (Most of the subs were also cheap, or kids, bar the rested/rotated £100m duo of Dominik Szoboszlai and Luis Díaz; Alisson, Jota and Konaté were important buys .)

So as an aside, it was worth looking at how Newcastle at St James’ was likely to prove tricky. (They also ‘beat’ Man City 1.6 - 0.9 on the xG in a 1-1 draw, and also beat Arsenal and Spurs in actual results, and Chelsea in the cup. They get ‘up’ for the big games there.)

But looking through the season’s data, there is a massive – and encouraging – disparity between Liverpool this season against the very good-to-excellent teams, and last season.

(Of course, it’s no good being great against the great teams and rubbish against the dross, but Liverpool have only ‘dropped points’ this season in all competitions to a pretty decent Nottingham Forest, aside from Arsenal and Newcastle, and only lost on the xG to the latter two, by 0.1 each time.)

Every metric this season is miles better, in 12 major head-to-heads, versus the eight faced in a longer period of time last season (the eighth game was late December, with no elite teams faced in Europe before Atalanta in the spring being the main difference).

Indeed, it’s hard to believe the absolute chasm in the data; where the overlying numbers, of 25% won last season to 83.3% this season, are reflective of the underlying numbers from the games.

Of course, next up is Everton away, which is not about elite opposition, but ferocious rivalry. A new saying could be ‘the data goes out the window for the derby’.

They are not included in this comparison, but it’s another game made tough by dint of the effort put in over the past month or so, as well as the context.

It’s also a fixture lost last season, where the ref gave Everton, who were overly physical, nine free-kicks until they were ahead, before giving one to Liverpool just before half-time. Of course, the ref was the very same Andy Madley, who just ‘managed’ the game at St James in a similar way, with 17 fouls against the Reds, twice the number given to them, to allow the home team maximal physical advantages, and who booked five Liverpool players, and just one Newcastle player, before the final whistle. But I digress.

So I included Champions League-qualifying teams of recent years, and Brighton, who are consistently good.

Of course, you don’t always have to beat the best team; each season is different in terms of where you get your points; you mostly just tend to need 90-or-so, one way or another. But while Liverpool are still generally beating the easier teams, the improvement against better teams, especially away, is worth noting.

In the following piece I will compare the eight 2023/24 games below with the 12 of 2024/25:

1. Chelsea

2. Newcastle Utd

3. Aston Villa

4. Tottenham

5. Brighton

6. Manchester City

7. Manchester Utd

8. Arsenal

This season:

1. Manchester Utd

2. Milan

3. Bologna

4. Chelsea

5. RB Leipzig

6. Arsenal

7. Brighton

8. Bayer Leverkusen

9. Aston Villa

10. Real Madrid

11. Man City

12. Newcastle Utd

In addition, there’s some hugely promising data in the home vs away data, this season overall, and when compared to last season.

This is especially encouraging, given that no one below 11th in the table (and therefore with less than 20 points) has visited Anfield yet.

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