Man City (A) – Match Preview Thread, and Further Comparisons in Playing Styles vs Officials' Treatment

Huge game ahead. Plus, possession, tackle volume, tackle success rate and relationship to fouls

The full pre-match thread will be added in due course, with team news, which Manchester ref will be officiating, and more.

(Aside from a few exceptions that you’ll always get, I’ve actually recently shown that hometown refs in hometown stadia, when it comes to Manchester and Liverpool, are more likely to favour the away side against standard Big Decision rates. So, Manchester refs at Anfield are more generous than other refs, and less generous than normal at Manchester stadia; similarly, Scouse refs are more generous to Manchester clubs in Manchester than normal, but obviously a Scouse ref would never be allowed to do a game involving Liverpool and a Manchester club, and Scouse refs rarely do games at Anfield. Not that I’ve explained it particularly well here.)

For now, I’ll also share a few thoughts on the impending top-of-the-table clash, and follow up on the article I wrote last week, by moving away from just 2023/24 data and looking back at the past five seasons.

So far, Liverpool players have already scored nine goals on full international duty (in some impressive wins), with Harvey Elliott also bagging one at U21 level; but the weekend remains a tough assignment: Man City away on a Saturday lunchtime, with more first XI players in the Liverpool team playing on other continents for their countries on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning UK time.

This international break, City have just Julián Álvarez away in South America; Liverpool have Alisson, Luis Díaz, Alexis Mac Allister and Darwin Núñez, all of whom would be the in the Reds' best XI if it wasn't a rush back to England. (Ederson has a minor injury.) The sooner 12:30 kick-offs are abandoned the better, as in general they aren't helpful to anyone, and rarely seem to produce the classics you get in the afternoons and evenings, under the floodlights. Can't another time-slot be found?

(That Liverpool have had 14 in the Jürgen Klopp era to everyone else having no more than six is another good reason to stop the unfairness. But midday is just not a great time to watch football, or play football. And that’s before getting onto 115 other reasons of unfairness.)

It may need Diogo Jota and Cody Gakpo to start, along with Mo Salah, as they all will have more time to prepare, and will likely have fewer minutes in their legs.

Díaz scored two remarkable headers against Brazil (giving Alisson no chance), and Dominik Szoboszlai’s goals for Hungary were like peak John Barnes vs QPR in 1987.

With Chelsea’s last-gasp equaliser in the thrilling sportswashing derby, Liverpool losing to City – the most common result in this fixture – will not open up a huge gap. Anything could be a bonus with that in mind, before the big teams come to Anfield.

This game will mean that Liverpool will have gone to Man City, Spurs, Chelsea, Newcastle and Brighton, who happen to include four of the five teams (as well as Liverpool) to have ultra-high possession stats this season.

(Newcastle are not an ultra-high possession team, with Arsenal the other one who are.)

That leads nicely into what I wanted to return to after last week.

Tackles, Possession and Fouls: A Five-Season Review

Rather than write a separate short article, I'll also use this as a chance to take some quick analysis from last week further, as promised, and look at the differences between the 22 very-high possession% teams/team seasons since 2019/20 (including six for this season so far) who also press hard and play a ‘generally’ similar way; and to see if being really good at tackling (and successfully warding off/riding opposition tackles) is consistent across the board, including for Liverpool's five qualifying seasons.

Indeed, apart from Spurs’ freakish success rate during 12 games this season, the Reds have had three seasons where they’ve been far better at this tackling lark than anyone else. (Albeit this season is the opposite.) Excluding this all season’s extrapolated figures, Liverpool have three seasons when they’ve had a +4-7% difference in their own tackle success rate and the opposition in each 38 games; over twice as good as Arsenal, the next best full-season team, in 2022/23.

So, I'll let you have a game of pin the tail on the donkey below, by saying that this includes 16 of the 22 teams (73%), within a cluster, and that it only includes Liverpool once. Can you guess where the Reds, occupying three of the top four tackle success rates, rank?

To add context, Spurs are also massive successful outliers, to match their massive tackle success differential.

Most of the teams are generally a bit better or worse at tackling (and warding off tackles), and a bit luckier or unluckier in being given free-kicks, and so mostly there's a total lack of outliers. Hence, the circle. (I assume that all teams in this list also want ‘play-on’ where possible.)

Indeed, within the circle are two of the three most aggressive (pressing-wise) and tackle-heavy teams; one side – playing something dubbed ‘murderball’ – made an astonishing 740 tackles in a season, against the 22-team high possession average of 501 (and were tackled 564 times, against an average of 530).

They pressed at least 10% more than any other team in the five years, with a PPDA (passes per defensive action) of 7.17, where the lower the more intense; the next-best is Spurs’ 7.82 so far this season.

You'd expect the muderballers to be outside the circle, having 176 more tackles and with an exactly equal success/failure rate (to within 0.03%) … but no, Leeds United at peak-Bielsa are within it, in the season when they also had 57% possession.

(Liverpool's best PPDAs rank 4th and 5th out of the 22; then 10th, 13th and 17th – albeit their hardest-pressing data predates 2019, as does that of Man City and some other clubs, who got it down to to around 6.5. The Reds’ PPDA in recent seasons has tended to be between 8.0 and 9.0, whereas City’s has dropped to c.10 and now c.12 with Erling Haaland in the team.)

But this is about tackle success differential (percentage difference between tackles won vs opposition tackles won against you), and free-kick differential.

However you play – and in this case, everyone keeps the ball a lot and presses from the front a lot – what seems key is the relation between tackle/tackled volume, tackle/tackled success differential, and free-kicks won vs free-kicks conceded.

And here are the results of the tail-pinning exercise.

Whether or not Liverpool are elite tacklers and retainers of possession via opposition tacklers, or the opposite, they concede more free-kicks than any other team. Whatever they do, they concede more free-kicks. (All data via FBref.com, any pressing data via Understat.)

The standard average for the Reds is around 70-80 more free-kicks conceded than won per season, and that’s where they’re headed with 25 so far this season, when extrapolated to 38 games (so, divide 25 by 12 and multiply by 38).

This, despite Liverpool consistently being tackled almost 100 times more than they tackle, and consistently tending to win more than they lose. Opponents fail to tackle Liverpool as successfully as Liverpool tackle them, whilst Liverpool average between 58-62% possession per season.

As such, it’s quite baffling to work out why the Reds then give masses more free-kicks away, also whilst not being seen as a dirty team (bar a few tactical fouls that all teams indulge in when playing a similar way).

Some of the extrapolations below will merge back towards the norm, but for Liverpool, it’s par for the course.

Interestingly, in the last five years, the only time that City were treated more harshly than Liverpool by refs on these metrics saw Liverpool win the title.

Had similar occurred in 2021/22, Liverpool would have been champions then too, to win the treble – albeit by that measure, perhaps not in 2019/20 (although the difference in 2019/20 was far less pronounced).

In one way, City themselves were treated harshly by refs prior to 2019 according to stats provided to me by Andrew Beasley when asking for flaws in my case, but only in relation to possession-adjusted fouls. Liverpool’s recent seasons sit just behind City’s peak 100-point-era team on this metric (giving away far more fouls based on possession than other teams), but I don’t know what the tackle frequency or tackle balance was in those earlier seasons.

This season, Liverpool have been poor at tackling via the outcomes, and of course, still give away more fouls than they win. (As well as having four mostly ludicrous or harsh red cards, two of which were borderline and you wouldn’t always see given, and two of which were just plain crazy.)

It feels that if Klopp’s team had 99% possession in a game, they’d still concede 15 free-kicks and be awarded just six.

Maybe there’s something I’m missing here. But as with things like Liverpool winning fewer penalties than other teams as consistently good as them (and many teams nowhere near good as them); and the 303-game, eight-year wait for an opponent to be sent off for a second yellow against the Reds; and the really low number of subjective VAR interventions for the Reds (the only helpful interventions tend to be over offsides, but subjective decisions are given against them by VAR); and all the other data – such as how basically only two active referees, who happen to be the most experienced and highly-rated by everyone – treat Liverpool like other clubs, remains fairly baffling too.

As ever, I end up shocked at the extent of the disparities in the data, which always seem more extreme than I expect.

The only officiating positive I can find is that Liverpool get an unusually low number of yellow cards, but of course, this is countered by Liverpool’s opponents also getting an unusually low number of yellow cards (and an almost non-existent number of second-yellows, with just one in almost 310 games).

For whatever reasons, refs don’t behave normally when they take charge of Liverpool games, as exemplified by Mo Salah winning a free-kick only once every 1.2 games since joining the club in 2017, while some mediocre, non-dangerous Premier League attackers can win four or five per game.

So, tackle quantity, tackle balance and tackle success rate (in similar-style teams in terms of possession and pressing style) seemed perhaps the final metrics to look into regarding officiating, as I try and close a loop on all this stuff.

And to me, it’s just as bad the rest of the data I’ve found, if not worse.

As with the financial disparities and apparently flagrant flaunting of laws by other clubs, whatever Liverpool achieve will have to be done the hard way.

And while Klopp himself may be part of the reason refs seem to punish his team (because he shouts at them), at least we get to watch a Jürgen Klopp team, sans dickheads, play great football, and constantly compete for silverware.

It’s been eight great years, and for all the titles bought by other clubs, nothing comes close to winning fair and square; or indeed, against the odds.

The match preview and debate, follows below for paying subscribers only.