What New Ways Can Cynics Devise To Undermine Liverpool’s Excellence?

The league is boring, the football robotic, yada yada

It only occurred to me fully, when looking back across the season and going over my old articles, just how many ways Liverpool were either written off or, once successful, undermined, asterisked and caveated. The relentlessness of the undermining is astonishing.

Now, towards the end of the season, in mid-April, the new inventive way to dismiss Liverpool (albeit as an attack on the quality of the league and the football) is that the game is now boring, and less special, and a bit dull.

The BBC quoted Gary Neville after the drab Manchester derby.

“This robotic nature of not leaving our positions, being micro-managed within an inch of our lives, not having any freedom to take a risk to go and try and win a football match is becoming an illness in the game. It’s becoming a disease in the game.”

And Neville’s United, under Alex Ferguson, were happy to turn up at Anfield with Wayne Rooney in wide midfield, to try and make 0-0 turds of the matches 15-20 years ago, and often did so.

Remember, Neville also said Liverpool wouldn’t make the top six this season.

This week the Athletic had a pretty good podcast on the fact that the Premier League isn’t suddenly as boring as everyone has been saying since Neville (clearly not enjoying the season given his beloved Man United under Ruben Amorim are now statistically worse than Roy Hodgson’s Liverpool) broached the subject, and Jack Pitt-Brooke and the likeable Opta alum Duncan Alexander made some good points, which have also been made in a few other places:

• A near-record number of goals;

• A near-record low number of 0-0 draws;

• Away teams doing better than ever, bar empty stadia season;

• Mid-table teams much better;

• Loads of comeback wins.

And they note that these are the very things people would say they wanted to see in a good football season.

They posited the idea that the title and relegation being as good as sorted so early (only Southampton’s relegation is confirmed, mind) removes a lot of drama, which is fair enough. The sharp-end jeopardy is not there, but as they say, that’s not Liverpool’s fault.

But the general gist, across the media and internet, is that Liverpool are only winning the league because everyone else is rubbish. This is clearly false, as I keep pointing out with 11 or 12 teams ranked in the top 25 in the Club Elo Index over the past month, and Liverpool top, Arsenal 2nd.

Liverpool remain damned with faint praise, or indeed, every excuse to not give Arne Slot and his players (and the club as a whole) due credit is often reeled out.

The idea that just being so much better than everyone else automatically makes everyone else rubbish is just weird. (Especially as Liverpool also walked the new 36-team Champions League group.)

Let’s look at athletics, and a 1,500m race from the 2025 European Championships. Some Norwegian called Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who you should have heard of; if you don’t recognise him, he’s all in red, which makes it an even better metaphor.

1) – boy, he’s a bit shit, isn’t he? Look at him here, miles off the pace. The fraud!

2) – I thought this guy was supposed to be the best? He’s ahead, sure, but he’s hardly slaying the rest of the pack! He’ll get overtaken, mark my words!

3) – Err… Blimey, how rubbish must these other racers be? What a weak field of runners. What a boring race! This proves that Ingebrigtsen is clearly not that good.

Athletic

Pitt-Brooke and Alexander made good points about what is clearly recency bias, talking about how people have forgotten a lot of the football from earlier in the season; a point I’ve made a few times, as Liverpool’s best football, like a lot of champions, was over the first two-thirds of the campaign, before the run-in peters out a bit (especially if you’re well ahead, and especially if you’ve played 10 Champions League games, and reached a domestic cup final by playing only Premier League opposition).

There’s some good talk on nostalgia, and if people aren’t away of the inherent bias and distortions of nostalgia, they shouldn’t be making any comparisons. Nostalgia removes the boring parts, and keeps the highlights. And recency bias means you forget what happened any time before 30 seconds ago.

A general media issue has been the talk of PSG being “the greatest team in Europe” right now; that’s a lot easier if you’ve not had a testing season overall. And even then, Arsenal, Liverpool and Aston Villa have all won games against PSG this season. Villa are 7th in England right now.

PSG look superb (as I’ve said, the fastest team I’ve ever seen), but they caught Liverpool at a good time; albeit Liverpool were supposed to have caught every other team in the first 40 games of the season at a good time, it seemed. Arsenal have also joined Liverpool in beating Real Madrid at home.

However, Pitt-Brooke was sloppy in saying that Liverpool “have had no injuries”, which even allowing for conversational phraseology, I take exception to.

Fewer injuries than some rivals? Yes. No injuries? That’s like saying that Arsenal have conceded “no goals all season”, or Man United “have no good players”. (Wait ...)

I appreciate that they made the correct point that Slot has, as he was tasked with doing, minimised injuries (by having a slightly less energetic style of play), but saying no injuries minimises the actual injuries.

Alisson has missed a third of the league season. Why is that glossed over?

The best keeper in the league also missed European games against Bayer Leverkusen, Leipzig and Real Madrid, that the Reds won with ease; while Caoimhín Kelleher’s league starts include facing Chelsea, Arsenal, Man City, Brighton, Newcastle, Bournemouth and Aston Villa, plus Spurs and Newcastle in the cup (but which was expected).

As such, Alisson missed many of the season’s toughest games. Does anyone note this? Of course not, as … #narratives.

Diogo Jota hasn’t been the same since missing months after having his ribs caved in against Chelsea; Harvey Elliott hasn’t made much impact after a great preseason since then breaking his foot. New signing Federico Chiesa has had fitness issues all season. Cody Gakpo got injured when in supreme form. All three right-backs have been out injured for long spells, including Joe Gomez, who got injured while playing his best football in years back at centre-back while Ibou Konaté was injured; all stuff I’ve noted often enough.

I just find it a slightly lazy way, to not say “fewer” injuries and just say “no” injuries. As if it’s just too darned hard to add the nuance of a word with one extra syllable.

Liverpool have also had massive contract situations playing out in the media that could have been a distraction to many, as a new manager had what people said was the “impossible” job of following Jürgen Klopp, with the summer, which a new manager especially needs, also lacking senior players for preseason due to the various international tournaments.

Pitt-Brooke then says the performance gap between Liverpool and Arsenal is not actually that wide, but on xG Difference, which I believe to be the best readily available metric for judging performance, Liverpool are a massive 85.7% better (season averages of 1.3 vs 0.7 per game), while Arsenal are only a little better than Chelsea on the metric, and a little bit better than Bournemouth, and then a little bit (more) better than Man City and Newcastle.

Liverpool are obviously massively better than all these teams on xG Difference. And on xG created, Liverpool are 20 ahead of Arsenal for the season, but defensively similar. (Arsenal are risk-averse in attack and get a lot of set-piece goals, which they are excellent at.)

The graph below shows how far ahead Liverpool are from the rest; in a league of their own.

And the graph below here shows the running 6-game xG Difference per game all season long vs challengers (until two of them fell away and I stopped tracking them), and how Liverpool have been ahead all season by some distance, but pulled further ahead midseason. At no point have Arsenal been close to Liverpool this season on performance, based on xG.

There were comparisons made with 2015/16, but even that misses the point that the Premier League in 2015/16 was much lower quality, by all metrics.

While the scoring system may have changed, these were the UEFA coefficients in 2015/16, with England, who didn’t have a lot of success in Europe, well behind Spain:

1. Spain 97.713

2. England 84.748

3. Germany 81.641

Whereas now, the Premier League is miles ahead of Italy, and Spain in 3rd place:

1. England 111.124

2. Italy 95.793

3. Spain 93.168

So Liverpool, unlike the remarkable story of Leicester in 2015/16 are winning an historically strong Premier League, which has been awarded a fifth Champions League spot, and not a weak one.

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