What’s In The Box? Liverpool Need Christmas Miracles To Win Penalties – Years of Shocking Data

Liverpool’s freakishly low penalty awards since 2015; can Howard Webb change things?

And it gets worse. The league resumes with Liverpool on zero league penalties, to maintain the freakishly low number the Reds win compared to a) other good teams, and b) mediocre teams and c) often, relegated teams.

Compare Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp to rival teams – or to Liverpool (who were less good) before Klopp arrived – and the penalty data remains utterly baffling, and a sign of something not being right with the way the Reds are officiated.

You don’t even need to think I’m biased, because a) the data speaks for itself; and b) Klopp’s Liverpool are treated incredibly unfavourably when compared to far inferior Liverpool teams.

More penalties are awarded these days (see graph below).

Liverpool have attacked better between 2015 and 2022 than at any other point in the Premier League era, and maybe at any point in their history; most neutrals agree they’ve been one of the all-time great attacking teams. The data backs that up.

Yet Liverpool have been awarded far fewer Premier League penalties since 2015 than beforehand.

As a trend, it’s bizarre (albeit I have in the past shown a correlation between the number of British – and specifically English – players in the team and the penalties awarded, as well as showing that across the league as a whole over seven seasons, analysing over 600 penalty awards, foreign players are treated more harshly at both ends to a statistically significant degree as defined by a top scholar I had check the numbers, and Liverpool just happen to have foreign players at both ends).

Since Klopp took over, Liverpool have been electric (even the difficult first couple of years were full of great attacking play), yet his Reds have won 8.2% fewer penalties per season compared to Liverpool’s average in the 13 seasons before he arrived.

(Yet the Reds have conceded more penalties per season under Klopp, despite several elite seasons defensively.)

So, in the period where Premier League penalties per season has risen by 16.7% (100.5 per season, vs 86.1), Liverpool’s have fallen by 8.2%; despite being almost immeasurably better as a football team.

This season there have been 40 Premier League penalties already, on course for over 100 again. To repeat, Liverpool have won zero.

Liverpool’s battle for the top four this season has been hampered by injuries, but also, seeing as the underlying attacking numbers are as good as ever, the officiating. A penalty is an 80% chance to score. And a goal scored is worth, on average, one point.

All bar one of the 14 teams who have an attacking xG (expected goals) above 16.22 has at least one Premier League penalty, with that xG roughly half the xG posted by the elite teams (including Liverpool).

Yet Liverpool are the exception, having won zero penalties (teams with zero penalties highlighted below), with an xG roughly twice the minimum ‘entry’ level, at 29.58. And that’s 29.58 without the extra 0.80 per penalty, as they’ve had none.

Liverpool are also in the relegation places in 2022/23 for balance of penalties, despite being 6th in the table for balance of xG. As often seems the case, Liverpool are sandwiched in penalty balances between promoted teams (sometimes it’s relegated teams; this year it could be both).

This is not about conspiracies against Liverpool FC, but about the optics referees face, and often, the pressure to not bow to the Kop; seeing as most of this weirdness relates to Anfield.

Liverpool win merely a normal number of penalties for an elite team away from home, but a below-average number for at Anfield, despite having the best record for any Premier League club in any home stadium for the past five or so years (minus the empty, soulless Covid period).

On average, looking back at some work I did a couple of years ago, the higher you finish in the table, the more penalties you win (data from 2015-2020); the better you are, the more penalties you win. The average from top to bottom halves.

Except that Liverpool, under Klopp, have won the penalties equivalent to a team finishing 5th-6th. And take away the penalties awarded by the two best referees, and the stats become mind-boggling.

My argument is also that the problem mostly lays with all but those two referees: the two clear best referees (one from Manchester, as well) give Liverpool penalties at a healthy rate in their 63 league games combined; all the others, on average, in over 200 games, give Liverpool penalties in keeping with what a team near the relegation zone can expect.

As noted in an Athletic piece about Howard Webb taking over from the truly atrocious, spineless Mike Riley,

“Webb was the best [referee] around for a spell and now must bring his vast experience to a group that routinely finds itself in the firing line of Premier League managers. Standards are not what they were, with concerns over the quality of referees in a band below Michael Oliver and Anthony Taylor, the two Englishmen that oversaw games at the World Cup in Qatar.”

So, Michael Oliver and Anthony Taylor are deemed the best by those outside the Premier League, and presumably most neutrals would agree.

Yet they have given Klopp’s Liverpool almost half of the penalties the team has won since he succeeded Brendan Rodgers (a big penalty winner with Liverpool and Leicester), despite taking charge of only a quarter of the games.

They’ve also handled more games against better opposition, too. More Big Six clashes, and derbies, and key matches.

What do Taylor and Oliver do differently?

They make decisions.

They punish Liverpool too, but they make decisions.

Most other referees simply close their eyes and put their fingers in their ears when refereeing Liverpool, in order for the Reds to have to wait an average of 10 games for a spot-kick from the 200+ games officiated by anyone other than Taylor and Oliver. That’s the frequency with which a team that finishes 16-17th gets a penalty.

(The graph below is a bit busy, but it tells a story.)

And again, this is Liverpool as one of the world’s best sides in this time, ranked the best in Europe in 2020 and 2022, and Champions League finalists three times, plus three 92-99-point league seasons.

As a brief interlude, some weirdness:

– Penalties per game at World Cup: 64 games, 21 penalties 0.33 (0.164 per team). Argentina had five in seven games. It helped.

– Penalties per game in Premier League this season: 146 games, 40 penalties: 0.27 (0.136 per team) = the average team can expect a penalty every 7.3 games, so Liverpool should logically have two by now.

– One weird anomaly from Italy. In the last 15 games, Roma have won seven penalties and seen five opponents sent off. They have conceded no penalties and had three red cards (two to Jose Mourinho). Mourinho constantly puts pressure on refs before, during and after games. The run of generous decisions began after he sounded off about how bad the referees were.

Again, Liverpool attack with pace and skill, and often have a ton of touches in the opposition box. Up to last season (I haven’t updated the data), Liverpool were ranking 24th out of 27 teams to play in the top flight in recent seasons for number of touches in the opposition box per penalty.

The Reds ranked below Cardiff, Burnley, Swansea, Watford and Norwich, and above only Leeds, Stoke and Huddersfield. (Obviously Liverpool have had hundreds of touches in the box this season, and no penalties.)

I don’t believe teams try not to make desperate fouls against Liverpool but are somehow more than happy to do so against other top teams (and not so top teams), who all win more penalties.

Unfortunately, Michael Oliver should have given Liverpool a penalty against Arsenal this season and in the same game gave a soft one for Arsenal, that probably cost the Reds three points. There have been four or five clear shouts for penalties, but none have been given.

But Oliver is an elite referee. So is Anthony Taylor, even if he bottles some big decisions at times, and should not be doing games involving Liverpool and Manchester clubs.

I learned to accept Taylor once I looked into his data and stopped judging him on one or two major decisions that went against Liverpool. That’s what data is there for - to challenge our preconceptions and misunderstandings.

Even so, to go 14 games this season with the best attacking xG in the league (when you remove the xG from penalties awarded!), and not win a single penalty, is just plain weird.

Take Paul Tierney. (No, please.)

So far, 17 league games reffing Liverpool in his career, and leaving aside some super-bad VAR blunders in his additional games (some real howlers), it’s zero penalties for the Reds, one for the opposition, as well as no red cards for opponents and two for Liverpool. That’s 17 games, with three big decisions: all against Liverpool.

What are the odds of that being a plausible, correct streak, when the team is elite? It seems fishy.

I look for weirdness in data. Sometimes its just randomness; but too much weirdness for too long suggests something is wrong, just as we’d find it odd if no one with blue eyes ever played in the Premier League, or the Premier League was 90% comprised of Latvians. It wouldn’t make much sense.

Over a large sample size of nearly 300 league games (272, with 172 won; 581 goals scored, 260 against), Jürgen Klopp’s ‘penalties received’ record suggests something is wrong; just as I noted that something was wrong in how Mo Salah tends to need about the equivalent of a league game plus 30 minutes of extra time to win a single free-kick in the Premier League, while similar players won one every 20-30 minutes.

Again, that’s not right for one of the best attacking players the league has ever seen.

Liverpool get a weirdly low number of penalties at Anfield (on average, over 60% of penalties go the home team, which again shows a general ‘homer’ bias as only 50-55% of the key metrics support the home team – but it’s below half for Liverpool), and even fewer if the referee is from the north west; fewer still if closer to Merseyside. The fear of looking biased makes people go out of their way to look unbiased.

Below is a graph from 18 months ago, to show how, despite being arguably the joint-best team in that period, with certainly the best home record, Liverpool won roughly half as many penalties at home as either Manchester club. (I haven’t updated the data since I last did a big penalty analysis – and I want to get this piece out before the league resumes – but obviously this season isn’t going to help Liverpool’s tally.)

Again, if Liverpool were winning a ton of penalties away, that would balance it out, but they don’t.

I’ve also shown that age makes a difference: referees who grew up with the myth of the Kop winning penalties duly awarded the Reds fewer penalties. Those born in the 1970s were harsher on Liverpool than those born in the 1980s.

Again, I don’t think any of these are coincidences. They are biases, and in some cases, lame attempts to look unbiased. (I feel this last issue is a mainstay of modern life, as people spend all their time on social media either calling people biased, or saying that they themselves are not biased.)

I’ve pointed out how, even now, ex-players and managers say things like “you don’t get those decisions at Anfield”. Frank Lampard said it last season about not getting a penalty, when actually, Everton had won two penalties in recent Anfield derbies, and you had to go back years for one for Liverpool against Everton at home.

So yes, you don’t get those penalties at Anfield – if you’re Liverpool.

Facts don’t matter; emotions and myths and narratives are more powerful. Lampard merely said what Steve Bruce, Sam Allardyce and other visiting managers were always saying. Refs are put under pressure before games to not bow to the power of the Kop, and the myth that Liverpool win a lot of penalties (which may have been true in the dim, distant past, often when the team was full of English players).

This is how confirmation bias works: everyone thinks something is true, when the opposite is true, because any tiny, single example is used to confirm the misconception.

The data should speak for itself. (I’ve got tons more, but I’ve tried to keep limit it; I can share the rest in time.)

As to why Klopp’s Liverpool get so few decisions, it’s hard to know for sure, beyond the various theories I’ve posited here. (Another is that he’s an angry foreigner, even though he never criticises refs before and after games. He got a ban for shouting at a linesman after Mo Salah was rugby tackled to the ground. Because Klopp knows the data on Salah.)

I don’t think it’s a grand conspiracy, but the little dishonesties and fearful moments that are part of any public official’s life, as they try to look the part, and perhaps get an easy life. Not making decisions is often easier than making decisions; it’s stealing a living, to be something like a traffic cop and never stop any traffic. I also think the heads of organisations can reward certain behaviours, especially if they don’t have the data and are working on poor instincts.

When it comes to Liverpool, refs just don’t make decisions.

Maybe Howard Webb will change that. But hey lads, it’s Howard Webb.

Anyway, I’d like to wish you all a happy Christmas, and if you’re reading, Mr Webb, I’d ask for the gift of a more logical, fair and rational distribution of penalties for the Reds, based on what happens on the pitch, not fear of what might happen on social media.

Be brave. Go look at the data. Tell your officials to make decisions, and to not be scared of myths and the trolls who don’t look at the data, and just think Liverpool win lots of penalties. Because bar the two best referees in the league, Liverpool hardly win penalties at all. And even with the penalties they award, the Reds still win them overall at the rate of a Europa League side.

All I want for Christmas and 2023 is some competent, unbiased refereeing. It’s not a big ask, surely?