Liverpool are -- how shall I put this? -- terrible. They stink. They cannot be trusted. Horrible. Awful. Yuck. Ew.
After winning the league and spending more than half a billion dollars on transfers this summer, they're in 12th place. They've conceded 20 goals. They have a negative goal differential. Only four defending champs have ever had fewer points at this stage of the season. They're 11 points back of first -- and seven points clear of the relegation zone.
I can keep going. You want me to keep going? OK, I'm going to keep going: This is the most goals since 2008-09 they've conceded through 12 Premier League matches. When Liverpool won the Champions League in 2018-19, they'd allowed only five at this point. When they won the league last season, they'd conceded eight through 12 matches. Again, just last season!
Despite the same center backs, the same midfielders, and a pair of new fullbacks who were supposed to be defensive upgrades on the guys they replaced, Liverpool have allowed fewer goals than only the four teams at the bottom of the table. And despite assembling what seemed like perhaps the deepest collection of attackers on a club not owned by a sovereign wealth fund, they've failed to score 20 goals in the first 12 matches for the first time in 10 seasons.
Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz are the two most expensive-to-acquire players in English soccer history -- and they have combined for zero goals and one assist. They've been so bad that Hugo Ekitike seems to be Liverpool's one bright spot of the summer transfer window ... and he's a center forward who has scored just three goals. Yesterday was Thanksgiving -- that's how far we are into the season! Mohamed Salah was the best player in the world for most of last season, and he's now scoring and assisting goals at a lower rate than Casemiro.
We'll see if Liverpool can figure out how to turn it around eventually. They have to ... right? But even if they do, their title race is over. Betting markets and savvy projection systems still give them around a 5% chance of surpassing the 11 teams ahead of them in the table before the end of May. They're saying there's a chance -- we're saying we'll believe it when they're not losing 3-0 at home to a team that's already fired two different managers.
Yet while this is a special and especially spectacular brand of collapse, Liverpool's season is broadly in line with what we see in most Premier League seasons: Whoever won the title in a given year gets worse the next year.
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How hard is it to win back-to-back Premier League titles?
Since the biggest clubs broke off and decided to hoard the television revenues for themselves at the beginning of the 1990s, there have been 32 completed Premier League seasons. And of those 32, just 11 have featured a repeat champion.
All of those 11 repeat winners check one of the following boxes:
☑ Managed by Sir Alex Ferguson
☑ Owned by a Russian oligarch
☑ Currently being investigated by the Premier League for 115 potential breaches of financial regulations
Manchester United did it six times, Manchester City four, and Chelsea once. Basically, in order to have repeated in the Premier League, you've needed to both be coached by arguably the greatest manager in the history of the sport while generating more revenue than any other club in the world or you've needed to be owned by someone whose only financial limits are whatever rules the various governing bodies have put in place.
And of those 11 sides, only five of them actually won more points during their repeat title season. And only four of them improved their goal differential. These are the teams that did both:
• Manchester United, 1999-2000: from 79 to 91 points and from plus-43 to plus-52
• Manchester United, 1993-1994 (42-game season): from 84 to 92 points and from plus-36 to plus-42
• Manchester City, 2021-2022: from 86 to 93 points and from plus-51 to plus-73
• Manchester City, 2023-24: from 89 to 91 points and from plus-60 to plus-61
While we're here, we'd might as well take a look at the worst title defenders, too. Four title winners have declined by at least 25 points and seen their goal differential shift by at least 25 goals:
• Blackburn Rovers, 1995-96: from 89 to 61 points and from plus-41 to plus-14
• Liverpool, 2020-21: from 99 points to 69 points and from plus-52 to plus-26
• Chelsea, 2015-16: from 87 points to 50 points and from plus-41 to plus-6
• Leicester City, 2016-17: from 81 points to 44 points and from plus-32 to minus-15
Blackburn's numbers are a little skewed since the league switched from 42 to 38 games after their title win in 1994-95, but the broader point is that there are way more teams that got a lot worse than teams that even got slightly better. In fact, nearly half of all the title winners (15) declined by at least five points and at least five goals of differential the year after winning the league.
If we take everyone and average it out, then here's what a Premier League title winner looks like: 87 points, 82.7 goals scored, and 32.1 goals allowed. And here's what they do the following season: 78.5 points, 76.9 goals scored, and 35.2 goals allowed.
There's a slightly bigger relative decline defensively (10% more goals conceded, 7% fewer goals scored), and it adds up to this: When a team wins the Premier League, they win 10% fewer points the following season.
So, why is it so hard to repeat?
If we look at the year before a team wins the title, then it averages out to this:
• 80.3 points
• 76.8 goals
• 32.8 goals against
So, the average three-year trend for a title winner has been about a seven-point improvement and then an eight- or nine-point decline: 80, up to 87, down to 78 or 79.
This makes sense: You tend to win the Premier League by being very good for multiple seasons, but you win the league in the season where everything goes right. There's often not a huge material difference between an 80-point, an 87-point, and a 79-point team -- a few fortunate bounces, a couple sweetly struck balls, some bad goalkeeping, or a couple marginal refereeing seasons is enough to separate equally talented teams by seven or eight points.
That, then, is the main lesson from all this: It's really hard to win the Premier League in back-to-back seasons, because to win it in the first place usually requires a confluence of outliers coming together.
Take Liverpool last year: Everyone stayed healthy, the new manager's tendencies seemed to perfectly align with the blind spots of the previous manager, both Liverpool center backs played close to faultlessly in their own third, Salah had the best season of his career, and the two holding midfielders, Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch, had the best seasons of their careers at the same time.
This year, there have already been a bunch of injuries (including to Gravenberch), manager Arne Slot still hasn't figured out how to adapt the approach to the new roster and new tactical environment, and neither Salah nor Mac Allister have been anywhere near the levels they hit last season. Meanwhile, per Gradient Sports data, Ibrahima Konaté has made the second-most positional mistakes of all Premier League center backs this season (last year, he was 28th).
That's still not enough to explain just how much worse Liverpool have been this season, but it at least gets us closer.
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On top of the within-team variance, teams also only have so much control over what their opponents do. Take Manchester United in both 2011-12 and 1998-99. They improved on the point totals from the previous, title-winning seasons. Their goal differential improved by 15 goals both times, and both times, they still didn't repeat as champions.
The reverse can also be true and often was true for the same team and the same manager. United's point totals dropped by 11 points and seven points in the 2000-01 and 1996-97 seasons, respectively, and they still won the league both times. Meanwhile, in each of Arsenal's three title defenses, they declined by zero, seven and nine points, and they didn't repeat in any of them.
Last season, Liverpool, of course, benefited from key injuries, key player declines, or a combination of both at Manchester City and Arsenal. Neither club had won fewer than 85 points in either of the prior two seasons; in 2024-25, neither club won more than 74.
Should we have seen this coming, then? If so, there was plenty of money to be made, as most sportsbooks listed Liverpool as the favorites before the season began and then shortened their odds more and more as they won game after improbable game over the first five weeks of the season.
But it is almost always easier to predict what won't happen than what will. And since the Premier League started, the repeat champions do tend to share a number of performance-based characteristics: they finished second or first the year before winning, the improvement in their title-winning season was by fewer than seven points, and their title win came with 87 points or more. So, teams that were already excellent didn't have an outlier spike season, and didn't win with a relatively low point total.
Of the previous 32 league winners, 11 of them were able to check off only one of those three boxes, and just one of them repeated as champion. And that was 2017-18 Manchester City, who had just won 100 points, the most in league history.
If we look back to Liverpool from last season, they did improve by only two points from the previous season, but they also only won 84 points en route to claiming the title, and they had finished third the previous season. They'd maintained stability but they leapt multiple spots up the table and landed in first without the kind of points haul that makes future dominance more likely.
And so, even before the season began, Liverpool looked like the team they are now: a team that's not going to win the Premier League.