So, um, Liverpool, huh? Are they... back?
In Sunday's win against Manchester City, it sure looked like it. And in Wednesday's 7-1 blowout against Rangers, it absolutely looked like it. But, of course, there was the Arsenal game last Sunday, and the Brighton game before it, and the Napoli game, and the Everton game, and the Manchester United game, and the Crystal Palace game, and the Fulham game in which it looked like anything but.
The Liverpool team we've seen over the past week was the team many of us expected to see at the start of the 2022-23 season: absolutely electric in open space against the best teams in Europe, but also able to blow less talented sides into outer space thanks to a growing, dynamic collection of forward and attacking midfield talent.
And yet that's mostly not the team that Liverpool have been since the season started: a leggy, vulnerable side that frequently looked old and struggled to turn final-third dominance into goals. They are, after all, now in eighth place in the Premier League with 13 points from nine games -- much closer to Nottingham Forest in 20th than to Arsenal in first.
Did something get fixed? Are they just finally playing up to their talent level? Or is this just a blip before more months of maddening inconsistency?
Why Liverpool Have Fewer Points Than Brighton or Newcastle
We'll get the luck/randomness/variance -- whatever word makes you feel the best about not having control of your destiny -- out of the way first.
Heading into Sunday's match with City, Liverpool's league-table position was a lie. Through eight matches, they had the fourth-best goal differential per game (plus-1.00) and the fourth-best non-penalty expected-goal differential per game (plus-0.64, per the site FBref). Despite that, Liverpool were in 11th, tied on 10 points with three other teams that had negative goal differentials.
At this point in the season, both goal differential and xG differential are much better predictors of future performance. But even though Liverpool obviously were not the 11th-best team in the league, even the most optimistic Liverpool supporter couldn't have claimed that they'd been anything better than the fourth-best team in the league through the first two months of the season. That's still a significant decline from last season and most of the past four years -- and it's one that looks even worse when you see something like this:
If you believe the betting markets -- and you probably should, on average, if you're interested in things like "not losing all of your money" -- then Jurgen Klopp's side was supposed to be the clear second-best team in England behind Manchester City and also the second-best team in the world, as they had the second-shortest odds to win the Champions League behind Pep Guardiola's group. You don't need a data-science degree, or an innate understanding of the programming language R, to understand why.
Liverpool made it to the final of all three cup competitions they were in last season and lost the league title to City by a single point. They lost Sadio Mane to Bayern Munich, but brought in Darwin Nunez from Benfica and Fabio Carvalho from Fulham for added depth, and were also getting a healthy Harvey Elliott back after an ankle injury cut down his sensational start to last season.
And yet, they got worse -- and significantly so.
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Over the previous season, their non-penalty xG differential was all the way up at plus-1.3 -- nearly double the current season's rate. Much of the focus has been on the defensive side of the ball because, well, when you score nine goals in a single game, no one's gonna say a word about how you could be scoring more goals, but there was decline on both ends.
2021-22 attack: 2.19 npxG per game, 19 shots per game, 0.12 xG per shot
2022-23 attack: 1.84 npxG per game, 17.2 shots per game, 0.11 xG per shot
2021-22 defense: 0.89 xG per game, 8 shots per game, 0.11 xG per shot
2022-23 defense: 1.2 xG per game, 8.6 shots per game, 0.14 xG per shot
Still, the attack was mostly fine. They were creating the fourth-most xG in the league, and there was reason to believe that it was their floor. Through eight matches, they were averaging 44 touches in the attacking penalty area -- four more than in the previous season, and four more than second-best Manchester City this year. They were basically creating the minimum number of chances possible from a ton of dangerous possession.
It wasn't quite the case on the other end, though. While they ranked second in xG conceded last season -- unless I note otherwise, "second" means "behind City" -- they were suffering the double whammy this season of conceding more chances and conceding better chances. Before Sunday, nine other Premier League teams were allowing fewer xG per game than Liverpool.
They'd allowed 19.5 penalty area touches compared to 16 the previous season and they'd allowed an extra half-shot per game, but those specific numbers still ranked fourth- and third-best in the league. The big issue: they were conceding the best shots (from an opponent's perspective) of any team in the league, as measured by xG per shot.
So, they had a little less control of games (more shots), they defended a little less effectively in the defensive third (more penalty area touches), and they just fell apart once their opponents got into the box. That's how they dropped from one of the best defensive units in the world to somewhere behind the likes of Wolves and Aston Villa.
How They Might Have Fixed It
The two biggest explanations for everything you just read: injuries and aging.
Going into Sunday's game, the following players had played fewer than 60% of the Premier League minutes: DF Andy Robertson (56%), DF Joel Matip (36%), MF Thiago (32%), FW Diogo Jota (15%), DF Ibrahima Konate (3%) and MF Naby Keita (0%). Something all those players have in common: They are either literal defenders or non-defenders who are incredibly active and effective when the other team has the ball.
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In addition to that, half of the players who have played at least 60% of the available minutes this season are 30 years old... or older.
Across the first eight matches, Liverpool's average age weighted by minutes played was 28.1, third-oldest in the league. On average, a player's peak occurs within the 24 to 28 range. That makes them the third-oldest team in the league, and it means that a large chunk of their roster are at an age where you certainly don't expect any improvement and you do expect some decline.
On the other end of the spectrum, Arsenal, the team that's most exceeded preseason expectations, have an average age of 24.6, second-youngest in the league. Forget tactics; the biggest reason the Gunners have improved is likely that a bunch of their players all got better at the same time.
At Anfield, though, that combination of injuries to their best players and their best players getting older goes a long way toward explaining what we've seen so far: a kind of imitation Liverpool, one that has most of the same names and plenty of the same moves, a team that works well sometimes, but feels hollow as soon as you apply enough pressure.
And so, enter Plan B. Or maybe it's Plan D.
When Klopp got to Liverpool, the team quickly caught on to the gegenpress, but beyond that and their sheer talent... there wasn't much else. Teams that didn't want to play out of the box and didn't care if they had the ball were able to easily frustrate them when the press wasn't clicking or the long-range shots didn't find a corner.
The next step: Give the keys to the fullbacks.
Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold created chances to a degree a pair of fullbacks never really have before -- Robertson with his overlapping athleticism, and TAA with his wand of a right foot. It only worked because of a workman-like midfield of Fabinho, Jordan Henderson and Georginio Wijnaldum that maintained possession and positioning, but didn't do much else.
That was good enough for them to win Champions and Premier League titles, but in my opinion, it still wasn't as good as what we saw last season. Thiago replaced Wijnaldum and, mainly, Jota took over for Roberto Firmino. That meant that the front line now had three goal-scorers (Jota, plus Salah and Mane) and the midfield had a world-class creative passer who also didn't sacrifice any of the defensive stability from the past. They didn't win either major trophy, but they really were one of the best teams the Premier League -- and the world -- has ever seen.
The reason, though, teams are almost never as good as Liverpool were last season is that it's really hard to do -- even if you've already done it. The 4-3-3 they played worked so well because of the high-speed rotations between Salah, Alexander-Arnold and Henderson on the right side. Meanwhile, the off-ball movement of the other two attackers and Robertson on the left opened up all kinds of space for Thiago to handle the creative load by himself on the other side. Matip carried the ball forward to add another threatening body in the attacking third, Fabinho mopped everything up, Van Dijk put out fires and Alisson saved so many 1v1s.
It worked, but in retrospect, it sure seems like everything had to work for it to work. Thiago had to stay healthy for the important matches, or Keita had to be there to play whenever he didn't. Henderson had to squeeze another year of defensive cover and attacking production out of his aging legs, and also had to be able to cover as a defensive midfielder when Fabinho was hurt. Fabinho, Van Dijk, Matip and Alisson had to be near-perfect, and Konate did, too. Their opponents had to stumble over a couple key counter-attacks, while Salah and Mane both had to be there to smash the door down when all the other stuff didn't work.
Well, Mane is gone, and Salah is a year older. Same for Matip, Alisson, Van Dijk, Fabinho, Thiago, and Henderson. Keita and Konate, meanwhile, have barely played at all. Plus, they all have a marathon-season on their legs now. Last year, everything aligned and allowed them to play how they played. This year, a bunch of players just seem a half-step slower here or there, and it's led to an exponential decline. Everything fell out of order, but they kept playing the same way -- until now.
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Two weeks ago, Klopp switched to something of a 4-4-2, or a 4-2-3-1, or a 4-2-2-2 formation. With this approach, Liverpool battered Rangers twice, and got battered by Arsenal. The issue with the 4-3-3 is that it only really seemed to work with a certain subset of players functioning at a very high, very specific level. It just wasn't a customizable formation at all because it didn't need to be; Liverpool tried to blow you off the field, in the same way, no matter who you were.
This new set-up, though, seems like a much better fit for a team that has A) lots of attackers and attacking midfielders, and B) not many midfielders.
In the first match against Rangers, Thiago and Henderson played as the double pivot, just spraying balls up for the four attackers to chase. Klopp tried that midfield away at Arsenal -- a much better team than Rangers! -- and it only really worked when Liverpool were losing and the Gunners were content to let them have the ball. It fell apart in the second half -- one total shot -- especially after Luis Diaz and Alexander-Arnold went off injured. The set-up blew Rangers away in Scotland and then -- well, it did this against Manchester City:
Per Stats Perform, that's just the fifth time in five seasons that the xG gap in one of City's matches was more than 1.0 in favor of their opponent. Throw in one better decision from Nunez on one of the late-game counter-attacks, and it might be the biggest gap any team has put up against City over that stretch.
While the Arsenal game featured four pure attackers with two passers behind them, Klopp seemed to find the right balance for Sunday's win. Fabinho came in for Henderson, which brought more stability to the middle of the field. Elliott played wide right and as a kind of tweener attacker-midfielder, he tended to pinch in and aid possession; he was equally comfortable dropping deeper to defend or making late runs forward and creating around the box.
With Elliott out right, it meant Salah played centrally. After looking isolated out wide against Arsenal, he was unstoppable against City, constantly on the ball in dangerous areas and looking like the best player on the field in a game that featured Erling Haaland. Behind Salah, Firmino was able to drop deeper and help the two midfielders in possession -- then, wide left, Jota provided a second goal threat in addition to Salah. They got a little bit of everything, from everywhere.
This formation almost necessitates a less-manic and more organized press, too, but perhaps that's not a bad thing for this current, aging roster. In a 4-3-3, you have the front three pressed up, with two midfielders pressed up behind them. In whatever you want to call this formation, you have four attackers with the two midfielders behind them, or: only four players pushed forward instead of five. It also just means there are more layers to get through for the opposition.
Earlier in the season, teams -- see: Palace, Crystal -- would break through the initial pressure and be clean through on goal. Now there's a line of attackers, then another line of attackers, then the midfielders, and then the back line. It just feels more solid.
Of course, playing in a slightly more rigid way probably lowers your ceiling a bit. I think you can only reach the heights Liverpool (and City) have reached over the past year-plus with either peak Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo on your team, or with a roster of players who can constantly execute fluid and unexpected attacking movements and rotations that are near-impossible for a defense to account for.
This, though, is a new team -- thanks to injuries, aging, the departure of Mane, as well as the arrivals or returns of talented-but-very-different attackers/midfielders like Luis Diaz, Nunez, Carvalho and Elliott. But even if it's unlikely to ever reach the heights of last season, there's suddenly lots of promise after a few months of poor play.
Not many teams will ever win a road Champions League game 7-1 or significantly outplay Guardiola's Manchester City. And, well, when you do both of those things, in back to back games? You're moving in the right direction.