The Premier League title race has featured just one viable horse this season – and Liverpool confirmed the inevitable as they laid their hands on the trophy with four games to spare.
A comeback victory at home to Tottenham Hotspur sealed the deal for Arne Slot’s side with a performance that typified everything that has made their season so successful and brought the title back to Anfield for the first time in five years. Here’s the key factors behind that title charge.
Right place, right time
To be clear, we don’t say any of this to diminish Liverpool’s accomplishments. You can only play within the context of the league you’re in within any given year, and nobody is calling Manchester United’s treble winning side of 1999 a bunch of frauds because actually they won the title with just 79 points. Nobody sensible, anyway.
But it is fair to say that the expected challengers gave Liverpool a clear and easy road to drive down. Manchester City allowed creeping squad issues to suddenly crash home at once, while Arsenal lost their heads too often in the early season and have quite simply drawn too many games over the campaign as a whole thanks to their lack of firepower, especially during Bukayo Saka’s lengthy absence.
Arsenal and Manchester City’s decline is spelt out by this simple fact: after adjusting for difference in schedule, Liverpool were third with 74 points from 34 games last season. That is eight points behind this year’s total to date, but still would have been enough to put them 11 points clear this season.
So it’s hard to make an argument that this Liverpool is more gutsy or resilient or…whatever other nebulous adjectives you want to throw at them…than they were last term. They have only a marginally better record after going behind (1.57 points per game) than last year (1.56), but this season that has been enough to make them pretty comfortably the best in the division at winning from behind; last season they lagged well behind City.
When it comes to not squandering points, Liverpool are again extremely comparable (2.63ppg) to last season (2.66) – but behind only Newcastle, with Arsenal and Manchester City suffering much more marked declines.
Most notably, and unlike their would-be rivals, Liverpool have made a positive habit out of finding ways to win even in games where they have not played particularly well.
They have looked decidedly dodgy for significant spells of most of their games since mid-February, allowing Everton, Wolves and West Ham to score equalisers and going behind to Aston Villa, Southampton, Fulham and Tottenham. Yet across that 11 game spell, they have won eight, drawn two and lost just one.
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Refusing to panic in the transfer window
That underlines the fact that all Liverpool needed to do was remain stable to capitalise, and whether by accident or design, they did that – despite Slot’s arrival as Jurgen Klopp’s replacement.
It would have been especially easy for Slot to have kicked off about the lack of signings, but as a modern coach rather than an old-school manager, there was no such d***-swinging about ‘not being backed’.
Credit should be extended to Liverpool’s recognition that after missing out on their top transfer targets, they largely avoided resorting to just reaching for the next available warm body with a vaguely comparable skillset – Federico Chiesa aside.
As a result, practically no time has been wasted trying in vain to bed in new players who were simply never going to make the grade. There’s been nothing to emulate Steven Gerrard’s proclamation that he spent years at Liverpool closely watching new signings on the training ground, ‘wondering whether we’d bought a star or another dud, a king or a prat’.
Mo Salah, Mo Salah, Mo Salah
The impact of Mohamed Salah’s phenomenal season on the title race cannot be overstated. Reload your save from last summer, transfer Salah to Arsenal, and the Gunners win the league instead. The Egyptian has more Premier League goals (28) than Arsenal’s top three goalscorers combined (24), for god’s sake.
But it’s worth saying that this season has been exceptional even by his standards. This is already his second-best ever season in front of goal, behind only his first season at Anfield in 2017/18 (32 league goals, 44 in all competitions). Even with only three games left, it is not entirely inconceivable that he might go on to match or exceed that Premier League tally.
Over the past couple of months, we have felt Liverpool were a little bit guilty of “just give the ball to Salah, he’ll do something” – but it’s hard to blame them when that strategy has overall worked so well for them. A system should be designed to get the most out of your best players.
Slot’s changes have helped to enable that shift, and while everyone has (quite fairly and rightly) wittered on about how much Arsenal are crying out for a top-class centre-forward, it has barely even been a conversation that Diogo Jota and Darwin Nunez have just 11 goals between them this season. Another manager might have focused on trying to get more out of his central strikers, but Slot recognised that it didn’t particularly matter.
Salah taking centre stage to the extent he has has made an enormous difference to Liverpool. Last season, Salah’s goals made a difference of 11 points to Liverpool across seven games. This season he had already matched both numbers by 5th January, and is now on 19 points difference across 12 games.
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Throwback levels of midfield stability
Despite a cavalcade of options, Liverpool had a real squad issue in midfield when they finished 5th in 2022/23 – their own Manchester City moment – but invested in comprehensively rebuilding it.
Fabinho, Jordan Henderson, James Milner, Fabio Carvalho, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Stefan Bajcetic and Thiago were all excised in favour of Alexis Mac Allister, Dominik Szoboszlai, Ryan Gravenberch and the more bit-part Wataru Endo.
Two years into that revamp, Mac Allister, Szoboszlai, Gravenberch and Curtis Jones are all settled and clear on their respective roles.
Gravenberch is the tactical mind-reader and ball-carrier at the base of the midfield. No other Premier League midfielder has made as many interceptions as the Dutchman, who has shown a particularly notable improvement under Slot. Mac Allister offers great defensive work rate, passing range and innovation, including an eye for a long shot – as he showed so brilliantly against Tottenham. Jones is a pace-setter, full of short, tidy passes and an ability to find space in and around the box. Szoboszlai…well, he does almost all of the above.
That quartet have been so reliable in both form and fitness that there has been no real need for the depth and constant rotation that was a hallmark of Klopp’s midfield setup. Wataru Endo and Harvey Jones have been relegated to bit-part players as a result; their combined 31 Premier League appearances include zero starts and just 349 minutes of football.
Keeping key players fit
As an extension to that…goalkeeper, centre-forward, left-back and the left wing have been the only positions that have not been more or less nailed down for Liverpool throughout this season. Only two of those roles – up front and between the sticks – have been due to injury.
Alisson and Diogo Jota are the only two clear first-choice players to have hit double figures for absences this season, with the bulk of Liverpool’s longer-term or niggling injury issues afflicting fringe players like Chiesa, Elliott, Joe Gomez and Conor Bradley.
Performance coach Ruben Peeters and Slot’s different approach to training and preparation have been particularly credited for shortening the queue for Liverpool’s treatment room after both arriving from Feyenoord in the summer.
That marks a significant departure from the pile-up of problems that led to a fleet of academy players being called up to make up the bench last season – and ultimately meant they drifted out of the title picture towards the end of the season.
