Assessing The 2024/25 Premier League
Liverpool are top, Pep Guardiola is on a losing streak, Arsenal seem in crisis and Nottingham Forest are the Premier League surprise package. What's going on?
An international break offers a good opportunity to take stock of the club season. The data remains static for a week or two, rather than updating every few days.
Liverpool are top of the Premier League, with a five point advantage over Manchester City, nine ahead of the chasing pack. Before the season got underway, the Reds were given just a 5.1 per cent chance of winning the title by Opta; that figure now stands at 62.3, almost a two-in-three shot. Their performance across the opening 11 match weeks of 2024/25 have been so strong as to suggest it’s likelier Arne Slot’s side win the league than don’t.
For many, this is a huge surprise. None of the 30 pundits asked by the BBC thought the Reds would finish top when the season began. Some didn’t even see Liverpool taking one of the Champions League positions in May, a viewpoint not only limited to the horrendous takes that spew forth from former Manchester United players either.
It was reasonable to think the transition from Jürgen Klopp to Slot could prove difficult. I had mild concerns myself. But the narrative this season is that the title race last term was between two teams. Here’s the table entering the first weekend of April.
At that point, Liverpool had taken 90 points from their previous 38 games. Even though 2023/24 fizzled out, the Reds entered this season with a strong body of work behind them.
The downturn across the final eight matches of last season began with a 2-2 draw at Old Trafford. Playing away against United is the only one of the octet of results that Liverpool have had a chance to address. While they won that game 3-0 and collected a point at Arsenal when they suffered a loss at the Emirates in February, defeat to Nottingham Forest has left them with the same points total as the corresponding fixtures generated in 2023/24.
With a drop in goal difference, both actual and expected, it’s fair to question if Liverpool have improved at all. It is all relative, though; a top team has far fewer opportunities to win matches they failed to in the preceding campaign. City and Arsenal’s figures in the above table illustrate that merely standing still by this measure is not a given.
There are some nuggets of interest further down the standings. Chelsea and Brighton are picking up more points without markedly better underlying numbers, unlike Bournemouth who have been rewarded for making the largest improvement on xG.
Tottenham have been their usual erratic selves yet have an identical points tally regardless. Julen Loptegui is under pressure at West Ham when his crime is to have continued where David Moyes left off. And while Nottingham Forest and Fulham are flying higher than predicted in the league table, both are only four points better off than they were from the same matches last term.
While Wolves, Aston Villa and Crystal Palace have seen bigger drops on like-for-like games, the big red flag currently flies highest over Everton (with the colour of the pennant guaranteed to annoy them). They have regressed against corresponding fixtures despite having the easiest 10-game start of any team this season, per Opta. Sean Dyche may need to mastermind victories in tough matches to keep the Toffees in the top flight for the opening of their new stadium.
As Liverpool have not improved in terms of the results from last season, does this mean they are not worthy of being top of the table? No. If anything, they deserve an extra point based on expected goals.
It is remarkable seeing City in fourth, arguably even more eye-catching than having Fulham and Bournemouth sat above them. In 2019/20, Liverpool won 26 of their first 27 matches, took the title by 18 points yet were still behind Pep Guardiola’s side by this measure. As I recently discussed on the Distance Covered podcast and indirectly in my previous post for subscribers, it is no fluke that City are a little off the pace.
They have arguably fallen into the pit in which Liverpool found themselves two seasons ago. At the very least, they are teetering around the edge of it with old legs and no safety rail.
Only Everton and West Ham have fielded older starting XIs than the City side which lost 2-1 at Bournemouth recently. They are the fourth oldest team in the division, three times fielding a side over 28-years-old on average. As simplistic an analysis as this may be, facing younger sides who can run past them might help explain why they have the highest xG per shot conceded in the Premier League. Worse than Ipswich, worse even than United (the second and third poorest sides by this metric). That’s bad, Pep. Real bad.
City have even had to benefit from one of the eight most unjust results of the season, if you put faith in expected goals. They beat Fulham 3-2 despite Marco Silva’s side amassing 0.9 xG more than they did.
It is Bournemouth who have been really hard done by here, losing three matches which the underlying numbers imply they should have won. Chelsea, Newcastle and Southampton all have one unjust result on each side of the ledger, while it’s struggling Palace who have pulled off the biggest xG heist so far. The data-defying table also shows that Leicester would be in the relegation zone without the fortunate three points they collected against the Cherries.
Undeserved or not, the Foxes’ victory that day was not a huge shock based on the pre-match odds. Here are the six biggest result discrepancies according to the bookmakers.
When it comes to discussing, assessing and analysing the Reds in 2024/25, it all comes back to the 1-0 defeat against Nottingham Forest. That being more of a shock than Ipswich’s win at Tottenham may seem strange, but then it occurred early enough in the season for Nuno Espirito Santo’s men to still be viewed as relegation candidates.
So, there we are. Liverpool suffered the unlikeliest defeat of the season, are not any better off against the corresponding fixtures from last season and still deserve to be leading the Premier League. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Oh, and before we go: Brentford. There, now all 20 top flight teams have had a mention.
