Liverpool are Getting Better at Passing The Pressure On

Arne Slot wants his Liverpool players to 'kill' the opposition with passes. Their improvement at passing under pressure is a big part of how they do it.

Most statistics in football are a two-way street. If you’re trying to do something, the chances are you have an opponent intent on stopping you.

The view of the outcome of any such situation can vary. Take pressing, for instance. You picture a player attempting to regain possession, possibly with ideals on launching a counterattack. It can be one of the most exciting facets of the game when executed correctly.

But less than one in five pressures result in the presser’s team regaining possession within five seconds, per Fantasy Football Scout. It’s a huge part of the sport, so teams can usually play their way out of tight corners as they expect to be closed down.

Inevitably some players are more proficient at this than others, leading to teams varying in their standard of pressure escapology. Being able to evade a press is as much about the movement of colleagues without the ball creating passing options as it is about the ability of the player in possession to find them.

Assessing the latter is far easier than the former thanks to Statsbomb data. Like any metric this season, it’s fascinating to assess Liverpool’s record under Arne Slot against their data from their final year under Jürgen Klopp, especially as the squad is largely unchanged.

While players have inevitably seen a shift in their figures, there has been an overall trend which will please the new head coach. One change which won’t have pleased the men in red on the pitch is that they are now making a higher percentage of their passes under opposition pressure than they did in 2023/24.