Liverpool Get The Balance Right
Mohamed Salah is scoring lots of goals, the other Liverpool forwards less so. But the Reds' balance is far better than it is at Manchester City.
The top scorer list for the 2024/25 Premier League is not full of surprises. Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah lead the way on 13, with Cole Palmer two goals behind them. The latter pair have had near-identical league performance over the last 18 months.
Chris Wood is next in the hitman standings, with 10 goals. He is followed by the Brentford pair of Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa, who have nine apiece. Something will have to go very wrong for this not to be the first Premier League season in which the Bees have two players who reach double figures.
The bigger clubs will likely have multiple men get 10-or-more too. Diogo Jota, Darwin Núñez and Salah ensured the Reds had three such players last season, while Manchester City set the record with five in 2019/20. Right now, though, their attacks look unbalanced, at least in terms of tangible output.
Any offensive issues the defending champions are having this season are largely down to no player other than Haaland scoring more than three league goals, no attacker more than two. Not that Liverpool have been much better; Luis Díáz has scored five times, with Cody Gakpo, Jota and Núñez each contributing two goals.
As ever when assessing attacking data, penalties blur the picture. Salah is only four league goals ahead of Díaz without his spot kicks whereas Haaland is still nine clear for the Citizens. It’s the Norwegian plus scraps for Pep Guardiola.
Arne Slot has made the composition of his front line largely clear. Díaz and Gakpo share the left side, Jota or Núñez plays through the middle and - barring the emergence of Federico Chiesa - Salah takes care of business on the right. Even though the goal totals they provide inevitably fluctuate, the underlying statistics are remarkably consistent across the trio of positions.
Confession time. The idea for this article emerged a couple of weeks ago (following the 3-2 win over Southampton), at which point the data made an even stronger case for the equality of the three positions. Behold:
Such things will always fluctuate. As recently investigated on here, Gakpo has since had a couple of close-range strikes which has noticeably pushed up his expected goal tally, for instance.
The broad sense of balance is clear though. It’s noteworthy that you have to add together players two through eight from the City rankings to make a non-penalty xG total which equals Haaland, even if tactical differences make a comparison with the Reds moot. Liverpool’s main man receives far greater support.
There’s more to attacking than shots though. Salah’s agent would be wise to point out his client has also delivered 8.2 xG in terms of chances created in the big two competitions this term. You could triple Jota, double Darwin and add in Díaz plus Gakpo, you’d still only match what Salah has offered to the expected assists pile. Let that sink in, and let the pay offer rise.
The balance of chances evolved over the final six seasons of the Jürgen Klopp era. In 2018/19, the focus was on the flanks.
It was the last time the left forward would be so markedly ahead of his central colleague. While the following season was Salah’s lowest scoring, he moved ahead of Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mané on the underlying numbers.
2020/21 saw the arrival of Jota. In what would prove a depressingly frequent development, he missed time thanks to injury. The Portuguese still found time to help push the centre-forward involvement up though.
It now gets harder to make a fair assessment. In 2021/22, Mané played centrally in the second half of the campaign after Díaz arrived. There was a mid-season signing the following year too, in the form of Gakpo.
Núñez also arrived at the start of 2022/23. For all his finishing faults, Darwin was a big chance magnet, linking up superbly well with Salah. “It was Firmino, now I feel I generally like playing with Núñez,” the Egyptian king said recently when asked about favourite teammates.
We then hit last season, when the broad positional divisions which we see this season were formed. Salah missed more time than ever before, which helps explain why he was notably adrift of the other two options for the first time.
In terms of the proportion of each metric split across the three positions, the current campaign has the closest breakdown since 2021/22, the season in which Liverpool came within a couple of goals of winning everything. Whether it holds as the games pile up while the stakes increase in value will have to remain to be seen. For now, Slot has got the balance right.
