Liverpool's Pressing under Arne Slot and the Mohamed Salah impact

Liverpool's pressing style was inevitably going to evolve once Arne Slot replaced Jürgen Klopp. Here's what happened and a potential benefit for Mohamed Salah

Who do you think are the 11 best players in Europe without the ball? Ryan O’Hanlon recently attempted to answer this question for ESPN, selecting several Liverpool players in the process.

From back to front, Virgil van Dijk, Dominik Szoboszlai and Mohamed Salah made the cut. Salah? Yeah. If, like me, you assumed the article would be looking at the defensive efforts players put in, you’d be wrong. Instead, the study looks at receiving high value passes, finding space, that sort of thing.

Even so, this feels like a good time to assess the Reds’ pressing data for 2024/25. Arne Slot has banked just over half a season of Premier League statistics, having faced the task of replacing a man who famously declared that “no playmaker in the world can be as good as a good counter-pressing situation.”

We don’t need advanced data to prove Liverpool no longer press as high up the field as they once did. Per Fotmob, Slot’s side have averaged 5.0 final third possession regains per 90 minutes in his rookie year, down from 6.1 in the final campaign under Jürgen Klopp. It was last lower in 2018/19.

Opposition teams are averaging 44.2 touches in their defensive third for each time Liverpool recover the ball there, when they only got 35.8 last season. Again, there has been a drop off even though 2023/24 wasn’t peak pressing for Klopp’s Reds by this measure.

Yet the detailed Statsbomb numbers on Fantasy Football Scout tell a slightly different tale, at least in terms of overall pressing. The evolution in intensity from player to player is worth a closer look too. It shows why looking at one man in isolation can be misleading