Which Premier League Team is The Hardest To Face?

Premier League teams have been getting good results against Liverpool recently then struggling afterwards. Are the Reds the most draining side to play?

There are many things we are asked to blindly accept in football. We are meant to believe that referees are without bias. They are human beings, beautiful, flawed creatures like all of us; of course they have biases.

Their decisions also even themselves out over the course of a season, apparently, just as luck does. You won’t ever convince a football supporter that this is the case. Perhaps the most erroneous cliche of all is ‘the league table never lies.’ Even if it might be an accurate representation of the results, it conceals countless mistruths.

This can be through teams collecting points their performance didn’t merit, or by taking no account of the fixture difficulty each team has faced. Brentford recently held the best home record in the Premier League, having mostly played poor teams on their own patch. The Bees then collected a single point from hosting Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool, only one of whom is currently a bad side.

When Team A faces Club B matters hugely too. Who has the most injuries? Was one side in European action in midweek? Is it following an international break, and if so whose players travelled furthest? Have TNT Sports selected the game for a lunchtime kick off? For much of Jürgen Klopp’s time at Liverpool, the answers to those questions were often: Liverpool, Yes (Liverpool), Yes (Liverpool) and Of Bloody Course. These factors carry rarely discussed impacts.

Another consideration which should be mentioned more is which teams a side has recently played. The Reds breezed past Ipswich at home last weekend, making it likelier they’ll be in better shape for their next fixture than if they’d been battling Arsenal at the Emirates. They’d obviously have the referee in their pocket in the latter scenario (or so I assume from social media), but it would still be a draining 90 minutes.

The above post was shared when Bournemouth were on their way to beating Nottingham Forest 5-0 last weekend. Does playing Arne Slot’s Liverpool drain a team? The opposition will have been killed with passes if the Reds’ head coach got his way. They will likely have faced more shots than average based on the statistics for this season too. Defending is tiring.

While we can’t account for the questions about Team A and Club B mentioned above, it’s easy enough to look at how each side fares in their league match following their game against a particular opponent. In 2022/23, teams averaged 1.76 points-per-game after facing Liverpool, the second highest mark in the division. Last season, as Klopp steered the Reds’ ship into calmer waters, that figure dropped to 1.14, the joint-third lowest.

This makes sense for Liverpool’s improvement from fielding an ageing, legless midfield in 2022/23 to a younger one the following year, yet the nearby presence of Everton, Sheffield United and Burnley in the table immediately brings the data into question. It can’t have been harder to play a match after facing those teams, can it? Similarly, teams averaged the joint-second most points after playing four-time champions City.

The raw figures above take no account of expectation. For instance, Brighton lost a match after playing the Reds last season, but the game in question was away to the Cityzens. They’d have probably been beaten no matter which club they had faced the week before. To try to assess the data more fairly, we must account for whether a loss or draw was an upset.