Jurgen Klopp is a hard act to replace but Arne Slot’s record breaking start could not have gone much better. He is the first Liverpool manager to win nine out of their first ten games in charge. Liverpool are top of the Premier League after seven games, but they are yet to play a side in the top half of the table.
Liverpool’s stats in terms of goals scored and the number of goals they’re expected to score are not too dissimilar across the first seven games of last season and this season showing there has not been much of a drop off if any at all offensively.
Defensively there has been an improvement.
On paper the start of the last campaign looked much harder facing the likes of Chelsea, Bournemouth, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Wolves, West Ham and Tottenham. This year Arne Slot’s team have come up against Ipswich, Brentford, Manchester United, Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, Wolves and Crystal Palace.
Slot has inherited a top-level team but the new Manager has so far improved the defence, with the least amount of goals conceded in the Premier League, two, whilst also having the lowest expected goals against. Last season, Liverpool made a habit of conceding the first goal of the game.
Liverpool are creating enough XG (expected goals) to compete with the other top teams, but they may struggle to convert their chances a little more than the others currently in the top four.
Manchester City and Chelsea both score more goals than they are statistically expected to, City outperform theirs by 2.61 and Chelsea by 0.67, while Arsenal underperform by 2.17.
Liverpool underperforms by a staggering 3.55 which could cost them down the line if they continue to not be able to convert their chances into goals.
A common trend in the list of Premier League winners in the last ten years (apart from Leicester City) is that every team has outperformed their xG, Leicester only underperformed by 0.42, and the majority of winners also outperformed their xGA.
Slot has been able to coach his team to outperforming their xGA, so far which is great as we can see that most of these teams also did this, likely contributing to them being crowned champions at the end of each season.
But the more common trend in these sides is outperforming their xG, which at this point Slot has not been able to accomplish. So if Liverpool aspire to win the Premier League this season then they really need to try and improve in this area.
