Liverpool Have Won the Premier League and Their Season Is Over in March
The final nine games of Liverpool’s Premier League season will serve as a coronation procession but its hard not to feel disappointed by defeats to PSG and Newcastle.
It is the middle of March, and Liverpool will win the Premier League, the final nine games serving as a coronation procession on the way to number 20 for Arne Slot’s Reds in his first year in charge.
It is the middle of March, and Liverpool’s season is functionally over, the Reds knocked out of the Champions League by a sharper and more energetic Paris Saint-Germain and having lost the League Cup final in shockingly lifeless fashion in the past week. There are legitimate questions and concerns over how first year manager Arne Slot’s has utilized his squad.
It is, to put it mildly, a rather strange situation to be in.
To try to put it into a little context, at this stage last season, Liverpool had 67 points after playing 29 Premier League games. This season, they’re at 70, a one win improvement. Last season, at this point they were still top of the Premier League table—if just barely. The big difference is in the sides chasing them.
Last season, when Liverpool had 67 points after playing those first 29 games, Arsenal had 65 and Manchester City had 64. By the time the final table rolled around, Liverpool had 82 while Arsenal had 89. City passed both to win the league with 91. A three point advantage on City became, over the next nine games, a nine point deficit—a 12 point swing.
Arsenal went from two behind to seven ahead, a nine point swing that allowed Mikel Arteta’s Gunners to finish second.
Today, the gap is 12 points to second place Arsenal and City are not in the mix, while the Gunners look a diminished side compared to last season. Few would bet on this Arsenal side going on a run like the one they ended last season—and the one they went on last season wouldn’t make up the gap even against a stumbling Liverpool side.
As for Liverpool last season, in Jürgen Klopp’s final year in charge a tiring team earned 15 points over the final nine league games, recording 1.67 points per game after clocking 2.31 ppg up until that point. A similar drop off now, with perhaps a 4W-3D-2L record, would see them hit 85.
For Arsenal to hit 85 at this stage they would need 27 points, a perfect 9W-0D-0L record.
Liverpool, then, will win the league. That’s not hope or optimism but simple realism. Throw in another defeat and have Slot’s Reds end the year 3W-3D-3L over the final nine—1.33 ppg, a middling 50 point season pace—and that still means they get 12 more points and finish on 82. To get to 82 and make it about goal differential Arsenal would need 24 more points, aka eight from nine.
Liverpool are tiring. Liverpool are stumbling. That’s true. There’s also a compelling case that new manager Arne Slot has misjudged the physical demands of English football and trying to compete across three other competitions and so exhausted his core players heading into the final two months of the season.
There’s a compelling case that Ryan Gravenberch, at 22 years of age and having played less than 2K minutes last season and 1K the year before at Bayern, shouldn’t have been asked to play 4K+ minutes this season—a mark he will blow past even with rotation in the final nine games. A case that while Wataru Endo may not be as good as him, a game a week in the autumn for the combative Japan international would have helped Gravenberch and the team now far more than it hurt then.
Adding up the minutes played, you could say similar about Harvey Elliott—whose 1,335 league minutes last season have dropped to a mere 121 this year—taking 500 minutes or so apiece off of Dominik Szoboszlai and Alexis Mac Allister.
One could reasonably ask if it might have been wise to play Federico Chiesa and Jarrell Quansah more. It’s always easier to answer such questions in retrospect, perhaps, but in the case of Gravenberch at the very least there have been questions and concerns regarding Slot’s over-reliance on him—and calls to give Endo more time—well back into the autumn.
Slot more than Klopp before him has through his team selections made it obvious which players he rates—and which he doesn’t. And few would quibble with his top choices. Yet players like Endo and Elliott and Quansah and Chiesa aren’t bad players. They are the sorts of players most top clubs would consider themselves lucky to have as depth options.
Liverpool have them and mostly this season didn’t use them. That over-reliance on a small group of key starters worked wonders through the autumn, but results have been far less consistently positive since the calendar ticked over to 2025.
Liverpool, though, will win the league. That’s an achievement very much worth celebrating, even if it seems likely now that this Liverpool side won’t end the 2024-25 season looking much improved on the side that ended 2023-24 in third place.
The warning signs of an increasingly exhausted group have been on display for some times now, though, and it’s hard not to wonder what if after the past week.
What if Ryan Gravenberch had been spelled judiciously in the autumn rather than being run into the ground. What if Szoboszlai and Mac Allister had played a few minutes less here and there and didn’t look shattered now. What if Mohamed Salah wasn’t trying to fight off being triple marked while having played more minutes already this season than he did all of last.
Celebrating a coronation procession on the way to number 20 while picking through the rubble of a disappointing exit in the Champions League and a shockingly lifeless defeat in the League Cup final is a strange situation to be in.
What does seem safe to say, though, is that the Premier League next season will be more difficult. That Liverpool will have to be better. And that part of that will have to come from Arne Slot’s squad management, whatever his squad ends up looking like next season.
Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com
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