As we found out last weekend, in the now-infamous postgame rant he offered up to Norwegian television, Mohamed Salah thinks he has been thrown under the bus. Or he at least thought he was thrown under the bus. And he was not totally wrong: Plenty of people have blamed him as the main reason Liverpool’s chances of a back-to-back Premier League title expired before Christmas.
For others, the blame lies with the guy who Salah said he “used to have a good relationship” with, but now doesn’t “have any relationship” with. Although Arne Slot helped the club win its second title without breaking much of a sweat in his first season as Liverpool head coach, critics will tell you he was riding Jurgen Klopp’s coattails, coasting on whatever momentum had remained from the most successful era of Liverpool’s modern history.
Now, with his own team, Slot doesn’t know what to do. The club spent a British-record €482.9 million on six new players that everybody loved and, not only did they not get better, they got significantly worse. He changes the lineup nearly every match, and even with the club on a two-game win streak, nothing seems to work as well as it should.
Liverpool’s struggles this season are a microcosm of what makes this sport so interesting to think about. Everything is intertwined.
A tactical decision or a personnel change at left back could short-circuit the attacking production of the right winger. A further season of aging for a superstar forward could make the midfield look like a weakness a year after it was a strength. A new approach from all of their opponents might make a great team look average without any internal changes. A wave of fatigue might suddenly make an impervious tactical approach untenable one year later.
When faced with such a knotty ball of cause-and-effect like the one currently bouncing around Anfield, it’s often useful to take a step back — all the way to your fundamental belief about how the sport works. And for that, let’s quote the godfather of modern soccer, Johan Cruyff: “If your players are better than your opponents, 90% of the time you will win.”
Liverpool are winning way less often than they did last season. And Liverpool have a bunch of different players than they did last season. So maybe all of those players they signed this summer — Florian Wirtz, Alexander Isak, and everybody else — are not quite as good as we thought. Maybe that’s where the blame for Liverpool’s woes really lies.
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How many stars does it take to win the Premier League?
To win the Premier League, you need three or four star-quality attacking players. At least, that’s usually been the case since 2017-18.
By “attacking players” we mean “those who score goals and create chances,” and by star-quality, we mean “someone who generates a combination of at least 0.6 non-penalty expected goals and assists per 90 minutes.” We’re using 0.6 npxG+xA because around 20 or so players hit that mark in the league every season. And we’re using expected rather than actual numbers because they’re more likely to indicate true talent, as opposed to a player who had one hot season in front of goal or whose teammates finished his passes at an unsustainable rate.
Here’s how many players with at least 900 minutes played got there for each of the eight previous champions, per FBref. We’re rounding up:
• 2017-18 Manchester City (4): David Silva, Gabriel Jesus, Raheem Sterling, Sergio Aguero
• 2018-19 Manchester City (7): David Silva, Riyad Mahrez, Kevin De Bruyne, Leroy Sané, Raheem Sterling, Sergio Aguero, Gabriel Jesus
• 2019-20 Liverpool (3): Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané, Mohamed Salah
• 2020-21 Manchester City (2): Raheem Sterling, Kevin De Bruyne
• 2021-22 Manchester City (6): Riyad Mahrez, Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne, Ilkay Gündogan, Gabriel Jesus, Raheem Sterling
• 2022-23 Manchester City (2): Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne
• 2023-24 Manchester City (4): Phil Foden, Julián Álvarez, Kevin De Bruyne, Erling Haaland
• 2024-25 Liverpool (4): Darwin Núñez, Luis Díaz, Diogo Jota, Mohamed Salah
There are some freak seasons: the 2018-19 Manchester City side that were being pushed by eventual European Cup winners Liverpool and the 2021-22 Man City side that were being pushed by a Liverpool team which went five attackers deep (Salah, Mane, Firmino, Jota, and Diaz), too. Or on the other end: the weird COVID season in 2020-21 or 2022-23 when Haaland broke the goal-scoring record.
However, on average, that’s four “star” attackers per title winner — or exactly what Liverpool had last season.
And over this eight-year stretch, what’s kept Liverpool so competitive for most of it is that they’ve always had at least three players who were capable of getting on the end of and creating chances at a high rate:
• 2017-18 (4): Salah, Mane, Firmino, Phillippe Coutinho
• 2018-19 (3): Salah, Mane, Firmino
• 2019-20 (3): Salah, Mane, Firmino
• 2020-21 (3): Salah, Mane, Jota
• 2021-22 (5): Salah, Mane, Jota, Firmino, Diaz
• 2022-23 (5): Salah, Jota, Firmino, Diaz, Nunez
• 2023-24 (5): Salah, Jota, Diaz, Nunez, Gakpo
• 2024-25 (4): Salah, Jota, Diaz, Nunez
That is, until now. Nearly halfway through the 2025-26 season, only one Liverpool player is at or above that star threshold. And it’s not any of their new signings or the defending Premier League player of the year. No, it’s Cody Gakpo.
Why Liverpool need much more from Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak
Here’s how Liverpool’s top 10 players, as measured by expected goals and assists per 90, stack up so far this season. The graphic excludes anyone with fewer than 450 minutes played — otherwise you’d see Federico Chiesa, who’s averaging a Messi-esque 1.5 xG+xA per 90 minutes across a not-completely-insignificant stretch of 150 minutes:
Salah has averaged 0.75 xG+xA per 90 minutes across his Liverpool career, and his worst season at Anfield was the COVID-disrupted year: 0.61 in 2020-21.
He’s significantly below both of those marks, and especially below last season’s mark of 0.87. But if we look at the progression of his season, you can squint a little bit — OK fine, you have to squint a lot. Like, so hard that you’re on the verge of passing out.
But Salah’s five worst games of this season by this metric were the five games that Liverpool won to start the year. Perhaps some of his frustration came from the fact that he wasn’t dropped by Slot until he’d felt like he actually started playing better. And then, in his return against Brighton this past weekend, he was more dangerous than he’d been all season.
Take out the first five matches, and Salah jumps up to 0.68 xG+xAper 90 minutes. That’s still well below where he was last year. But he’s 33 years old, and as we’ve gone over, that’s still enough to contribute to a title-winning team. Plus, not only were these new players signed to take over when Salah left, they were signed to pick up some of the slack as he got older, too.
That just hasn’t happened — outside of Hugo Ekitike. The France international scored twice on Saturday, and his actual goal+assist production is now up to 0.83 per 90 minutes. Among starters across the Premier League, only Haaland has been more productive.
Ekitike, though, has been inconsistent across the season — three huge games, and a bunch of fine-to-middling performances — and across individual games. He’ll single-handedly create his own fast break but then rip a low-quality shot instead of playing in a teammate:
But his potential is obvious every match, and although the underlying performance isn’t quite there yet, you’d take the level of production he’s given you — especially given how much less money was invested into signing him than Wirtz or Isak, the two most expensive transfers in Premier League history.
Even though Wirtz still has zero goals and zero assists in the Premier League, Liverpool would still make the €125 million move for him 10 times out of 10. He won’t even turn 23 until May, and he already has multiple seasons of elite play for a very good team in a Big Five top league in Europe under his belt.
But it just hasn’t worked in England yet. Wirtz makes plenty of really nice touches every match and he’s a vital piece to how Liverpool move the ball up the field, but you don’t make this transfer just to get someone to help you move the ball up the field.
You make this transfer because you’re expecting to get top-level attacking production from a player who helps you move the ball up the field, and your best-case scenario is what David Silva and Kevin De Bruyne did for Manchester City: elite attacking production and elite ball progression. So far, Liverpool have a good ball-progressor with average attacking production. (Despite the zero goals and assists, he’s produced 3.7 combined expected goals and assists in the Premier League.)
Even that, though, is better than what Isak has given them so far. The most expensive signing in Premier League history, a striker, has one goal and one assist through 16 matches. He’s only attempted 14 shots all season. And it’s not like he’s doing anything else, providing any value beyond the paltry goal production. He’s attempting 12 passes per 90 minutes; no one else on Liverpool is below 20.
To make it worse: he’s 26 years old. This is the middle of his prime. While Ekitike and Wirtz joined from a very different league and both still have another season or two until they hit their peak years, Liverpool need Isak, who’s been playing in the Premier League since 2022, to be at his best — right now.
To make it even worse: there’s still no evidence that Isak and Ekitike can play together. They both started up top in the 1-0 win over Inter Milan last week, and combined to play … zero passes to each other. Liverpool signed two incredibly similar players for a combined €240 million — FBref’s similarity algorithm lists Ekitike as Isak’s most statistically similar player in all of Europe — and the younger and less expensive one seems like the better one right now.
When Liverpool signed Isak for a record fee after already signing Ekitike, it seemed irrational. No one plays with two strikers anymore! But this was Liverpool — the one data-driven club among all the big ones. They’ve played the transfer market better than anyone over the past 10 years — surely there had to be a plan. Maybe they think clubs won’t be able to handle a two-striker setup exactly because no one does it anymore? So, defenses are no longer designed to deal with it? They’re always one step ahead!
But if there was a plan, we still haven’t seen it yet.
It’s not all Slot’s fault
Now, this isn’t to say that Slot hasn’t done anything wrong.
He’s tried a lot of different lineups, but he also keeps giving up on lineups after one or two games. That’s not a big enough sample to know if it’s working, and it’s definitely not helping the team develop the kind of on-field cohesion and understanding that he walked into last season.
But rather, it seems Slot probably deserved less credit than he got for Liverpool’s title last season — and he deserves less blame than he’s getting for their struggles this season. Liverpool’s masthead suggests as much: Slot is the “head coach” not the “manager.”
So much of Liverpool’s previous era of success appeared to be driven by the modern way the club worked: how the forward-thinking staff identified undervalued players and how Klopp accepted their ideas. This was undoubtedly part of the interview process with Slot: confirming that he would operate within the same model. But when you de-center the manager, you don’t get to re-center him once things go poorly.
2:13
Slot on Salah’s future at Liverpool: ‘You already know the answer’
Arne Slot speaks about Mohamed Salah’s future at Liverpool after his performance vs. Brighton.
Both Wirtz and Ekitike fit into the classic Liverpool model of signings: pre-peak players with absolutely elite underlying numbers and impressive physical outputs. And the relationship is a simple one: a scorer and creator. At the same time, Ekitike was a quality creator for a scorer, and the opposite was true for Wirtz. These players made sense — from an age perspective, and from an on-field perspective.
While Wirtz is still struggling to impact the game in and around the box, his relationship with Ekitike has been one of the few bright spots from this season. By Stats Perform’s expected possession value metric, which quantifies the amount every on-ball action increases or decreases a team’s chances of scoring a goal, Wirtz passing to Ekitike has been Liverpool’s most valuable pairing so far this season — even though both of them have fallen out of the starting eleven for weeks at a time.
Once you get beyond those two, the logic of the other moves start to unravel. We’ve already been over Isak, but he’s always been injury prone and he’d never played at a high level for a team that was expected to control games like Liverpool. Plus, he’s older than the players the club has spent lots of money on.
Milos Kerkez — who joined Liverpool over the summer with Isak, Wirtz and the others — is a player that Richard Hughes, Liverpool’s sporting director, signed when he occupied the same role at Bournemouth. Maybe that’s a coincidence, but it’s at least a red flag. And fellow summer-signing Jeremie Frimpong was previously a wing back at Bayer Leverkusen — a position that hadn’t existed at Liverpool the previous season.
If these players were expected to fit into something similar to what Liverpool had done the season prior, then it’s an incredibly lopsided vision. Two extremely attacking full backs, two center forwards, and a very attack-oriented attacking midfielder — added to a team where the star player attributed his improved performance the previous season to being given fewer defensive responsibilities.
The alternative is that there was a plan to move to a back three with wing backs, but that was scuppered by a failure to get the move for Crystal Palace center back Marc Guéhi over the line on the final day of the transfer window. But if that’s the case, and your entire tactical approach hinged on the acquisition of one player, then why was that left until the final hours of the transfer window?
Instead, it really just looks like Liverpool’s front office acquired a bunch of players they were overconfident in — see: the fees for Wirtz and Isak — without any rigorous consideration for how they all might fit together. Perhaps they view that as Slot’s job, and perhaps someone else might figure out a way to get the team performing at a level closer to what you might expect from the €482.9 million invested into transfer fees this past summer.
But for as important as talent is, you still have to make sure you identify the right talent. And then that aggregate talent only matters if it’s able to function together in any kind of cohesive way. Or as Cruyff himself once put it, as only he could: “Why couldn’t you beat a richer club? I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.”
