“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” It’s every football manager’s favorite cliche at this stage of the season. There is time aplenty for gaps to be made up with more than two-thirds of the Premier League campaign to be played. Like an endurance race, however, the pace has been set. A brisk one at that. Liverpool have burst out of the blocks, but, like many a bronze medal winner way out in front at the first set of landmarks, there is some skepticism as to whether they can keep on moving at this near world record pace.
Perhaps they don’t need to. The perennial champions Manchester City look hobbled. Meanwhile, Arsenal, one of those who looked firmly in the medal mix before the race began, have got themselves caught up in the log jam of the chasing pack. Will they be able to pick up the pace and close the gap on the front runners? How much can Liverpool afford to ease up when the finish line comes into sight? Can this tortured marathon analogy go the distance? Some of these questions are more easily answered than others.
With nine wins, a draw and a defeat from their first 11 games, Liverpool have built a handy five point cushion at the top of the Premier League. Arne Slot could scarcely have imagined a better start to life in England than topping both the Champions League and Premier League tables, setting a pace in the latter that would surely be enough to win the title. Extrapolate their 2.55 points per game over the course of a 38 game season and you end up with 97 points. Keep that going and Arsenal would only be able to drop points in one remaining league game and match the Reds.
(It speaks to the vertiginous standards set by Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola in the final years of the 2010s that such a tally wouldn’t have guaranteed you top spot for three straight years up to 2018-19. In one of them you’d have been in a goal difference tussle for second.)
However… this Liverpool don’t exactly feel like a high 90s champion in waiting, do they? The really great teams tend to brush their Ipswiches, Crystal Palaces and Wolveses aside by a little more than a goal or two. The very best Klopp teams would run in two and a half, three goals a game, not the slightly under two that Slot’s men are averaging. The expected goal (xG) data tells a similar story. In 2021-22, a year where they perhaps played their best football in a season where they took their rivals to the wire in every single competition, they had a per game non-penalty xG difference (npxGD) of 1.36. It was just their luck that they ran into a better City side that season. The same was true in 2018-19 (1.18). This season, perhaps not.
Now in 2024-25 Liverpool’s early season npxGD is not at the dizzying heights of their best Klopp years. It is worth noting from the outset that 0.86 is still the best per game tally the Premier League has to offer this season. Slot isn’t competing with the Liverpool teams that came before, but the 19 teams that are in the Premier League now. If in another 27 games none of them are beating his current xG profile then there is a pretty strong chance that Liverpool will be champions.
Note: Manchester United’s 80 points in 2000-01 and 2010-11 is the lowest tally by an English champion this century
Still, that 0.86 mark hasn’t been the tally of league leaders in recent years. Since the start of 2020-21 the one side to hit that mark over the course of a full campaign were Newcastle in 2022-23. They ended the season with 72 points. Liverpool in 2023-24 were better by a fairly significant margin at 0.97. They ended up with 82 points. In 2021-22 Chelsea were at 0.79 and ended up with 74 points. The most worrying comparison for Slot might be the Arsenal team of 2022-23, another early season title contender who no one quite believed would hold out over the course of 38 games. Their per game npxG difference by the end of the season was 0.84.
There is not, then, a huge sample of teams playing at Liverpool’s level. A few of the teams who, in recent years, have had their xG profile, however, have ended up at around the mid 80 mark. Given that xG is by this stage of the season more predictive than not, let us suppose that the league leaders accumulate points at the 84 point pace of Arsenal 22-23. That means 2.2 points per game over the remaining 27 games. Another 60 points to go with the 28 already in the bag.
This may not be the best Liverpool side in recent memory. It might not need to be. Continue on their current trajectory and it is plausible that this team ends up with 90 points.
Can anyone catch that? Of course City can. The five point gap between them and Liverpool can be addressed just on the two occasions they face each other in the league. That does not mean that they will. After all the reason this race is so fascinating is that we can see clearly now that the 2024-25 iteration of City is not what it was. In every one of Guardiola’s seasons since his first English title, his team has had a npxGD per game of over one. This season they’re at 0.83.
If Kevin De Bruyne gets fit, if the defense sorts itself out, if someone other than Erling Haaland can weigh in with goals, if a temporary replacement for Rodri can be sourced, maybe City could just do a City in the back end of the season, drop half a dozen points between new year and summer and the race becomes a procession. That’s a lot of ifs though.
Where the questions of point accumulation get really interesting, though, are where Arsenal are concerned. Nine points from the summit with just five wins from their opening 11 games, they have left themselves an awful lot of work to do. History would suggest this gap isn’t unbridgeable. Newcastle began frittering away a 12 point cushion in January 1996 with only 15 games to play. With games in hand but precious little time, Arsenal themselves pulled Manchester United in from 12 points ahead, starting in February 1998.
Such gaps can be made up and Mikel Arteta knows how. “Win, win, win, win, win, win, win and win,” as he put it after the draw at Chelsea. Would even that be enough?
Let us suppose that the scenario laid out above comes to pass, that come May 25 Liverpool have hit a tally of 88 points. What pace do Arsenal need to go at to leapfrog that (let’s park goal difference for now, not least because Slot’s men already have a nine goal advantage there)? The target then would be a neat 70 points over 27 games. That is 2.6 points per game. Arsenal then, need to perform like a team that over the course of a full season could accumulate 99 points. Manchester City fans will not need telling that that can be done even over 38 games rather than 27.
Can it be done by Arsenal? Yes. They’ve done it before. Not for 27 games but for 19 as recently as the second half of last season. That began with a 2-1 defeat at Fulham after which the Gunners rained fire on the rest of the league. Sixteen wins, a draw and a defeat. Only Manchester City at their best could hold back Arteta’s title charge. Run that points per game tally over 27 games and you get 69.6 points. We’ll round that one up, eh?
What Arsenal need then, is their best selves. No more unnecessary red cards, a swift settling into the groove for the Martin Odegaard-Declan Rice-Mikel Merino midfield, a moratorium on all major injuries now that Ben White is sidelined for anywhere between six weeks and over two months after knee surgery. Those moments against Liverpool and with their full compliment of 11 against City where they have looked like the best team in England need to be the benchmark. If Arsenal are going to win the league, they probably have to be a relentless winning machine between now and May. Liverpool might be able to hold them off by being quite good. There may be many miles yet to go but some of these runners are going to have to pick up the pace.
