How Arne Slot Unplugged Liverpool's Heavy-Metal Football

Not sure if you’ve heard, but Liverpool have a new manager. I wrote about him, and his team’s perfect start:

In the same fixture against Brentford last season, Liverpool played 37% of their passes forward, compared to 31% on Sunday. They moved the ball upfield, on average, at a rate of 1.71 meters per second at home to Brentford last season; that dropped all the way down to 0.97 meters per second on Sunday.

However, the bigger changes -- to me, anyway -- have come on the other side of the ball. Liverpool are still pressing, but it's not the aggro, all-out gegenpress we saw under Klopp. These numbers in particular can change significantly as soon as you add another game into the sample, but Liverpool have allowed their opponents to complete 80.3% of their passes so far this season, and they've allowed 10.7 passes per defensive action (PPDA).

Those are both better-than-average numbers across the league, but they're well below Liverpool's rates from last season.

Who knows: it might work!