Liverpool Finally Figured Out How to Make It Easy
First, Europe. Then, the world. Now, they're champions of England, too.
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Everyone has their story -- a time when it really felt like this would never happen.
Depending on when you started watching, it might be the one with Vincent Kompany and that one last shot. Maybe it’s the one with Loris Karius and Sergio Ramos. Perhaps it involves Tony Pulis in red and blue or Steven Gerrard, the one who always saved you, unable to stay on his feet. It could be the fire from those two wins over Manchester United getting doused by draws against Charlton. Maybe it was when Michael Owen left, or Bruno Cheyrou arrived. It could’ve been when King Kenny quit.
For me, it was some time right around here, in the early days of the short-lived Roy Hodgson era:
I started rooting for Liverpool in late 2002. I don’t have the same connections that Liverpool natives do, especially those connected to the disasters at Heysel or Hillsborough. Over here, the games weren’t on TV in the US -- or at least not in a way that a 14-year-old me was capable of keeping track of. Instead, I found my way in through FIFA 03. Liverpool weren’t the best team in the game, but they were still pretty good. They hit a sweet-spot of giving me some faux moral authority -- I’m not a frontrunner -- while also letting me experience plenty of aesthetic and technical brilliance. Little did I know, that description would come to define the real-life version club I chose for the better part of the next decade.
They were almost always good and quite often great. Hell they might have even been the best at times, too. But even then, it was still never enough. Until Jurgen Klopp arrived, and here we are today: Liverpool, they’re your 2019-20 Premier League champs.
El Hadji Diouf. If you’re a Liverpool fan, you don’t like the guy and that is probably a tame way of putting it, too. Liverpool signed him after he starred at the 2002 World Cup; the front-office has come a long way. He did OK in Year One: three goals and eight assists at age 21 across 21 starts. More importantly, he was unstoppable for me in FIFA. Pair him with Michael Owen’s pace and Steven Gerrard’s passing power; no defense could handle all three at the same time. Somewhere in a reality I was not aware of, I assumed they all got along great and were winning games at the same clip as the team I controlled as a benevolent god with no patience for player fatigue. Not quite. They finished fifth. Owen left for Real Madrid the following summer. And Gerrard later said he had “no respect” for Diouf as a teammate. In 2016, Diouf told his side of his story, “When I arrived I showed him he was nothing at all. He was nothing at all ... he was afraid of looking into my eyes. He was afraid of talking to me. Let's not forget when I arrived I did not ask for his shirt. He asked for my Senegal shirt for one of his mates.”
Diouf was gone after the next season, and he might still have a spot on the Mt. Rushmore of Ignominious Liverpool Icons. The first season without him, though, hooked me for life. Enough games were on Fox Sports World -- the real heads know what I’m talking about; shoutout Jeremy St. Louis -- and of course: Istanbul. After failing the first two, I took my third road test for my license that day (don’t ask), so I taped the game. Not enough friends had cell phones and/or an interest in European soccer to spoil the match for me, so I got home, and then seriously considered fast-forwarding to the end once I got to halftime with the score at 3-0 in favor of AC Milan . Thankfully I didn’t, and the greatest comeback I’ve ever seen branded me a fan for life.
For a teenage kid on Long Island, that game was kind of a special secret -- this amazing, exhilarating, once-in-a-lifetime moment that only a handful of my friends, a handful of my teammates, even knew about, let alone watched. Something so big that, somehow, stayed so small.
It couldn’t stay that way forever, but it really seemed like it might. My first real moment as a Liverpool fan was as good as it gets. Over the next decade and a half, Liverpool put on a masterclass of being just-not-quite-good-enough. The club was capable of short-term highs that few others reached, in addition to long-term competence. But greatness over 38 games was always just a couple games too many.
First up: 2008-09. Liverpool beat Manchester United twice, including a 4-1 win at Old Trafford punctuated by a goal from another name from Liverpool’s long list of forgettable transfers, Andrea Dossena. Somehow, though, they lost the league by four points ... to Manchester United. This was a bizarre confirmation of why I chose the team: I got to claim that Liverpool were better than the best team in the league. The two games between them certainly showed it. And so did the numbers that I’d one day go on to write about professionally. Per Stats Perform data, Liverpool’s plus-31.54 expected goal differential was the best in the league in 2008-09. United, meanwhile, were third by the same metric. They just seemed to have a knack for scoring at all the right times, while Rafa Benitez’s team just couldn’t keep it up.
There were a handful of inexplicable seasons in between, most notably the 2011-12 season under Kenny Dalglish when LFC underperformed their expected goals by the largest margin of any Premier League team that Stats Perform has data for. Andy Carroll and Stewart Downing and Charlie Adam are all punchlines on their own, but part of the reason why is that they missed so many chances that were so hard to get in the first place. However, the next real near-miss came in 2013-14. We don’t need to go into detail, especially on a day like today. Liverpool beat the best team in the league once again, took a commanding lead atop the table, only for Gerrard, the club’s golden son and the center of its solar system, to slip against Chelsea and see title go along with his balance
Something had to be wrong, on some deeper metaphysical level, for this team — a club that dominated the 80s and in decades prior — to have never won a Premier League title. Under three separate managers over a six year span, Liverpool suffered some kind of historically awful luck over either the whole season or at the worst possible moment imaginable. It seemed, too, that it might be true for Klopp. Yes, they got back to the top of Europe, but even a 97-point haul -- the third-highest total in the history of the league -- wasn’t enough to win. If not then, when?
Turns out, right now is the right time. This club has had more than enough high-profile, unthinkable victories and last-second disasters. Liverpool, as a 21st-century entity, exists within the public imagination to constantly fail to reclaim its history on a grand scale -- over and over and over again. So, what better way to do it than to win the title without even playing a game?
The story of the past four years is really just one of red-hot competence at every level. First, they hired the right coach. Then they signed all the right undervalued players to build a world-class attack. Then, thanks to that attack and thanks to that internal improvement driven both by the coach and by the fact that all the players were signed at ages that made them likely to improve after they arrived, the team reached a level of cachet and financial power that allowed them to sign the most expensive defender and goalkeeper in the world. That fixed the defense, and that’s how you get to be European, world, and English champs -- all at the same time.
But, this is the specific story of Liverpool’s 2019-20 season: They finally found a way to make it easy.
Through 31 games, Liverpool’s per-90-minute goal differential with the score tied is miles ahead of the competition: plus-0.81, with Chelsea in second at plus-0.48. Sure, they’re brilliant at pressing, playing the ball into the box, managing territory, and limiting good shots, but none of their other statistics stand out so far from the rest of the league. The most valuable goal in a soccer match is the goal that breaks a deadlock, and Liverpool both scored more often (1.03 goals per 90) and conceded less often (0.23) than any other team in the league at an even game state.
Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino, and Sadio Mane are essentially a perfect front three, with beautifully interlocking and complementary skill sets. The midfield -- Fabinho, Jordan Henderson, and Giorginio Wijnaldum -- is filled with players who have sublimated flashier parts of their games to give the team its much needed defensive solidity. The fullback pairing of Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson is the ideal: an athletic freak and a generational passer of the ball, acquired for the cost of a 19th man. Virgil Van Dijk could probably stabilize the economy or an active volcano if you asked him to. Joel Matip and Joe Gomez both brilliantly aided the high press and provided passing out of the back. Alisson, well, he might be the best goalkeeper I’ve ever seen. (The numbers certainly agree.) And Klopp is the ultimate leader: a brilliant manager, strategist, and motivator who proves that the cold, macho American-sports-coach archetype has been bullshit all along. But if you want one on-field reason why Liverpool won the league so easily this season -- and why they’re on pace to break the record for points in a season -- it’s that all of those players and their coach took care of business when the score was tied.
Of course, that’ll be tough to repeat, as will their ability to wring this heady point total from their performances. Yes, Manchester City have better underlying numbers, and in fact, last year’s Liverpool team looks better in a number of ways than this year’s title winners. But ultimately, who gives a shit? This club has been so close, so many times. It has produced multiple performances worthy of titles -- only for the bounces to go the wrong way, their opponents to find too many top corners, or their best players to fail to execute in the highest-leverage moments possible.
There’s that comic about sports-writing: how it’s really just all of us clicking random-number generators and then attaching narratives to them. That’s true to some degree, and I think I even fail to acknowledge just how much randomness decides a silly low-scoring game like this. Maybe Liverpool just flipped tails 20 times in a row and finally landed on heads this season. But even if that’s true, the way it happened is just too sweet to ignore. Klopp created a helter-skelter machine that evoked the best and worst of the Liverpool of years past, but he eventually found a way to turn that mania into something that could also grind its opponents to dust. The last title was lost against Chelsea to Manchester City, and then it was finalized with three-goal collapse against Crystal Palace. This time, Manchester City went down at Chelsea and the title was lost to Liverpool. As for Klopp and Co.’s last win before they became champions? They took a 3-0 lead against Palace. After that, then they scored a fourth, and they beat the guy in the picture you saw at the beginning.
It’s been a long time, but boy is that one hell of a story.
I really hate to be that guy, but the Gerard slip game was at Anfield.