Liverpool is top of the Premier League with nine matches left to play. History suggests Manchester City and Arsenal will do well to overhaul Jürgen Klopp’s men.
Liverpool supporters will be poring over the remaining fixtures of all three Premier League title challengers after the Reds moved to the top of the table on Sunday. It could prove to have been the most pivotal day in the race for the 2023/24 crown.
After Liverpool had beaten Brighton 2-1 for the main course, Manchester City and Arsenal served up the perfect dessert from the Reds’ perspective, a sterile, tasteless pudding of a match which ended 0-0. It left Jürgen Klopp’s men with a two-point lead over the Gunners, with the defending champions a point further back.
With only around a quarter of the campaign remaining, any advantage is a very good thing. The significance of Sundays results was highlighted further by Opta noting that a) Liverpool are now favorites for the title, and b) City aren’t for the first time this season.
They give the Reds a 47.7 per cent chance of glory, with a City title rated as a 33.5 per cent likelihood and Arsenal’s hopes of finishing first an 18.8 per cent shot. With a full midweek slate of fixtures, these figures will soon change, though as Liverpool welcome Sheffield United to Anfield on Thursday, it can be confident its percentage won’t drop in match week 31.
Like any model, it can only be an estimate. Per Premier Injuries, Liverpool have eight players out injured (and they don’t count Ben Doak), over twice as many as City (two) and Arsenal (one) combined.
The Reds’ are top of the league and have serious quality in the shape of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Alisson Becker, Curtis Jones, Diogo Jota and Andrew Robertson set to return in the next two weeks or so. Having them available will provide a boost from which Liverpool’s rivals cannot benefit.
There’s also the factor of European football to consider, with Arsenal and City possibly clashing in the Champions League semi-finals. That’s if they get through monumental ties with Bayern Munich and Real Madrid respectively. Liverpool supporters will be hoping that they do.
While it’s impossible to truly account for all of these factors, we can take a look at Premier League history. In only three of the last 20 seasons has the team at the summit after 29 matches not gone on to win the title.
Before we rush to crown Liverpool as the kings of 2023/24, we have to acknowledge that the circumstances for each campaign in the last two decades have been far from identical.
The most extreme example occurred four years ago, with the Reds a whopping 22 points clear of the competition with nine matches remaining. No team was going to bridge that gap whereas Liverpool’s current advantage could vanish in a single round of fixtures.
There’s also the fact that one of the teams who failed to go all the way from this point occurred just last season. Arsenal held a five-point lead after game 29 yet then drew 2-2 at Anfield which initiated a significant collapse. It ultimately finished five points behind City.
While Liverpool’s squad contains players who have undergone Premier League title races in the past, there are many men within it who have not. It doesn’t feel likely that the Reds will stumble as badly as the Gunners did last term, but pressure does funny things, especially when playing every three or four days.
History does at least provide Klopp with a target. There have been five instances of a team holding no more than a two-point advantage who won the title, and they all collected a minimum of 20 points over the final nine games, with 22.4 their average. The teams in this position who failed – Chelsea in 2013/14 and Manchester United two years earlier – took no more than 19 points from the run-in.
If 20 points do not feel like they will be enough in 2023/24, and they don’t, they do at least provide a starting point for which to aim.
Liverpool is finally favorite to win the Premier League this season and yet that will merely allow rival fans to label it as a bottler should Arsenal or City take the title. Nonetheless, history shows that the Reds have a fantastic opportunity to seal the Klopp era in glorious fashion.
