Liverpool can't keep getting away with this right?
Liverpool have now won late 5 times in 5 matches. There is no way that this is sustainable right?
Here are the times that the winning goals have come for Liverpool this season.
88’ Federico Chiesa goal vs Bournemouth, after giving up a two-goal lead
90+9' Rio Ngumoha goal vs Newcastle, against a 10-man team, also after giving up a two-goal lead.
83’ Dominik Szoboszlai free kick goal vs Arsenal
90+4’ Mohamed Salah penalty goal, against a 10-man team
90+1’ Virgil van Dijk goal vs Atletico Madrid, after giving up a two-goal lead
That is five matches played and five winning goals coming very late in matches. That has also somewhat combined with them not exactly playing sparkling dominate football to get people (myself included) if this is sustainable.
The classic meme gif from Breaking Bad comes to mind to sum up how us rival fans look at this.
To a certain extent no what they are doing is not sustainable. They have scored 5 goals after the 80th minute in the Premier League (6 if you include the Champions League) and that is from just 1.7 expected goals.
A simulation of these chances would have you expecting most teams to score between 1 and 3 goals from this quality of chances and Liverpool have scored 5 from this. That’s something that you’d expect to happen 6 times out of 1,000 and would be pretty improbable to be anything other than just chance.
Here is what the individual xG of these shots looks like.
The best chance was the penalty that they scored to win against Burnley, and the only other “big chance” was the Ngumoha goal scored against Newcastle, everything else has been a 13% or less chance of being converted.
So, if the question is, will Liverpool continue to beat their expected goals by nearly 3x late in matches going forward, the answer is almost certainly no, that is incredibly unlikely to happen.
Before we go and poo-poo this as nothing but “luck” or variance, it should be noted that Liverpool are one of the best teams at creating and scoring chances late over the last three seasons.
No team has scored more goals after the 80th minute than Liverpool’s 40, they have overperformed their xG here but they have still created over 30 expected goals and rank 5th.
Cutting this slice into an even smaller view, here is what it looks like just looking at the game state where a team is down a goal (meaning scoring would bring them level) and where the score is tied (meaning scoring would give the team the lead).
Liverpool again have been the team that has scored the most in these situations over the last three seasons. With the game in the balance, Liverpool have performed at a level that no other team can match right now.
This makes the late goal scoring a bit less of an outlier and less unexpected for Liverpool. They have been one of the best attacking teams over this span and they do have a relentlessness that has given them more goals in this time period than other teams.
This is not something that I would expect to change going forward.
One of the other big questions that should come up when looking at the need for the late match heroics is that this is not really a situation that good teams find themselves in often. Good teams will typically get ahead earlier in matches, often adding on more goals and have matches that are a bit more comfortable.
Overall, this season Liverpool have not played especially well, and that has put them in these positions where they have had to win it late more often.
Last season by contrast they were head and shoulders the best performing team and used that to avoided needing to save it late. At the 80th minute, they were winning 24 times, tied 8 times, and losing 6 times. They turned the losing position into a draw 3 times (no wins). They turned the 8 tied game states into a win once and into a loss once. They converted 23 of 24 times winning in the 80th minute into wins, with the only dropped points late coming against Everton.
Here are the race charts for each match that they have played in the Premier League so far this season.
The win against Burnley was the match where they had the most dominate performance on the chances but outside of that they have won but not done so convincingly. Even in this win, where they produced 2.5 expected goals, in the middle period Liverpool struggled to create clear openings, and it took the late penalty to score their goal.
Aggregating everything up and Liverpool this season have been closer to the good but not elite teams than they have been to the elite team that we would expect them to be.
This relative lack of good performances has been a surprise and it makes their position at the top of the table look like it was done on a bit of smoke and mirrors. On my expected points model, there is no team that has overperformed the expected total this season than Liverpool has.
This would put them 7th, instead they are the only team that is a perfect 4/4 this season.
Going back to the theme here, overperforming the underlying numbers by +1.4 points per match is something that would be incredibly unlikely to repeat at the same level over a full season (that would be over 53 points more than expected and that is not a level that you see over a full season).
If Liverpool keep playing like this, they will drop points. They will not be able to keep getting away with it. The worry for the teams that are chasing them is that they probably also won’t keep playing this poorly and won’t need to keep getting away with it. This is a changed team from last year’s team that was deserving Champions, but the changes are not moves that would make you think that they have gotten worse (in fact it does seem like they have on the balance of things added more talent and gotten better).
These points that have been “unearned” or “lucky” don’t have to be given back and there is not some balancing karmic force that will make it so that they have a similar magnitude of negative variance. This could be the basis that gives them the needed margins to retain their title. Time will tell and it will be an interesting thing to potentially look back upon in the coming months.