Liverpool, with a millionaire investment in signings and after conquering the league, finds itself in a critical situation. Currently, they occupy the 12th position in the table, with a performance far below expectations.
The numbers are alarming: 20 goals conceded, a negative goal difference, and only four defending champions have had fewer points at this stage of the season. They are 11 points behind first place and seven from the relegation zone. This number of goals conceded hasn’t been seen since the 2008-09 season. In the 2018-19 season, when they won the Champions League, they had only conceded five goals. In their winning league season, only eight goals in 12 matches.
Despite having the same center-backs and midfielders, along with new full-backs that were supposed to improve the defense, Liverpool has conceded more goals than only the four teams at the bottom of the table. Despite having an attacking squad with great figures, they have failed to score 20 goals in the first 12 matches for the first time in 10 seasons.
Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, two of the most expensive signings in the history of English football, have not managed to score goals or assist. Hugo Ekitike, with only three goals, seems to be the only positive point of the transfer market. Mohamed Salah, who was the best player in the world last season, now has a lower goal and assist rate than Casemiro.
Although Liverpool has to find a way to reverse the situation, the chances of winning the title are low. Bookmakers and projection systems give them only a 5% chance of surpassing the 11 teams ahead before May.
This collapse is similar to what happens in most Premier League seasons: the previous year’s champion usually gets worse in the following season.
The Difficulty of Winning Consecutive Titles in the Premier League
Since the biggest clubs decided to keep the television revenue in the early 1990s, there have been 32 complete seasons of the Premier League. Only 11 of them have had a repeat champion.
These 11 repeat winners meet one of the following requirements:
Managed by Sir Alex Ferguson
Owned by a Russian oligarch
Currently under investigation by the Premier League for potential breaches of financial regulations
Manchester United achieved it six times, Manchester City four, and Chelsea once. To repeat in the Premier League, you need a coach like the best in history and generate more income than any other club in the world, or be owned by someone without financial limits.
Of those 11 teams, only five earned more points in their repeat title season. Only four improved their goal difference. These are the teams that did both:
Manchester United, 1999-2000: from 79 to 91 points and from +43 to +52
Manchester United, 1993-1994 (42-match season): from 84 to 92 points and from +36 to +42
Manchester City, 2021-2022: from 86 to 93 points and from +51 to +73
Manchester City, 2023-24: from 89 to 91 points and from +60 to +61
It is also important to highlight the worst title defenders. Four title winners have declined by at least 25 points and have seen their goal difference change by at least 25 goals:
Blackburn Rovers, 1995-96: from 89 to 61 points and from +41 to +14
Liverpool, 2020-21: from 99 points to 69 points and from +52 to +26
Chelsea, 2015-16: from 87 points to 50 points and from +41 to +6
Leicester City, 2016-17: from 81 points to 44 points and from +32 to -15
The Blackburn season was affected by the change from 42 to 38 matches. Overall, there are more teams that get much worse than teams that improve. In fact, almost half of the title winners (15) decreased by at least five points and at least five goal difference the year after winning the league.
If we average everything, a Premier League winner averages: 87 points, 82.7 goals scored, and 32.1 goals conceded. In the following season, they get: 78.5 points, 76.9 goals scored, and 35.2 goals conceded.
There is a slightly greater defensive decline (10% more goals conceded, 7% fewer goals scored), which translates to a team that wins the Premier League getting 10% fewer points the following season.
Why is it So Hard to Repeat?
If we analyze the year before a team wins the title, the average is:
80.3 points
76.8 goals
32.8 goals against
The three-year average trend for a title winner has been an improvement of about seven points and then a decrease of eight or nine points: 80, up to 87, down to 78 or 79.
This makes sense: you usually win the Premier League by being very good for several seasons, but you win the league in the season when everything goes well. Often, there is not a big material difference between an 80-point team, an 87-point team, and a 79-point team: a few lucky bounces, a couple of well-struck balls, a bad goalkeeper or a couple of marginal refereeing seasons are enough to separate teams with the same talent by seven or eight points.
The main lesson is that it is very difficult to win the Premier League in consecutive seasons, because to win it in the first place, it usually requires a confluence of atypical factors.
Let’s take Liverpool from last year as an example: everyone stayed healthy, the new coach’s tendencies seemed to fit perfectly with the previous coach’s blind spots, both Liverpool center-backs played almost flawlessly in their own area, Salah had the best season of his career, and the two defensive midfielders, Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch, had the best seasons of their careers at the same time.
This year, there have already been several injuries (including Gravenberch’s), coach Arne Slot still hasn’t figured out how to adapt the approach to the new squad and the new tactical environment, and neither Salah nor Mac Allister have been close to the levels they reached last season. Meanwhile, according to Gradient Sports data, Ibrahima Konaté has committed the second-most positional errors of all Premier League center-backs this season (last year, he was 28th).
That still isn’t enough to explain how much worse Liverpool has been this season, but at least it gets us closer.1:49 Does Florian Wirtz lack confidence since moving to Liverpool? Craig Burley analyzes Florian Wirtz’s current form with Germany and how that relates to his move to Liverpool.In addition to the variation within the team, teams also have little control over what their opponents do. Take Manchester United in 2011-12 and 1998-99. They improved on the points totals of the previous, title-winning seasons. Their goal difference improved by 15 goals on both occasions, and on both occasions, they still didn’t repeat as champions.
The opposite can also be true and often was for the same team and the same coach. United’s point totals fell by 11 points and seven points in the 2000-01 and 1996-97 seasons, respectively, and yet they won the league on both occasions. Meanwhile, in each of Arsenal’s three title defenses, they decreased by zero, seven, and nine points, and did not repeat in any of them.
Last season, Liverpool benefited from key injuries, declines of key players, or a combination of both at Manchester City and Arsenal. Neither club had won fewer than 85 points in either of the previous two seasons; in 2024-25, neither club won more than 74.
Should we have seen this coming then? If so, there was a lot of money to be made, as most bookmakers listed Liverpool as the favorites before the season started and then shortened their odds more and more as they won improbable match after match during the first five weeks of the season.
But it’s almost always easier to predict what won’t happen than what will. And since the Premier League began, repeat champions tend to share a series of performance-based characteristics: they finished second or first the year before winning, the improvement in their title season was less than seven points, and their title victory came with 87 points or more. Therefore, teams that were already excellent did not have an atypical season, and they did not win with a relatively low point total.
Of the previous 32 league winners, 11 of them were able to score only one of those three boxes, and only one of them repeated as champion. And that was Manchester City from 2017-18, who had just won 100 points, the most in league history.
If we look at Liverpool from last season, they improved by only two points compared to the previous season, but they also only earned 84 points on their way to claiming the title, and they had finished third the previous season. They had maintained stability, but they jumped several places in the table and landed in first place without the kind of points haul that makes future dominance more likely.
And so, even before the season began, Liverpool looked like the team it is now: a team that is not going to win the Premier League.
