Liverpool’s nightmare season explained and why Jurgen Klopp has been here before

Jurgen Klopp was still learning everyone’s names at Melwood when he was introduced to Ian Graham in November 2015.

The Liverpool manager was only weeks away from his post at Anfield when he spoke to the director of research at his new club.

A doctor of theoretical physics in a previous life, Graham’s work – no matter what field he is employed in – focuses largely on number mining and exhaustive analysis of the data presented to him.

His role with the Reds is no different, but a first meeting with Klopp six years ago saw them deepen the nuances of the German’s last season with Borussia Dortmund.

BVB would finish seventh in the Bundesliga in 2015, a far cry from their back-to-back title wins in 2011 and 2012, but it could have been a lot worse.

Towards the end of December of this season, Klopp’s men were 17th before slipping to bottom in February.

A total of 38 injuries in the squad led the Dortmund players to miss 546 days in total and it was widely assumed that Klopp’s famous pressure intensity was far from its stifling levels of previous years.

After further analysis of the situation, Graham noted that Dortmund’s demise was not simply due to massive regression.

“Have you seen this game?” Klopp is said to have posed the question when discussing a particularly unfortunate loss to Mainz.

“We killed them! I’ve never seen anything like it. We should have won. Ah, you saw that!

But Graham hadn’t. In fact, he hadn’t watched a single Dortmund game this season.

Despite that, his dissection on how and why Klopp’s former side worked hit the nail on the head when it comes to the current Liverpool boss.

The data reaffirmed what Klopp already knew.

Sometimes even the most calculated analysis has to account for bad luck.

“His last season at Dortmund was a disaster,” Graham later explained.

“They were in the relegation zone, and the German media said it was all over for Dortmund, Klopp lost it. There is no going back for them.

“Our analysis showed something very different.

“They were still clearly the second best team in Germany, but the performances did not match the results.

“I analyzed ten seasons of Bundesliga performances and Dortmund were the second most unlucky team in this 10-year history, it was just terrible luck that cost Jurgen this season.”

Seems familiar?

The wounds leave the title dream in tatters

While a lucky moan from inside Liverpool’s side is unlikely to cut the ice outside of it, it can hardly be denied that fortune has not favored the Liverpool side. Klopp this season.

Injuries to key personnel forced the Reds boss to operate for most of the campaign without a center-back department.

Eighteen different partnerships were named as a result, with the Reds forced into a deadline race for two untested defenders in the form of Ben Davies and Ozan Kabak earlier this month.

A final dig in the center-back aisle on transfer deadline day was very different from a club that became known for their surgical approach to income in the Klopp era.

But it is not only the absence of Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and most recently Joel Matip that has impacted the team.

It was also the volume of injuries that left plans to defend the Premier League title in tatters.

Jordan Henderson became the latest to fall victim to an infamous string of muscle problems, joining Fabinho and James Milner on the sidelines.

Naby Keita and Diogo Jota have not played since December when Thiago Alcantara was absent for two and a half months.

Alisson Becker has served a total of 10 games while Trent Alexander-Arnold, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Kostas Tsimikas and Xherdan Shaqiri have all been sidelined at different stages.

Sadio Mane, Mohamed Salah and Divock Origi also missed games.

Unhappiness, of course, can only offer mitigation to a certain extent.

But it sank beyond the medical service and into the field.

Liverpool and expected goals

Expected goals are a performance indicator commonly used in football.

The metric simply rates each photo taken by a team from 1 to 100 based on the likelihood of those attempts finding the net based on historical data.

Penalties – for example – are usually assigned a value of 0.76 because, from what has happened in the past, about 76% of penalties tend to be awarded by the average player.

The metric can be applied to Liverpool’s predicament to determine the team’s performance against expectations in attack and defense, in the same way Graham applied his own model to Klopp’s time at Dortmund in 2015.

Particularly since Christmas Day, the Reds have scored 8.4 fewer Premier League goals than expected goals without penalty would suggest.

Of the 166 shots released by Klopp’s outfit in that span, only eight have found the net.

According to the concept of expected goals, the average player – when presented with exactly the same shots – would have scored closer to the 16 mark.

It’s a notable underperformance and overshadows the next worst team in the division, Brighton and Hove Albion, who underperformed by 5.3 goals.

The finish on display at Anfield has been incredibly cold lately for a team that has mostly heated up since Klopp’s appointment.

Liverpool are close to nearly nine hours of scoreless football since the start of the year at home.

Since Sadio Mane ringed against West Brom on December 27, the champions have gone 528 minutes without a one, with only Mohamed Salah’s penalty against Manchester City to show their toil in front of goal in 2021 at Anfield.

And that has coincided with the unprecedented problem at center defense and a league-leading 11 count for negative VAR decisions this season.

Each team will benefit from VAR at some point.

But Liverpool’s tally of 11 negative decisions is more than any part of England’s top flight has suffered throughout the previous campaign, with a number of appeals appearing open to interpretation.

Much of football is decided by chance, and although Klopp has generally been successful in containing and utilizing the uncertain aspects of the game in the past, the element of chance has really unleashed itself with detrimental effect on the German. this year.

Liverpool, fresh off four successive home defeats for the first time in 98 years, have fallen short of the standards demanded since the start of the year.

But there is at least an explanation behind why the decline of the current Premier League champions has been so brutal over the past two months.