Last season, Liverpool won the Premier League by running out to massive lead thanks to a stellar autumn while playing twice a week. Despite the fixture load, the Reds looked imperious, and by the time
they played the second leg of their Round of 16 tie against Paris Saint-Germain they had a 15 point cushion.
When that game was played, Liverpool had 70 points to Arsenal’s 55. By the time the final table was set, second place Arsenal had just 74 points. Which means Liverpool would have mathematically secured the title with just five points from their final nine matches. A win, two draws, and six defeats would have sufficed.
“This is not going to be a popular opinion, but maybe the reason we won the league last season is we had to play Paris Saint-Germain,” Arne Slot said at his press conference ahead of Wednesday’s league phase Champions League closer against Qarabag. “They beat us and we had a week to prepare for games.”
It’s genuinely hard to know how to productively address such a statement given, as outlined, Liverpool had a 15 point cushion on Arsenal and would have secured last season’s Premier League title by earning 0.56 points per game after being knocked out of the Champions League by Paris Saint-Germain last season.
Put another way, a 0.56 points per game pace is 21 points across a 38 game season (or 22 points in the league’s first three years with 22 teams and 40 games). Seven clubs going back to 1992 and the formation of the Premier League have earned fewer than that in a season. Wolves look set to make it eight this year.
Put yet another way, over 33 completed Premier League seasons to date, a pleasingly even 600 team-seasons have been completed. Of those, 593 of them would have been good enough, on a points per game basis, to win the title last year from the point where Liverpool were knocked out of the Champions League.
“Every manager knows the more players you have the better equipped you are,” Slot added of his currently injury-hit squad (which has seen Liverpool lose fewer man games to injury than leaders Arsenal). “It is not easy to balance but you can see with the recent injuries it is not a good balance, that is obvious.”
