Liverpool are like most other Premier League champions: Regression is inevitable

Liverpool are – how should I put this? — terrible. They stink. We can’t trust them. Horrible. Awful. Yuck. Uh.

After winning the championship and spending over half a billion dollars on transfers this summer, they sit in 12th place. They conceded 20 goals. They have a negative goal differential. Only four defending champions have collected fewer points at this stage of the season. They are 11 points from first and seven points from the relegation zone.

I can continue. Do you want me to continue? OK, I’ll move on: that’s the most goals they’ve conceded in 12 Premier League matches since 2008-09. When Liverpool won the Champions League in 2018-19, they had only conceded five at that stage. When they won the league last season, they conceded eight out of 12 matches. Again, just last season!

Despite the same central defenders, the same midfielders and two new full-backs who are supposed to be defensive upgrades Regarding the guys they replaced, Liverpool have allowed fewer goals than the bottom four teams. And although they assembled what appeared to be perhaps the greatest collection of strikers at a non-sovereign wealth club, they failed to score 20 goals in the opening 12 matches for the first time in 10 seasons.

Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz are the two most expensive players to acquire in the history of English football – and they have combined for zero goals and one assist. They’ve been so bad that Hugo Ekitike seems to be Liverpool’s only bright spot in the summer transfer window… and he’s a center forward who’s only scored three goals. Yesterday was Thanksgiving – that’s how far into the season we are! Mohamed Salah was the best player in the world for most of last season, and he now scores and assists at a lower rate than Casemiro.

We’ll see if Liverpool can eventually find a way to turn things around. They have to… right? But even if they do, their title race is over. Betting markets and sophisticated projection systems still give them about a 5% chance of overtaking the 11 teams ahead of them in the standings before the end of May. They say there’s a chance – we say we’ll believe it when they don’t lose 3-0 at home to a team who have already sacked two different managers.

Yet while it was a particular and particularly spectacular collapse, Liverpool’s season was broadly in line with what we see in most Premier League seasons: whoever won the title in a given year looks worse the next year.

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How difficult is it to win back-to-back Premier League titles?

Since the biggest clubs broke away and decided to take over TV revenues in the early 1990s, 32 Premier League seasons have been completed. And of those 32, only 11 featured a repeat champion.

All of these 11 repeat winners check one of the following boxes:

☑ Managed by Sir Alex Ferguson
☑ Owned by a Russian oligarch
☑ Currently the Premier League is investigating 115 potential breaches of financial regulations.

Manchester United have done it six times, Manchester City four and Chelsea once. Basically, to have a repeat in the Premier League, you had to either be coached by arguably the greatest manager in the history of the sport whilst generating more revenue than any other club in the world, or you had to be owned by someone whose only financial limitations were the rules put in place by the various governing bodies.

And of those 11 teams, only five of them actually earned more points in their new title season. And only four of them improved their goal differential. Here are the teams that did both:

• Manchester United, 1999-2000: from 79 to 91 points and from plus-43 to plus-52
• Manchester United, 1993-1994 (42-match season): from 84 to 92 points and from plus-36 to plus-42
• Manchester City, 2021-2022: from 86 to 93 points and from plus-51 to plus-73
• Manchester City, 2023-24: from 89 to 91 points and from plus-60 to plus-61

While we’re here, we might as well take a look at the worst title defenders. Four title winners lost at least 25 points and saw their goal differential shift by at least 25 goals:

• Blackburn Rovers, 1995-96: from 89 to 61 points and from plus-41 to plus-14
• Liverpool, 2020-21: from 99 points to 69 points and from plus-52 to plus-26
• Chelsea, 2015-16: from 87 points to 50 points and from plus-41 to plus-6
• Leicester City, 2016-17: from 81 points to 44 points and from plus-32 to minus-15

Blackburn’s numbers are a little skewed since the league went from 42 to 38 games after their title win in 1994-95, but the broader point is that there are far more teams who have deteriorated significantly than teams who have improved even slightly. In fact, almost half of all title winners (15) lost at least five points and at least five goals in the year following their league victory.

If we take everyone and average it, this is what a Premier League title winner looks like: 87 points, 82.7 goals scored and 32.1 goals allowed. And here’s what they did the following season: 78.5 points, 76.9 goals scored and 35.2 goals allowed.

There is a slightly larger relative decline defensively (10% more goals conceded, 7% fewer goals scored), and that adds up to this: when a team wins the Premier League, they earn 10% fewer points the following season.

So why is it so hard to rehearse?

If we look at the year Before a team wins the title, then the average is as follows:

• 80.3 points
• 76.8 goals
• 32.8 goals against

So the average three-year trend for a title winner has been about a seven-point improvement, then a decline of eight or nine points: 80, down to 87, down to 78 or 79.

This makes sense: you tend to win the Premier League by being very good for several seasons, but you win the league in the season where everything goes well. There’s often not a huge material difference between an 80-point team, an 87-point team, and a 79-point team – a few lucky rebounds, a few softly struck balls, bad goaltending, or a few marginal officiating seasons are enough to separate equally talented teams by seven or eight points.

So that’s the main lesson from all of this: it’s really hard to win the Premier League in consecutive seasons, because to win it in the first place usually requires a confluence of outliers.

Take Liverpool last year: everyone stayed healthy, the new manager’s tendencies seemed to align perfectly with the previous manager’s blind spots, Liverpool’s two central defenders played almost flawlessly in their own third, Salah had the best season of his career and both starting midfielders, Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch, had the best seasons of their careers at the same time.

This year there have already been numerous injuries (including to Gravenberch), manager Arne Slot still hasn’t figured out how to adapt the approach to the new team and 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 made the second most positional errors among all Premier League center backs this season (last year he was 28th).

That still doesn’t quite explain how much worse Liverpool have been this season, but it at least gets us closer.

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In addition to differences within teams, teams have limited control over what their opponents do. Take Manchester United in 2011-12 and 1998-99. They improved on the points total of previous title-winning seasons. Their goal differential improved by 15 goals each time, and each time, they still failed to repeat their championship title.

The opposite can also be true and often was true for the same team and the same manager. United’s points totals dropped by 11 points and seven points in the 2000-01 and 1996-97 seasons, respectively, and they still won the championship twice. Meanwhile, in each of Arsenal’s three title defenses they have dropped zero, seven and nine points, and they have not done it again in any of them.

Last season, Liverpool of course benefited from significant injuries, declines of key players or a combination of both at Manchester City and Arsenal. Neither club had won fewer than 85 points in the previous two seasons; in 2024-25, neither club has won more than 74.

Should we have seen this coming, then? If that was the case, there was a lot of money to be made, as most sportsbooks listed Liverpool as favorites before the season started, then lowered their odds further and further as they won game after improbable game over 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 start of the Premier League, repeat champions have tended to share a number of performance-based characteristics: they finished second or first the year before winning, their winning season’s improvement was less than seven points, and their title victory came with 87 points or more. So teams that were already great didn’t have a peak season and didn’t win with a relatively low point total.

Of the league’s 32 previous winners, 11 of them were only able to check one of those three boxes, and only one of them was named champion. And it was Manchester City in 2017-2018, who had just won 100 points, the most points in the history of the league.

If we go back to Liverpool from last season, they only improved by two points from the previous season, but they also only gained 84 points en route to the title, and they had finished third the season before. They had maintained their stability, but they climbed several places in the standings and landed in first place without the kind of points that make future domination more likely.

So, before the season even started, Liverpool looked like the team they are today: a team that won’t win the Premier League.