Liverpool FC - Form, expectations, decline and recovery

Liverpool have been difficult to judge so far this season. They have a new young manager in Brendan Rodgers who is trying to transform their style of play. But the transfer window left them woefully short of attacking options, and this has been exacerbated by the injury to Borini, one of the few attacking players they did manage to bring in. They've also lost one of their best midfielders, Lucas, for a long period with a thigh injury, and have been reliant on the excellent form of youngsters such as Raheem Sterling and Andre Wisdom to fill gaps in a thin looking squad.

All of this has made it difficult to tell whether they are a team on the up, or one destined for mid-table obscurity (or worse), and opinions tend to reflect people's opinion on Rodgers and whether they believe in what he's trying to implement - so some fans will point to 8 games unbeaten before Spurs in midweek as being a good solid run to build on, while others point out that the same run included only 1 win in 5.

Regardless, their next run of six games consists of Southampton (H), West Ham (A), Aston Villa (H), Fulham (H), Stoke (A), QPR (A). Six games that they will consider to be 'winnable', and which will go a long way to defining their season. A good run would put them back in contention for the European places with the teams around them faltering. So, let's look at how good the recent form looks in comparison with their form over the last few years, and what they might realistically expect from the next six games.

The chart below shows the number of points gained from the last 6 league games, going back to 08/09 when Benitez was in charge, and shows form up to and including Swansea away last Sunday.

All managers and teams have good runs and bad runs at some point, and this is reflected in the chart. Even Roy Hodgson managed to achieve 13 points from 6 games at some point in his otherwise disastrous tenure. Rodgers appears to have presided over the worst run of 6 games, however this is slightly misleading as it includes the end of season defeat to Swansea under Dalglish. The recent run of 9 points from 6 games seems to be roughly par for the course over the last two years.

It is interesting to note that since Benitez no-one has managed to achieve 15+ points from 6 games, and Dalglish only achieved 14 points once. It is also worth noting that the last time Liverpool managed to gain 11+ points from 6 games was at the end of 2011. As such, whilst the run of games coming up looks relatively easy in Premiership standards, and fans might be expecting 12 points or more, 10 points would seem to be a good return based on 2012 form.

The last 6 form guide is not an ideal measure however. At the start of this season Liverpool played Arsenal, Manchester City and Manchester United in their first 6 games, and the points return in part reflected the toughness of this run of games. It can be more useful to look at form over an extended time period, so the chart below shows results over the previous 19 games, again going back to 08/09 under Benitez.

Here Liverpool's decline in recent seasons can be clearly seen. Their form peaked under Benitez with 46 points from 19 games  during 2009, clear title winning form. As has been well documented, the club began to unravel financially during 09/10, with the owners Hicks and Gillett struggling to finance the huge debts that they'd placed on the club. Xabi Alonso was sold to Real Madrid, replaced by Alberto Aquilani seemingly because Liverpool were able to pay the transfer fee entirely in instalments.  Glen Johnson was also signed from Portsmouth because they still owed Liverpool £7 million for Peter Crouch and so the up front cost was reduced. These deals were a sign of things to come and the club was reportedly 'a day away from administration' before the takeover by Fenway Sports Group in late 2010.

The impact on the team's form is clear to see. From title winning form in 2009, they slipped to finish 7th in 2009/10. Benitez was sacked, and his replacement Roy Hodgson presided over a spell where Liverpool spent some time in the relegation zone, and he eventually left in January 2011 having gained just 24 points from the previous 19 games.

There was a brief revival under Dalglish, with top-four form of over 35 points from 19 games towards the end of the 2010/11 season. But, the decline during 2011/12 is shown starkly in the chart. When Dalglish left the club, Liverpool had secured just 18 points from the previous 19 games. Of course, during that period Liverpool also reached two cup finals, winning one of them, but the league form was atrocious, and was that of a side which would get relegated if replicated over a full season.

So, Rodgers inherited a side that was in relegation form, and in that context the recent form appears to be a bit of a mini revival. Liverpool fans won't get carried away, as it's still not great and is a long way from where they want to be. If the next 6 games provide 10 points or more though, as the fans will hope and even expect, then Rodgers will have gone some way to restoring Liverpool's league form to a level which will allow them to compete for the European places once again.

Most Competitive Premiership Season Since 1996-97!

As expected (see previous blog post at http://sporteconomist.blogspot.com/2011/04/most-competitive-english-premier-league.html), this year’s premiership proved to be one of the most competitive seasons since the competition began. The previous post showed that the season was on course to be the most competitive since 1997-98. In the end it went one better, being the most competitive season since 1996-97 and the third most competitive season since the premierships came into being in 1992-93.

The chart below shows the competitive level of the premiership since its inception in 1992-93. Building on the analysis of footballeconomics.com I’ve created a competitiveness index, which is equal to one minus the standard deviation of the proportion of points achieved by each team. This is a statistical technique which allows us to analyse the variation in the league. A perfectly competitive league would produce a competitive value of 1, as all teams would end up winning an equal proportion of the points on offer.

(click on chart to enlarge)

As can be seen from the chart, the long term trend has been for a decline in the competitiveness of the premier league ever since its inception, but this season has bucked the trend. 

In 2004-05, Liverpool finished 37 points off the leaders, qualified for Europe in 5^th place, and won the European Cup. This season Birmingham and Blackpool finished 41 points off the leaders and were relegated. So tight was the spread of points this season that just a couple of wins in a row could make a huge difference to a team’s season. Just 8 weeks ago, Aston Villa fans were unfurling a banner calling for Gerard Houllier to be sacked as they almost fell into a relegation battle. In the end they finished a creditable 9^th in the league. Roy Hodgson’s Liverpool occupied the relegation places for some of the season, only for Kenny Dalglish’s Liverpool to finish in 6^th place, one place better than Rafa Benitez achieved last season. Meanwhile, many were rightly praising the performance of Owen Coyle’s Bolton Wanderers as they were riding high in the table earlier in the season, but they eventually ended up in 14^th place. For all these reasons and more, many football pundits have argued that this season was the most exciting and competitive league for a long time, and it’s interesting to see that the stats above endorse this view.

There are reasons to be optimistic, e.g. with the new UEFA financial fair play rules, that this year’s increased competitiveness may be a sign of things to come, and if so we can look forward to a much more competitive league in future years. At the top of the table, the top four seems to be moving towards a top six, with Liverpool strengthening, and Spurs proving that last season’s fourth place was no fluke with a fifth placed finish this time. Similarly, looking at the teams coming up from the Championship, there are no obvious whipping boys next year, and the battle against relegation is likely to be as fierce as ever.  Time will tell whether this turns out to be true, or whether like 2003-04 (itself the most competitive for 8 years at the time) this is just a short term blip in the long term decline

Cost per goal of English Premier League Strikers

This week’s post is inspired by a conversation I had regarding Fernando Torres. Until recently he was hailed as one of the greatest strikers ever to grace the English game, but is now being slated by many as an expensive flop who’s so far cost Chelsea £50 million per league goal. In my opinion, Torres is a great striker who I’m certain will prove himself again, even if injuries may have robbed him of a little sharpness, but the £50m per goal figure stuck in my head and made me wonder which strikers have proved to be the best value for money in recent years in terms of cost per goal scored?

To analyse this, we’d need accurate data on transfer fees for some of the best strikers in premiership history, adjusted for inflation and changes in the transfer market over time, along with their goal stats. Thankfully, in writing their excellent book “Pay As You Play: The True Price of Success in the Premier League Era”, Paul Tomkins, Graeme Riley and Gary Fulcher collected just this kind of information*, and Joel Clyne used some of the data to discuss Darren Bent’s £18m January transfer to Aston Villa in this journal post http://joelclyne.livejournal.com/734.html. For their book, Tomkins, Riley and Fulcher painstakingly researched the accurate transfer fee paid for every player since 1992 and converted them to modern prices using the ‘football inflation rate’ that came out of their Transfer Price Index.

Taking the figures from the table in Joel’s article, it is possible to calculate the cost per goal of the selection of players that he considered, and they are shown  in the table below:

Table showing real costs (in March 2010 prices, using Transfer Price Index figures), appearances and goals of a selection of premiership strikers

            

So the best ‘value for money’ (in terms of cost-per-goal) striker in premiership history from this list is Thierry Henry, at a cost of roughly £140,000 per goal scored. He’s some way clear of Van Nistelrooy in second place on £260,000 a goal, and Cristiano Ronaldo, on £295,000 a goal, with the others trailing further behind.

Thierry Henry: The best value for money striker signing in Premiership history?

In hindsight, this is probably not such a surprising table. Thierry Henry was famously bought relatively cheaply by Arsene Wenger as a winger, converted to a striker, and was then prolific in the great Arsenal teams that won trophies under Wenger. It’s interesting to note that his ‘real’ transfer value, in modern prices (from ‘Pay as You Play’), is higher than that Liverpool paid to sign Fernando Torres from Atletico Madrid though, and similar to the fees Manchester United paid for Cristiano Ronaldo and Ruud Van Nistelrooy.

Obviously we know that strikers are not judged on goals alone, particularly certain types of striker. Peter Crouch comes out bottom of the above table, yet he offers much more to a team than the goals that he scores. The other huge caveat with this analysis is that it only includes transfer fees, when a fuller analysis of the value of a striker would also take into account the wage cost of signing him. Players these days can move for relatively cheap fees if they are out of contract, or near the end of their contract, but these players tend to command higher than average salaries and this additional cost would need to be factored in. 


Finally, not all players are included in this table (as I only have the data for those in Joel's article), and those who are still playing are a little harshly treated as their cost per goal will fall with each goal they score until they are next transferred. That said, it’s interesting to see how some of the best strikers in Premiership history compare on the basic figures shown above, and the clear win for Thierry Henry even when his transfer fee is inflated to take account of changes in transfer fees over time.

As for Torres himself - until 2010 he was the fourth best in the table above, and would almost certainly have pushed his way into the top three with an average season (if he'd scored 14 goals), and possibly even second place with a great season (with 24 goals). The huge fee and lack of goals since his move to Chelsea will have moved him almost to the bottom of the table though, and it will take some time and a lot of goals to move back to the position shown above.

(* I’m currently reading this book, and so far I’d highly recommend it - it’s a great read for anyone interested in how money shapes English Premiership football. A fantastic amount of data and high quality analysis behind it too, the data I've used above (obtained via a third party)  is just a tiny tiny snippet.)