Liverpool are going to win the Premier League …
…
…
… right?”
While normally you need a $500,000 MRI machine to image the human brain, I have just given you direct access inside the mind of most Liverpool fans, at some point, over the past four months.
It has been a foregone conclusion for everyone else for a long time now, but Liverpool fans remember when Steven Gerrard slipped. They can’t forget how they finished one point behind Manchester City twice. Or how about those multiple losses to Real Madrid in the Champions League final? That time they beat Manchester United twice and still finished behind them in the table? And don’t forget the, you know, entire modern history of the club.
Of course, those doubts have mostly evaporated by now. Despite some hiccups in the second half of the season — the draws with Everton, Manchester United and Nottingham Forest; the losses to Plymouth Argyle in the FA Cup, Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League, Newcastle in the Carabao Cup, and Fulham in the league — Liverpool are six points away from clinching their second-ever Premier League title. ESPN BET isn’t even taking bets on the title race anymore.
But let’s just say that the unthinkable did actually happen: that Liverpool somehow didn’t win the Premier League. What would that disaster scenario look like?
Thanks to 10,000 simulations from the analyst Simon Tinsley, we can sketch out a pretty specific and plausible picture of the rare-but-still-possible scenario where Liverpool don’t win the Premier League.
How to predict the Premier League
At his site Analytic Football, Tinsley maintains Premier League and Championship projections throughout the season. They’re the best publicly available projections I’ve seen, and he uses a combination of goals, expected goals and penalties to create team ratings that represent how many goals we’d expect each team to score and concede on a neutral field against the average Premier League team. The ratings are then updated after each match.
Here’s how overall ratings for Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City have developed since the start of last season:
With the ratings, Tinsley then projects the remaining Premier League schedule and uses that to come up with estimated season-end point and goal totals, plus probabilities for the title race, Champions League spots and relegation.
For example, his model rates Nottingham Forest as the 14th-strongest team in the league right now, but it still gives them a 63% chance of playing in the Champions League next season. They’ve banked the third-most points already, their remaining schedule isn’t that hard, and not enough of the challenging teams are expected to go on a late-season run.
To come up with the probabilities, Tinsley simulates the Premier League season 10,000 times using the implied probabilities for each matchup remaining. Whatever percentage of time, say, Chelsea finishes in the top five of those 10,000 seasons becomes their probability of qualifying for the Champions League. (Currently: 31%.)
As of now, Tinsley’s site lists Liverpool with a 100% chance of winning the league, but that’s only because the model rounds up. I had Tinsley run another round of 10,000 simulations, and Liverpool won the league in 9,971, meaning there were 29 times when Liverpool didn’t finish first.
Here’s what that 0.29% chance of Liverpool failing to finish first looks like.
How Liverpool could still lose the Premier League
Across those 29 simulations, this was the distribution of the point totals for the top two:
Arsenal 81, Liverpool 80: eight times
• Arsenal 79, Liverpool 79 (Arsenal win on goal difference): seven times
• Arsenal 81, Liverpool 81: six times
• Arsenal 81, Liverpool 78: four times
• Arsenal 81, Liverpool 79: three times
• Arsenal 77, Liverpool 77: one time
Within these simulations, every single result of the rest of the Premier League season is decided to come up with the final standings. Since it’s the most common of the six different final points totals, let’s dig into one of the simulations where Arsenal finished on 81 points and Liverpool landed on 80. We’ll follow the exact match results from the simulation, and use some good old-fashioned analysis to fill in the details of how the results could play out.
Matchweek 33
When a team is projected by a model to achieve something, it’s projected to achieve it in all kinds of ways. Sometimes in the projection, the team will go wire to wire and do it easily. Other times, it’ll nearly blow the lead but still hang on. Occasionally, it’ll blow the lead but quickly win it right back, and even less often, it’ll blow the lead, fall well behind, and then mount a wild comeback.
So, when a team’s odds of winning something are 80%, that doesn’t mean that its odds of painlessly and easily winning that thing are also 80%.
Just take this specific projection we’re gaming out. If Liverpool win this weekend at Leicester City, they’ll only need to win one more game to clinch the title. Or, they’d need Arsenal to drop just three points over their final five matches. Or, some combination of the two.
In other words: If Liverpool win this weekend, their odds of lifting the Premier League trophy will be even higher than they are right now. And in this specific simulation, they still don’t end up winning the league:
• Liverpool win at Leicester City: 3-0
• Arsenal win at Ipswich Town: 2-0
Matchweek 34
After beating Leicester City, Liverpool are three points away from winning the league. All they have to do is beat Tottenham at home. You know, the same Tottenham team they did this to, on the road, back in December:
But even though they’re all the way down in 15th and falling, Spurs still have a plus-11 goal differential. Only Liverpool and Manchester City have scored more than their 60 goals.
With his job hanging on by the slimmest of threads, Spurs manager Ange Postecoglu turns this into just enough of a drunken boxing match — and Guglielmo Vicario, the best shot-stopper in the Premier League, makes a handful of remarkable saves — that it ends 2-2.
The match feels a lot like Liverpool’s sloppy 2-2 draw against Manchester United in early January. Except, this is the rare match where both sets of fans were rooting for the same team — and both sets left disappointed. Arsenal live for another week. Two points to go.
• Arsenal win against Crystal Palace: 2-1
• Liverpool draw against Tottenham: 2-2
Matchweek 35
At this point, Arsenal feel like they’re finally ready to get knocked out of title contention for good. After an intense first-leg draw with PSG in the Champions League semifinals, they’re still 11 points back of Liverpool with four games to go. With the second leg at the Emirates in a few days, Arteta rotates most of his starting lineup. Two more wins, and the Champions League is theirs.
Matchweek 35
At this point, Arsenal feel like they’re finally ready to get knocked out of title contention for good. After an intense first-leg draw with PSG in the Champions League semifinals, they’re still 11 points back of Liverpool with four games to go. With the second leg at the Emirates in a few days, Arteta rotates most of his starting lineup. Two more wins, and the Champions League is theirs.
Although Bournemouth beat Arsenal earlier this season and have played all of the big clubs tough, their late-season slump has eliminated them from Champions League contention. They head to the Emirates with little to play for, and their manager Andoni Iraola is already looking for homes just outside London. The Gunners win through an 85th-minute goal from Raheem Sterling. He celebrates like he just won the World Cup. Everyone else immediately starts worrying about PSG’s Ousmane Dembélé and Désiré Doué.
Chelsea, meanwhile, have everything to play for against Liverpool. If they don’t finish top five and bring in Champions League revenue, it’s unclear how a roster that has been financially engineered to the absolute limit will be viable for next season.
Liverpool have one of those games where Mohamed Salah just can’t get past his fullback, and they only generate 12 mostly low-quality shots. Like he did at Anfield earlier this season, Nico Jackson breaks through Liverpool’s high line three times.
He scores one — and VAR rules it out. The second one, Alisson Becker stops. But then the third time, Jackson wildly miskicks the ball so badly that the Liverpool keeper dives the wrong way. The ball smashes into the ground and loops way above the crossbar before bouncing into the back of the net.
• Arsenal win against Bournemouth: 2-1
• Liverpool lose at Chelsea: 1-0
Matchweek 36
After Manchester City officially imploded, this became the anticipated game of the year — a late-season title decider between arguably the best two teams in the world. Instead, it’s a battle between an injured Arsenal who just got dumped out of the Champions League by a PSG side they’d easily beaten earlier in the season, and a Liverpool team who haven’t been at their best for months.
And it’s not even clear what kind of match this actually is. The Gunners head to Anfield still eight points back of first with just three to play. Even with the recent hiccups, Liverpool have 80 points through 35 matches — a rate of 2.3 per game. Not only would Arsenal need to beat Liverpool here to have a shot at winning the league, they’d also need Liverpool to lose their next two.
Arsenal’s plus-34 goal differential is still way behind Liverpool’s plus-45, so for all intents and purposes, Liverpool only need one more point to win it all. And a point here, in particular, would officially clinch it, since it would also take two points off Arsenal.
But the Gunners rally around the one or two points of title probability they’ve earned over the past two weeks since it’s the last thing they have left after the loss to PSG. “We probably won’t win,” goes the supporters’ rallying cry, “but at least we can keep them from winning it against us.”
The match is mostly a repeat of the game at the Emirates in November. Arsenal create a few quality chances from set plays, and Bukayo Saka has Liverpool fans calling for Andy Robertson to retire at halftime.
Declan Rice scores another free kick to give Arsenal the lead in the 75th minute, and this time, there’s no late goal from Liverpool because there’s no Trent Alexander-Arnold to pry open the defense. He tweaked his hamstring and was subbed off at half. Instead, Gabriel Martinelli adds a second during an injury-time counter-attack.
• Arsenal win at Liverpool: 2-0
Matchweek 37
So, uh, here are the expected-goal totals for Liverpool’s league matches away against Brighton over the past five seasons:
• Liverpool: 8.2
• Brighton: 9.4
Maybe it’s because Brighton’s young athletes make up one of the few sides that can run with Liverpool. Perhaps their possession-heavy approach has held up well against Liverpool’s press. Maybe Liverpool’s roster is composed of the only 25 people on planet Earth for whom sea air is not medicinal, but actually slightly poisonous. Whatever the reason, trips to the AmEx have rarely led to Liverpool dominance over the past half-decade.
This ends up being about a 50-50 game. Liverpool attempt 17 shots, and Brighton test Alisson 10 times. Liverpool create 1.5 xG, while Brighton create 1.3. But a deflected Danny Welbeck shot on a fast break gives Brighton the lead just after halftime.
Mohamed Salah, Dominik Szoboszlai, and Luis Díaz all hit the woodwork in the second half — before Kaoru Mitoma cuts in from the left side and curls one in at the back post. The goal is almost an exact replica of Callum Hudson-Odoi‘s winner at Anfield early in the season.
While Arsenal also face one of their bogey teams in Newcastle, it’s a meaningless game for the Magpies. A late-season collapse from Nottingham Forest and a win over Chelsea the week before led to Eddie Howe & Co. clinching Champions League qualification with two games to spare. The celebration hangover bleeds into the match at the Emirates, and the Gunners go up by two goals in the first half. Fabian Schär scores one of the goals of the season — a 45-yard, one-time volley, in the 94th minute — but nobody cares.
Would anyone be shocked if Arsenal beat Liverpool at Anfield? Outside of that, they’ll be favored in all of their remaining matches. As for Liverpool, they’ve only lost twice in the league this season, but are the teams that beat them — Nottingham Forest and Fulham — noticeably better than Crystal Palace, Brighton or Chelsea?
Rather, it’s the unlikelihood of all of those unlikely things happening at the same time that makes Liverpool so close to a lock to win the league. In this scenario, Arsenal would need to win six straight matches, and Liverpool would have to lose four in a row. The Gunners have done that just three times over the past five seasons, while Liverpool haven’t lost four Premier League games in a row this century.
There’s no way those two things happen at the same time
