This season is already starting to summon memories of 2020/21 for Liverpool. The Reds were beset by countless injuries throughout that campaign, and it took a remarkable late surge for them to secure Champions League qualification.
At the peak of the availability crisis last year, Jurgen Klopp was without 10 players for two matches. Remarkably, his side won them both, though when you’re relying upon an injury time winner from your goalkeeper, it’s fair to say one of the victories was looking very unlikely.
Since the beginning of Klopp’s first full season at the helm, there have been five matches – only one of which was won – where he was deprived of exactly nine players thanks to fitness problems. Two of the games in this sample were the recent fixtures against Crystal Palace and Manchester United.
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Liverpool’s issues were highlighted by their substitutes at Old Trafford. The bench included two reserve goalkeepers, a pair of 17-year-olds and two centre-backs who are often out on loan. When Klopp replaced Andy Robertson with Kostas Tsimikas with five minutes to go, it felt as though it was purely so he could get a fresh first team player on the pitch somewhere, so limited were his options.
"We had 15 senior outfield players in training, I think,” Klopp said after the 2-1 loss. “That’s obviously not cool, but I liked the line-up for the game tonight. And we had some good performances, obviously not enough to win the game.”
It’s too early in the 2022/23 season for the Premier League table to mean too much. However, when the top three sides have three fewer injuries between them than Liverpool currently have, it’s hard not to think the fitness problems are having an impact.
A look across a much longer period all but proves it. A graph showing the Reds’ injury and points trends since the summer of 2016 shows how closely the two have been matched.
As much as correlation is not automatically causation, the link between having a healthy squad and getting better results is perfectly logical. We can also see this if we break the matches down into groups depending on how many players were unavailable thanks to injury or illness.
In the last six seasons (and first three games of 2022/23), the Reds played 121 league matches where they were deprived of no more than three players. They won 91 times and averaged 2.44 points per game. This equates to 93 over a 38-match campaign.
With four-or-more men out, they have played 110 fixtures but only averaged 1.95 points per game, or 74 for a full season. Set the minimum absentee amount to six and the rate drops to 1.76 and Liverpool would drop out of the top four most years with 67 points over 38 games.
These findings are hardly revelatory, they make perfect sense. The problem for Klopp is that his current squad is well stocked with many of the most injury-hit players Liverpool have employed during his tenure.
Across the last six years, a Liverpool player has made an average of 3.9 appearances for each game they have missed through injury. However, the range varies wildly, with the likes of Andy Robertson (45.6 games per injury) and Mohamed Salah (19.8) proving much more resilient.
Of the 22 players with at least 70 appearances in this period, the five worst men for availability are still with the club, four are currently injured and three of them are midfielders. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Joel Matip average just 1.6 appearances per game missed, while Joe Gomez, Thiago Alcantara and Naby Keita (all 1.7) aren’t far behind.
Some of this will be down to them being on the bench at times, not playing games even though they were not injured. This simple measure does punish squad members more than regular starters.
But how ever you slice the data, the broad point remains true. Liverpool have averaged 8.7 injured players per league match this season and they’re yet to put three points on the board. With several squad members not due to return for a while, Klopp needs to figure out how to break this problematic trend.
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