Considering Riyad Mahrez’s record with penalties, it was surprising he was chosen to take one for Manchester City against Dortmund earlier this week. He has now missed 10 for club and country across his career, with his teams only going on to win one of the matches in which those failures occurred.
Liverpool fans will recall one of his aberrations, as it was at Anfield in 2018, and he’s far from alone in failing from the spot for City. Sergio Aguero, Kevin De Bruyne, Ilkay Gundogan and Raheem Sterling are among the players who have also missed penalties for the club in recent years.
According to Squawka, the Cityzens have the worse record of any Premier League team since the summer of 2016 when Pep Guardiola took charge, having missed 25 of their 80 penalties on his watch. That’s still 55 goals, though, and a tally the Reds can’t dare to dream for in this sense.
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That’s because Liverpool have only had 55 spot kicks in total over the last six-and-a-bit seasons, with 46 of them having been converted. Most Reds fans would begrudgingly accept that City are the better attacking side, and the goal stats bear that out, with City having scored 56 more times than the Reds in the league in the Guardiola era.
But while that means they have been 10.5 per cent above Liverpool’s goal tally, in all competitions they’re up 45 per cent when it comes to penalties. If that doesn’t seem fair – and it doesn’t – wait until you see how the Reds compare to other Premier League teams in respect of their box touches per penalty won.
There have been 13 ever-present clubs in the top flight since the summer of 2017 (the period for which FBRef has detailed data). The average number of touches in the penalty area required to win a spot kick has been 161 in that time, yet for Liverpool it stands at 217, the worst of any side.
If you add on the seven teams with at least three Premier League campaigns in the last six, there’s still only Burnley and Wolves who have earned penalties less often when weighted against their total of box touches. In this unusual table of 20 clubs, Liverpool are third bottom for pro-rata penalties when they are second top for both goals and points per game. It just does not add up.
The figures also continue to debunk the tiresome ‘LiVARpool’ narrative which exists. Manchester City might also be below par for box touches per penalty, but they have at least been awarded 10 spot kicks following video review, more than any other team in the division since VAR was introduced in 2019.
Liverpool, for the record, have had just three, and one of those was for a handball on the line by Reece James which was so blatant it should have been spotted by referee Anthony Taylor anyway. The other two were won by Diogo Jota last season and were both deemed controversial.
“This is one of the worst decisions I’ve seen this season,” was Micah Richards’ assessment of the penalty awarded at Crystal Palace, while Roy Hodgson found a spot kick against his Watford side “very hard to accept when a situation happens when literally nobody sees it.”
It’s not quite as bad at the other end of the field for Liverpool – where VAR reviews have awarded four penalties against them in the league – but the Reds have still conceded more spot kicks than the touches they have allowed in their box suggest they should. In this regard City are more harshly treated, and the records of both clubs are somewhat understandable. They dominate possession, leaving opponents to hit them on the counter and in transition. Such frantic attacks are perhaps more likely to draw a penalty than other methods.
But even allowing for that, if Liverpool won and conceded penalties at average rate, they’d have been awarded 10 more and given away one fewer than they have in reality over the last five years. The Reds have remained a lot better than average no matter their ups and downs in the last few seasons, so even improving to that level would undersell them. City might have trouble dispatching spot kicks but Jurgen Klopp’s side face a relative struggle to get them in the first place.
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