How the Autopsy of Black Swans Became a Celebration of Overcoming the Odds
The Next Chapter From This Red Planet
With the next part in the ‘Football is Fucked’ series due to be published tomorrow, I thought it would be apt to publish this from Paul in the book that became the title for this Substack. With the Saudi investment in football seemingly cranking up to insane levels with their purchase of Newcastle United (as well as our captain and celebrated number six jumping ship to join the ‘Pro League’); the United Arab Emirates’ owning our closest rivals Manchester City, and finally the potential that our fiercest ‘old school’ rivals Manchester United could be bought by Qatari investors suggests it might need huge wedge* of black swans for us to challenge again at the top of the table.
*A gaggle or herd also works, but of course, in the above context wedge seems appropriate! (DR) Anyway make a cup of tea, coffee, turn your phone off and enjoy the chapter…
In hindsight, 2020/21 was perhaps the most traumatic season for Liverpool FC, and perhaps the city as a whole, since Hillsborough in 1988/89. In the spring of 2022, the Echo reported that “More than 1,700 Covid-19 related deaths have been recorded in Liverpool since March 2020.” Though not as scandalous or avoidable – or as directly related to attending a football match – more Liverpool fans died than in April 1989; and some of them as a result of attending the Atlético Madrid game in March 2020. Most of the city’s Covid deaths occurred during the winter when Jürgen Klopp’s mother Elisabeth died, in January 2021, and he could not return to Germany for the funeral due to lockdown restrictions. A month later, Alisson Becker’s father, José Agostinho, out for a swim in Lavras do Sul in their native Brazil, tragically drowned, aged just 57; again, Alisson could not attend the funeral.
It’s easy to forgot the jolts to society of the first lockdown in 2020 and widespread fear, and subsequent struggles. Even though it ended up being delayed, Liverpool fans at least had the league title to celebrate, even if it couldn’t be properly celebrated. Perhaps part of the issue with 2020/21 was the sense of a crisis having passed, only to think, Oh no, here we go again.
On the pitch, the football was grim. During this time, in an empty Anfield, the Reds – with a home record prior to Covid that proved record-breaking – lost six league home games in a row. It felt soulless and depressing, going through the motions in the middle of a pandemic that had only just started to be eased by the first rounds of vaccinations, with stadiums – full at the start of the season – now just endless rows of plastic seats.
Top of the league in early 2021, many months after the season-ending injury to Virgil van Dijk, a full-blown injury crisis and Covid chaos precipitated a run of just three wins in 14 games, to drop to 7th by the time Fulham came away from Anfield with three points in early March. Despite beating Red Bull Leipzig home and away, 2-0 each time, a makeshift defence could not keep Real Madrid at bay in the quarter-finals, with the 3-1 defeat at the empty Alfredo Di Stéfano Stadium the sole loss since Fulham’s success on March 7th. Even so, Liverpool were ahead in consecutive games against Leeds and Newcastle before Diego Llorente in the 88th minute and Joe Willock in the 96th minute (at Anfield) respectively snatched improbable equalisers. With just four games to go, Liverpool were 6th.
A game against Manchester United in April had to be postponed after rioting, with the Reds’ team coach targeted by protesters, in the wake of the Super League proposals and United’s own finance-leaching owners.
All in all, it was a horrible time, with solace to be taken from the fact that “football is the most important of the least important things”, a quote attributed to just about every football manager in history. It helped that, out of the chaos of the season, Liverpool rallied just enough to secure a top-four place, with some incredible moments even with grounds still empty.
Speaking to a number of local-based journalists including Paul Joyce of the Times a year after those darkest moments, in the group’s first informal meeting in two years due to Covid restrictions, Klopp summed up how demoralising, depressing and draining the early months of 2021 had proven. He reflected on what was missing. “When you don’t have it, you realise. The atmosphere, for example. Sometimes it is not that good in a stadium. That doesn’t really happen for us, but if it is the case you think, ‘Why was it like that?’
“But if you have [had] no atmosphere, you take each atmosphere [even if it’s not that good]. In some moments, it was the hardest time of our lives – at least our football lives – because you are still Liverpool but with half-cut wings. You try to fly but it is pretty difficult.”
With the death of his mother, and the tragic drowning of Alisson’s father, it had to be up there with the hardest part of their lives, full-stop; a squad full of players separated from loved ones in other countries and on other continents, and perhaps in the midst of a serious Covid outbreak.
“I am an emotional coach,” he continued. “We are an emotional team, we are an emotional club. We are not like a little bit here, a little bit there. We need this extra bit. That was obviously not there and it was not helpful in the most difficult situation we had. Injury-wise, it was absolutely crazy.
“That is why I always say, after winning the Premier League [in 2019-20], winning the Champions League [in 2019], winning other cup competitions, finishing third last season comes next pretty quickly because that was incredible how we did that in the end. We were pretty much on three wheels, getting somehow over the line.
“It was an incredibly intense season and, yes, I was more than happy for a holiday. For the first ten days, I didn’t take out the phone one time, or whatever, and ask, ‘Could we have this player?’ I couldn’t have cared less at that moment.
“Why should managers be different [from other people]? But for all of us it was the same. We were all really drained. Just finished. Done.
“I never thought more about football – and I think a lot about football – than in this period. That was really tough, while everyone was talking about the former champions and now the worst-ever defending champions.”
The injury crisis was so extreme that even the 3rd- and 4th-choice players were injured in certain positions; at one point, arguably the 7th and 8th choices for centre-back were being fielded. At that point, it becomes almost like roulette.
“… It was so hard. You don’t have solutions player-wise because the [injured] players are just not there, so how can we keep the others confident through that and until the moment when we are in a different moment? It’s not cool. I would go home and think, ‘That’s why they pay me that much money.’ In other moments I still don’t understand why they do it, but in these moments I think, ‘Ah, yes, that’s why it is.’”
The highs returned in 2021/22; indeed, the run-in to 2020/21 was, as Klopp suggests, a major joy. Yet it’s worth noting how much adversity the Reds faced in Klopp’s fifth full season, and how – as long as it doesn’t totally break you – what almost kills you often makes you stronger.
The Bevy of Black Swans
The “Black Swan”: that event so freakishly rare you rarely see them; the term made famous by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
As I noted throughout a dark season – with some of that analysis revisited here – pretty much the only swans seen at Liverpool Football Club in 2020/21 were of the jet-black variety (with all the sheep mysteriously that colour too; and you couldn’t cross a street without seeing a black cat run across your path).
In this bizarro world, perhaps there was also a proliferation of white widow spiders, pale crows and albino jaguars; and of course, throw in some pink giraffes and green elephants, just to make it all the more trippy.
Time was running out – just two games to go after the match at West Bromwich Albion, which, in the 94th minute, stood at 1-1. The Champions League qualification dream was over, with just time for a late corner.
What happened next genuinely rates as one of the greatest single moments in the history of Liverpool Football Club, for various reasons. It was unique; it was late in the game; it proved pivotal; and not only was the goalscorer a 6,000-1 shot, and the situation a 100,000-1 shot, it came with the emotional release of a grief suffered that, due to global travel restrictions, could not be exorcised via normal means.
The cross came in, and Alisson Becker, initially unsure whether or not to go up for the corner, made a late run into the box.
For the first time in nearly 6,000 games of football in Liverpool’s history, and perhaps getting close to 100,000 top-flight games in England since the inception of league football in Victorian times, a goalkeeper scored the winning goal (as well as, I believe, becoming the first to score at that level with a header – most of them have been either long clearances that caught the wind, or the occasional stab-home in a mêlée. It’s also worth noting that, less than a year later, another Liverpool goalkeeper scored the winning penalty in a cup final shootout).
As I wrote, “Indeed, as the corpses of Black Swans littered the Anfield area in this era of plague and pestilence, we got to see something even rarer: a flying Golden Griffin, complete with gloved talons, as Alisson Becker channeled his inner mythic beast to head home the goal that potentially earned the Reds in excess of £50m and, more importantly, the cachet of elite football – and most vital of all, the chance to win next year’s Champions League (or, to at least enjoy some big Anfield nights that transcend the Europa League).”
In that moment, the last living Black Swans fell from the sky, dropping dead to the ground. It will never be Jürgen Klopp’s most celebrated achievement, but it could be his most impressive.
Worth
In the end, Liverpool couldn’t quite land the 2022 European crown (not helped by the chaos caused by UEFA, the French police and stadium officials), but came mightily close. Many more great nights were indeed written into folklore, and after the loss of around £100m in income during Covid, the £14m for qualification was ramped up to many multiples of that amount. Excluding all the additional income from ticket sales, etc., the prize money worked out at £72.4m, split as follows:
– Runner-up - £13.93m;
– Semi-finalists - £11.23m;
– Quarter-finalists - £9.52m;
– Round of 16 - £8.62m;
– Group stage wins - £2.51m (x6);
– Group stage qualification - £14.05m.
Diagnosing Disaster
The lessons of 2020/21 were vast and varied. At the time, working out what was going wrong – in a football sense – in a season when so many factors were having an influence was almost impossible. I compared it to trying to diagnose one specific illness from an inexhaustible list of symptoms. I went through the situation at the end of 2020/21, and in this section I revisit, update and expand my May 2021 post-mortem of a season that came back to life just before the tying of the toe-tag (whilst also comparing it to what happened afterwards, in 2021/22). What could have been the endgame instead became a reset.
At the time, people would pick one simplistic (and often incorrect) thing and focus on it; such as: “Thiago slows Liverpool down”.
Yet this didn’t explain why, during the midseason slump, the Reds were still creating good chances from open play – just a) missing them (was that Thiago’s fault?); but b) no longer creating them from set-pieces (and he neither took the corners, nor was expected to be on the end of them).
A graphic from a few months earlier (January 2021), at the peak of the ‘Thiago slows Liverpool down’ nonsense, showed that he made 10 progressive passes per 90 minutes; the next best of all Premier League midfielders were Jordan Henderson and Kevin de Bruyne, at seven each.
To put this in context, in his second season, Thiago rated in the 99th percentile for progressive passes (and the 99th percentile is the highest percentile possible). More surprisingly, he ranked way up in the 98th percentile for progressive carries, which means driving forward with the ball, without necessarily dribbling past players (his dribbling percentile was 62nd). Also 98th percentile was his passes attempted rate, and he had 80th percentile or higher for shots, assists, shot-creating actions, pass completion, tackles, interceptions and aerials won.
Critics saw the addition of Thiago – or rather, his understandably rusty return after several months out after Richarlison had studded his kneecap less than two (extremely impressive) games into his Liverpool career – coinciding with the slump, but didn’t note the loss of the third and final major centre-back as a far more decisive moment; especially at a time when Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams had one Premier League start between them. At that point, Liverpool were top of the league.
Both rookie defenders came into the side earlier in 2020/21 and had harrowing games that perhaps suggested they were not ready for the deep end; but while they appeared to be drowning, they were simply learning to swim in a very public pool. They were thrust into a side that had survived the season-ending injury to van Dijk, but once Joe Gomez and Joël Matip also had their seasons ended by early January, Liverpool were almost in a no-win situation.
The choices were: barely-tested rookies; midfield stand-ins; or new recruits who were likely to need time to adapt, and certainly weren’t going to be in synch with the Reds’ defensive line, drilled to cohesion season after season at Melwood (and then, from November 2020, the AXA training ground). The club also did not want to invest money in a short-term solution that it could not then easily offload if a flop, and where – as when waiting for Virgil van Dijk – someone much better could be available in six months’ time. And he was: Ibrahima Konaté. Imagine if Liverpool had plumped for Ozan Kabak on a permanent deal instead of waiting for Konaté?
Playing Fabinho (and even Jordan Henderson) at centre-half made sense in that the others did not appear ready; Kabak, who arrived in an emergency loan deal with only an option to buy, was himself only 20, and had to get up to pace with the Premier League with zero time to adjust. (He did pretty well considering, even if he didn’t quite convince the higher-ups at Liverpool that he was ready for that permanent deal. My personal concern was that, at 6’1”, he was just too short for the Premier League in that position, in a team that needed some tall players to compensate for all the talented smaller ones.)
More strangely, Ben Davies arrived from Preston, but was also only 6’1”, and while a talented ball-playing centre-back in the second tier, he had never played a Premier League minute. (Eighteen months on, and, on loan at Sheffield United, he still hasn’t.) Liverpool were cash-struck after Covid, and as such, £500,000 for Davies may have been a worthy gamble (at the very least, he could be sold for a profit back to the Championship), and Kabak’s option to buy, even at reduced price, was wisely allowed to expire.
Of course, with Liverpool’s two giant defenders out, to play the 6’2” Fabinho and the 6’0” Henderson – still below average for centre-backs in the Premier League – removed height and heft from midfield, while keeping them in their normal positions would have helped stabilise in that sense; but relying on Phillips, Williams, Kabak and Davies also felt like the heart of the defence would be weak in one sense or another. Liverpool had fit midfielders, so moving Fabinho – excellent as a deputy in the role prior to 2021 – had its logic, even if it had knock-on effects. Of course, Henderson, having played there quite a bit, lasted just a few minutes of the Mersey derby as a stand-in centre-back in February before his season was also ended. At this point it was becoming a farce. Gylfi Sigurðsson scored the game-killing penalty late on, to seal Everton’s first win at Anfield since the dawn of the dinosaurs (aka when Duncan Ferguson last played).
Thiago had his ups and downs in early 2021, after returning from near open-knee surgery performed by a snarling Richarlison, but slowing Liverpool down was never true. Yes, he made too many fouls, and at times his lack of pace (and fitness after injury) caused ‘optical’ alarm – he appeared to be too sluggish – but he always made the ball do more forward-thinking work than any other midfielder in the country. Plus, he returned, after months out, to a side that had already started to struggle. As the season unfolded, he increasingly bossed games. Vitally, as the campaign progressed, he was once again able to have a bodyguard in Fabinho – although he continued to battle for the ball and win a surprising number of headers.
Such an explanation – Thiago was the problem – ignored that lack of stability at the other end, with a different goalkeeper and centre-back pairing almost every game. Liverpool used a staggering twenty different centre-back pairings, and a mind-blowing thirty different rearguard trios (goalkeeper/centre-back/centre-back).
Losing van Dijk was huge, obviously; but did not derail the Reds. Thiago returning in the winter did not slow Liverpool down, but equally, he wasn’t at his best. Such narratives also ignored ten or twenty other important factors.
They ignored injuries to the two main goalscoring midfielders from open play: Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Naby Keïta; the only two who would run ahead of the strikers.
That pair also happen to be elite pressers, too. (As I noted regarding his pressing in May 2021, “Keïta remains the best at the club, but he needed to get an injury specialist to sort him out. He remains a fantastic player, but at this stage cannot be relied upon. I wouldn’t write him off, but I wouldn’t bank on him either.” My view is that you try to limit the churn in the transfer market, and work on getting talented fringe players to challenge for starting berths – as seen at Manchester City in 2021, with İlkay Gündoğan, John Stones and João Cancelo, amongst others whose form completely switched; a year later, the unwanted and apparently hitherto available Bernardo Silva, Aymeric Laporte and Raheem Sterling returned to their roles as key men, having been pegged for exits).
Another elite presser was Diogo Jota, the league’s best marksman in terms of shots on target per game, who missed three months. Indeed, in just two games (Everton and Midtjylland), Liverpool sustained four serious long-term knee injuries. These two games alone cost Liverpool c.100 appearances (from Virgil van Dijk, Thiago, Jota and Kostas Tsimikas: three major players, and one much-needed backup, as Andy Robertson ran himself into the ground to the point where he ploughed a deep furrow into the left-flank of the Anfield turf).
The narrative ignored how Liverpool were not being given penalties (an ongoing trend since a freakish 12 were won in 2013/14), but were conceding them at an unusually high rate (a new trend, which seemed to be ignored; but when they weren’t being conceded a season later, it was flagged in the media). Despite doing two-thirds of the attacking, the Reds conceded more penalties in the season than they won. That should not be happening, based on all logic, for the third-best team in the league at the time.
The four teams vying with Liverpool for the top four each won between 9-12 league penalties, ranking #1-4. Liverpool ranked joint-7th, level with several other clubs, to mean that every single season had seen Klopp rank lower on penalties won than league position (as did Rafa Benítez), while every single season in the top flight had seen Brendan Rodgers rank higher in penalties won than league finish. (This even continued in 2021/22.)
While that may be merely coincidental in Rodgers’ case, there is this very weird pattern that I spotted years ago where not only do British players get favoured in both boxes by referees (based on in-depth studies we’ve undertaken at The Tomkins Times with world-class data analysts), but the teams of British managers seem to fare much better too – it certainly applies to Liverpool: Benítez, lower every year; Rodgers, higher every year (ditto Dalglish and Hodgson); Klopp, lower every year.
In 2020/21, for the second season running a relegated team won more penalties than Liverpool, who had the best attacking xG figures in the top division. Again, this makes no logical sense. I also wrote that “no opposition player has been sent off at Anfield for several years now”, and that provided another turnaround in 2021/22: Reece James (handball on the goal-line), to go with two red cards for opponents in away league games (and a few more in the other competitions).
The Difference Officiating Can Make
Some huge decisions went against Liverpool in 2021/22 – key ones that may have cost the title – but on the whole it felt like an improvement from some recent seasons. It felt limited to a few outrageously bad calls, rather than repeated moments of madness?
One thing we have shown on The Tomkins Times over the past few years is how officials from the north-west give fewer big decisions to the Reds, and that the closer to Liverpool their hometown, the more apparently ‘biased’ they are; as if, actually, it’s a bend-over-backwards bias that is so prevalent in modern society (trying too hard to look unbiased, as the optics are all that counts: you have to appease the masses rather than the specific).