Can Arsenal or Man City catch Liverpool in the Premier League title race? How many points each team might need |Max Sporty|

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” It’s every football manager’s favorite cliché at this stage of the season. There is plenty of time for shortfalls to be made up with more than two-thirds of the Premier League campaign to be played. As an endurance race, however, the pace was set. Lively at that. Liverpool burst out of the blocks but, like many bronze medal winners have gone out before the first set of milestones, there is some skepticism as to whether they can keep moving at this near world record pace.

Maybe they don’t need to. Perennial champions Manchester City look shaky. Meanwhile, Arsenal, one of those who looked firmly in the medal mix before the race began, found themselves caught in the log of the chasing pack. Will they be able to pick up the pace and close the gap on the front runners? How much can Liverpool afford to facilitate when the goal line appears? Can this tortured marathon runner analogy go the distance? Some of these questions are easier to answer than others.

The rhythm of Liverpool

With nine wins, a draw and a defeat from their first 11 games, Liverpool have built a handy five-point cushion at the top of the Premier League. Arne Slot could hardly imagine a better start to life in England than topping the Champions League and Premier League tables, setting a pace in the latter that would surely be enough to win the title. Extrapolate their 2.55 points per game over a 38 game season and you end up with 97 points. Keep that up and Arsenal could just drop points one remaining league game and match the Reds.

(It speaks to the dizzying standards set by Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola in the final years of the 2010s that such a calculation would not guarantee you top spot for three straight years until 2018-19. In one of them you would was in a goal difference struggle for second.)

Still… this Liverpool doesn’t exactly feel like a high 90s champion in waiting, does it? The really great teams tend to brush aside their Ipswichs, Crystal Palaces and Wolves by little more than a goal or two. The best Klopp teams would run in two and a half, three goals a game, not the slightly less than two that Slot’s men average. The expected goal (xG) data tells a similar story. In 2021-22, a year where they played perhaps their best football in a season where they took their rivals to the wire in every single contest, they had a game non-penalty xG difference (npxGD) of 1.36. It was just their luck that they faced a better City side that season. The same was true in 2018-19 (1.18). this season, maybe not.

Now in 2024-25 Liverpool’s early season npxGD is not at the dizzying heights of their best Klopp years. It’s worth noting at the outset that 0.86 is still the best per game tally the Premier League has to offer this season. Slot does not compete with the Liverpool teams that came before, but the 19 teams that are in the Premier League now. If in another 27 games none of them beat his current xG profile, then there is a pretty strong chance that Liverpool will be champions.

How many points do the title contenders need?

Note: Manchester United’s 80 points in 2000-01 and 2010-11 is the lowest tally by an English champion this century.

However, that 0.86 mark has not been the tally of league leaders in recent years. Since the start of 2020-21, the only side to hit that mark over a full campaign was Newcastle in 2022-23. They finished the season with 72 points. Liverpool in 2023-24 were better by a fairly significant margin at 0.97. They ended up with 82 points. In 2021-22 Chelsea were at 0.79 and finished with 74 points. The most worrying comparison for Slot might be the Arsenal team of 2022-23, another early-season title contender that nobody quite believed would last 38 games. Their per-game npxG differential by the end of the season was 0.84.

There is not, therefore, a huge sample of teams playing at Liverpool’s level. Some of the teams that, in recent years, had their xG profile, however, ended up around the mid 80 mark. Given that xG is at this stage of the season more predictive than not, let’s assume the league leaders pile up points at Arsenal’s 84-point pace 22-23. That means 2.2 points per game over the remaining 27 games. Another 60 points to go with the 28 already in the bag.

This may not be the best Liverpool side in recent memory. Maybe it doesn’t have to be. Continue on their current trajectory and it’s plausible that this team ends up with 90 points.

So, are Arsenal out of the race?

Can anyone catch that? Of course City can The five-point gap between them and Liverpool can only be addressed on the two occasions they face each other in the league. That doesn’t mean they will. After all, the reason this race is so fascinating is that we can clearly see now that City’s 2024-25 iteration is not what it used to be. In each of Guardiola’s seasons since his first English title, his team has npxGD by more than one game. This season they are at 0.83.

If Kevin De Bruyne is fit, if the defense sorts itself out, if someone other than Erling Haaland can weigh in with goals, if a temporary replacement for Rodri can be acquired, maybe City might just make City at the back end of the season. , drops half a dozen points between New Years and summer and the race becomes a procession. That is, however, a lot.

Where the points accumulation questions get really interesting, though, is with Arsenal. Nine points off the summit with just five wins from their opening 11 games, they’ve left themselves an awful lot of work to do. History would suggest that this gap is not unbreakable. Newcastle began to squander a 12-point cushion in January 1996 with just 15 games to play. With games in hand but precious little time, Arsenal themselves pulled Manchester United from 12 points ahead, starting in February 1998.

Such shortcomings can be compensated and Mikel Arteta knows how. “Win, win, win, win, win, win, win and win,” as he said after the draw at Chelsea. Would even that be enough?

Let’s assume that the scenario presented above will take place, that on May 25 Liverpool reached a tally of 88 points. What pace do Arsenal need to go to leapfrog that (let’s park goal difference now, not least because Slot’s men already have a nine goal advantage there)? The goal would then be a net 70 points over 27 games. That’s 2.6 points per game. Arsenal, therefore, needs to act like a team that could accumulate 99 points during the whole season. Manchester City fans will not need to be told that this can be done even over 38 games instead of 27.

Can it be done by Arsenal? Yes. They already did it. Not for 27 games but for 19 as recently as the second half of last season. That started with a 2-1 defeat at Fulham after which the Gunners rained fire on the rest of the league. Sixteen wins, a draw and a defeat. Only Manchester City could best retain Arteta’s title. Run that points by game count over 27 games and you get 69.6 points. We’ll round that one up, shall we?

What Arsenal need then are their best selves. No more unnecessary red cards, quick deployment for the Martin Odegaard-Declan Rice-Mikel Merino midfield, a moratorium on all major injuries now that Ben White is sidelined for anywhere between six weeks and more than two months after knee surgery. Those moments against Liverpool and with their full compliment of 11 against City, where they looked like the best team in England, must be the benchmark. If Arsenal are going to win the league, they probably need to be a non-stop winning machine between now and May. Liverpool might be able to hold them off by being good enough. There may still be many miles to go, but some of these runners will have to pick up the pace.