Can Arsenal or Manchester City catch up to Liverpool in the race for the Premier League title? How many points could each team need?

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” It’s every football coach’s favorite cliché at this point in the season. There is plenty of time to make up the differences with more than two-thirds of the Premier League campaign left to play. However, as in an endurance race, the pace is already set. An energetic one at that. Liverpool have come out of the blocks but, like many bronze medal winners who are well ahead in the first set of benchmarks, there is some skepticism over whether they will be able to continue advancing at this near world record pace.

Maybe they don’t need it. Manchester City, eternal champion, seems limped. Meanwhile, Arsenal, one of those who looked firmly in the medal mix before the race began, have found themselves caught in the logjam of the chasing group. Can they accelerate the pace and reduce the gap with the first? How much can Liverpool afford to relax when the goal line is in sight? Can this tortured marathon analogy go the distance? Some of these questions are more easily answered than others.

Liverpool’s rhythm

With nine wins, one draw and one defeat in their first 11 games, Liverpool have built a handy five-point cushion at the top of the Premier League. Arne Slot could hardly have imagined a better start 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 his 2.55 points per game over the course of a 38-game season and you’ll end up with 97 points. If it continues like this, Arsenal will only be able to score points in one remaining league match and face the Reds.

(This speaks to the dizzying standards set by Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola in the latter years of the 2010s, the fact that such a figure would not have guaranteed you top spot for three consecutive years until 2018-19. In one of them , we have been in a goal difference fight for second place.)

However… this Liverpool doesn’t exactly feel like a ’90s champion in waiting, does it? The really big teams tend to brush aside their Ipswiches, Crystal Palaces and Wolves by little more than a goal or two. Klopp’s best teams would score two and a half, three goals per game, not the just under two that Slot’s men average. The expected goal (xG) data tells a similar story. In 2021-22, a year in which they played perhaps their best football in a season in which they pushed their opponents to the limit in all competitions, they had a non-penalty xG difference (npxGD) per game of 1.36. It was simply their luck that they ran into a better City team that season. The same thing happened in 2018-19 (1.18). This season, maybe not.

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

How many points do title contenders need?

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

Still, that 0.86 mark hasn’t counted for the league leaders in recent years. Since the start of 2020-21, the only team to reach that mark over the course of 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 finished with 82 points. In 2021-22, Chelsea was at 0.79 and finished with 74 points. The most worrying comparison for Slot might be Arsenal’s 2022-23 team, another early-season title contender that no one believed would hold up over the course of 38 games. Their npxG difference per game at the end of the season was 0.84.

There is, then, not a huge sample of teams that play at Liverpool’s level. However, some of the teams that, in recent years, have had their xG profile finished around the mid-80 mark. Since xG is at this point in the season more predictive than not, let’s assume that the league leaders They accumulate points at the pace of 84 points from Arsenal 22-23. That’s 2.2 points per game over the remaining 27 games. Another 60 more points to complete the 28 you already have in the bag.

This may not be Liverpool’s best team in recent times. It may not be necessary. Follow their current trajectory and this team could very well end up with 90 points.

So are Arsenal out of the running?

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

If Kevin De Bruyne gets fit, if the defense sorts itself out, if someone other than Erling Haaland can chip in with goals, if a temporary replacement for Rodri can be found, maybe City could just do a City at the end of the season. season. , drops half a dozen points between the new year and summer and the race becomes a procession. However, there are a lot of “ifs”.

However, where points accumulation issues become really interesting is when it comes to Arsenal. Nine points off the top and just five wins in their first 11 games, they have a lot of work left to do. History would suggest that this gap is not unbridgeable. Newcastle began to squander a 12-point cushion in January 1996 with just 15 games left. With games pending but very little time, Arsenal itself took Manchester United out of a 12-point lead, starting in February 1998.

These gaps can be corrected and Mikel Arteta knows how to do it. “Win, win, win, win, win, win, win and win,” as he said after the draw against Chelsea. Would even that be enough?

Let’s assume that the scenario set out above is true, that on May 25 Liverpool has reached a total of 88 points. At what pace do Arsenal have to go to surpass that figure (let’s leave aside the goal difference for now, especially since Slot’s men already have a nine-goal advantage there)? The goal then would be to get 70 points in 27 games. That’s 2.6 points per game. Arsenal, then, need to act like a team that over the course of a full season could accumulate 99 points. Manchester City fans will not need to be told that this can even be done in 38 games instead of 27.

Can Arsenal do it? Yes. They’ve done it before. Not for 27 games but for 19 in the second half of last season. That started with a 2-1 defeat to Fulham, after which the Gunners swept the rest of the league. Sixteen wins, one draw and one loss. Only Manchester City at their best could stop Arteta’s title fight. Run that points per game count over 27 games and you get 69.6 points. We’ll round that one up, huh?

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