Football: What went wrong for Liverpool this season?

Wounded warriors

At the core of every club in crisis is often an injury crisis. Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has suggested the Reds’ fitness problems have become a vicious cycle.

He said in January: There’s a lot of bad luck… You have too many injuries. Fit players have to play all the time, which means they can’t always fly. We don’t have much chance to go around.

The data seems to support that. In the Premier League, no Liverpool club bar had nine outfield players who played at least 2,300 minutes each. The closest team had seven players, while most of the rest of the Big Six had five.

Of those nine Reds players, only Diogo Jota started fewer than 40 games in all competitions, with 39. Last campaign they returned from injury quicker (26.4 days) than the previous season (42.5 days) and suffered fewer recovery days. (968 compared to 1,722).

Ben Dinnery, the founder of Premier Injuries, which tracks EPL injuries, warned at the start of the campaign that the Reds could face much smaller time-loss injuries, minor glitches that other teams usually get away with.

Influenced by the quadruple chase in recent seasons, he added that the physical demands have led to players starting the season a bit tired.

He highlighted a table which showed Liverpool have the most injuries and the most reported hamstring problems in the EPL.

In January, pundit Aurel Nazmiu of Twenty First Group published a chart which highlighted that Reds players had missed almost 160 games this season, more than any other EPL team.

Before the season, club doctor Jim Moxon left unexpectedly and has since joined Manchester United, and former Reds defender Jamie Carragher suggested this could be the reason for their injury problems.

Season Seven Syndrome

Klopps two previous coaching jobs at Mainz and then Borussia Dortmund did not see him stay for an eighth season.

On both occasions, he left after a sharp dip in form during the seventh season of an otherwise successful tenure. At Mainz he failed to secure promotion to the top flight, while at Dortmund they were in the relegation zone at Christmas before finishing seventh.

This is his seventh campaign at Anfield and there are similarities.

But the German has resisted that notion. He said earlier: I don’t have any problem with energy and it’s completely different here.

I understand that I left after seven years (earlier) and now we are in a difficult situation… but the situation is completely different.

Liverpool are probably lucky to have Klopp for this long. The 55-year-old was widely expected to see out his previous contract and leave in 2022.

But he has since signed a contract to continue until 2026 for a third extension after talks with his wife Ulla.