It has been 76 days since Liverpool returned to the top of the 2024-25 Premier League table with a 2-1 home win over Brighton & Hove Albion, a position they have since relinquished.
Arne Slot’s side are not in imperious form but have so far been beaten just once in their 20 league games so far and are four points behind second-placed Arsenal, with a game in hand, heading into the weekend games.
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So is Liverpool destined to win just their second domestic championship in 35 years?And if so, at what point in the coming months will this triumph be almost concrete?We convened an organisation of experts, some with affiliations with the Anfield team, others with Liverpool’s biggest rivals and asked for their opinion.
Pep Guardiola has burned all our brains.
He’s shattered a lot of English football’s illusions about its exceptionalism during his nine years as Manchester City manager. He’s affected the way pretty much every team in the country play. He’s changed what we all expect our full-backs to do. And our central defenders.
More immediately, it replaced what seems like a name race.
For the past few years – with one exception – the standard for anyone hoping to win the Premier League has been, as Jurgen Klopp once put it, perfection. Even to be close to that meant getting more than 90 points from the available 114. Actually claiming the crown usually required more: 93, or 98, or 100.
This season is different. A total of 85 will probably do it, even 82. This means that our reactions to individual effects are unbalanced: in a crusade where City only wins, a draw once at home can be fatal; In a country where rivals have more room for maneuver, the damage is limited.
Liverpool’s current league position, of course, makes them favourites, even if that game they have in hand is the last league derby at Goodison Park — hardly a gimme. But there is little to suggest the four-point advantage Arne Slot’s team currently hold over Arsenal is likely to be decisive. This is not the sort of season where a lead, once obtained, will not be surrendered.
Liverpool’s schedule, as of now, is more difficult than Arsenal’s; It is not that they may just draw 3 more games than Mikel Arteta’s aspect over the next 4 months.
Arsenal don’t have a huge margin for error, but they would only be safe in the twists and turns if Liverpool were to come out of their game against them at Anfield on the second weekend of May with a three-point lead. . And a staggering difference in purpose, just to be sure.
Rory Smith
Call it an Everton hardened self-defense mechanism, but I live with a chronic illness that presents itself as a lingering, underlying premonition of primary good luck at Liverpool. For example: they may be 18th in the Premier League 20-team table, without a manager and plagued by injuries, and my nervous formula would be to prepare for a fantastic cup win and be among the four most sensible.
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Then I had the feeling that the 2024-25 name would come to Anfield since they beat Real Madrid (in the Champions League) and Manchester City consecutively in five days when November turned into December.
A small part of me still just can’t rule out some astonishing City revival where they win every game between now and the end of the campaign in late May, as Liverpool drop points due to lingering defensive issues. Or that Arsenal will sign a decent goalscorer before this winter transfer window closes in a couple of weeks and really make it a contest.
But it would still be infinitely more likely that Liverpool would find a team and triumph comfortably.
As it stands, I think it will be after playing successive games against Chelsea and Arsenal in early May that I will make peace with the coming months of endless coverage, parades, theatre, poems, films, statues and true stories. decrees that will accompany his twentieth elite championship, a record.
Greg O’Keeffe
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If you are a fan of a rival club (Manchester United, for example), there comes a time in the season when you have to make peace with the concept that “bad” can happen and you start to prepare for the bad. arrival of friends The five-way group/discussion is starting to gloat more.
For me, this came after Liverpool’s trio of games against Tottenham Hotspur, Leicester City and West Ham United before Christmas. It wasn’t just that Liverpool were good. It wasn’t just that Manchester City and Arsenal were faltering. This is because Arne Slot has discovered enough tactical responses to those posed to him by the Premier League.
Left back is a challenge for this team, Darwin Nunez’s speed does not compensate for the speed of his decision making, Alisson is no longer the force he used to be in goal. Alexis Mac Allister – naturally – may seem like a bit of a match when he returns from long-distance foreign duty in South America with Argentina. Still, Slot continues to tweak and adjust while reminding his players at halftime that running hard is not an optional condition for winning games.
In Liverpool’s triumph for the 2019-20 season, a Jurgen Klopp-led team beat Leicester City 4-0 away from home on December 26 (it may have been Naby Keita’s last smart game for the club) and He stamped his authority on the rest of the team. the league. The 3-1 victory over them at Anfield on that date was not the same (if only because Leicester were much more potent five years ago), yet there is a similar feeling that when Slot’s team turn it on, no one in England he can compete.
Carl Anka
In 2019-20, there were two games at this stage of the season that saw Jurgen Klopp’s side win the title seem like a foregone conclusion: the 4-0 away win over Leicester City on Boxing Day and Manchester United’s 2-0 win at Anfield. on January 19. The latter their 21st league win in the first 22 games of the season. Absurd.
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I haven’t experienced that feeling yet this season. It is a funny time to pose this question due to the current wobble Arne Slot’s team is having. Had I been asked this question after the victories over Tottenham Hotspur, Leicester and West Ham United before and after Christmas, I would be more positive. But two draws since to make it three wins in seven league games doesn’t scream title-winning form, although they haven’t lost any of those matches.
As a pessimist when it comes to this sort of thing, my realistic answer is: only when it is mathematically more unlikely to achieve them, or Virgil van Dijk lifts the trophy.
However, I would love for that 2019-20 moment to take place in a Merseyside derby, preferably the next one, at Goodison Park on February 12, but more likely when Everton visit Anfield in the first week of April. These plays are very important in generating momentum, positive or negative.
Otherwise, a positive result at home against Arsenal on the weekend of May 10/11 will probably be the key moment I’ll be involved in.
Andy Jones
In Liverpool’s last seven Premier League games, they have lost a few out of four. It does not seem to me that it is an unstoppable procession towards the title. They are the favourites to take the win from now on, of course, but I’m still convinced.
The problem, of course, is that their most credible rivals, Arsenal, have a similar propensity to leave trouble, and a significant hole to fill. They have also arguably been without their most productive player for some time, with Bukayo Saka recently undergoing injury. surgery for a torn hamstring, and that blow to his attack was compounded by an anterior cruciate ligament injury in Gabriel Jesus’ knee last weekend.
A lot is likely to depend on how much money Arsenal will earn, if any, before the winter transfer window closes on February 3.
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I think Liverpool and Arsenal (and Nottingham Forest, Newcastle and Chelsea) will continue to leave problems here and there. It will be attractive to see if Manchester City can solve enough problems to close the hole and apply some pressure.
Liverpool host Arsenal on the second weekend in May. Arsenal’s mission for the next four months is to make that game matter — and I think there’s every chance they can.
Only if Liverpool win this match, to give themselves a sufficient lead with a few weeks to go until the end of the season, will I be the selected champion.
James McNicholas
Ever since Steven Pienaar of Everton slid in to secure a 4-4 draw at Old Trafford in April 2012, I’ve always made a point of holding onto hope in a title race.
Pienaar’s 85th-minute equaliser in a match Manchester United had led 3-1 after 66 minutes was a goal that helped Manchester City to make up an eight-point deficit with just six games to go and one of those incredible occasions where the desperate mental gymnastics — ‘They just need to lose at Wigan, drop points at home to Everton, and we’ll beat them at the Etihad’ — perfectly checked out.
But not even my optimism can go further.
City are out of contention, a stoppage-time header from Christian Norgaard denying them a 2-1 win at Brentford on Tuesday, the latest reminder that the reigning champions are too unstable to close what has lately been a 12 points.
That realistically leaves Arsenal, who I just don’t see catching up to Liverpool due to their inconsistency in goal and injuries to their right side.
Arsenal are due to visit Anfield on the penultimate day of the season and, unless they are virtually flawless until then, this looks like the game that could see the current leaders fight their way back to glory.
Thomas Harris
When you’re writing about something that may arrive in the future, there’s an understandable caution, a fear that you’ll be made to look ridiculous should your prediction turn out to be nonsense.
But even taking this into account, I’m pretty sure about this: I don’t expect there to be a moment between now and the end of the season, on May 25, when it’s clear that Liverpool have the name in their pocket, because I think it’s already there.
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If we’re picking a point when I became sure, it was probably not a single game, but that first week in December, when they beat Manchester City with relative ease, something that came not long before Arsenal drew with Fulham and then Everton.
The certainty doesn’t refer so much to Liverpool, an excellent, even traditionally brilliant team, but rather to the fact that I simply don’t accept that any of the pursuers are consistent enough to catch them. City are going through tough times, Arsenal are pretty ruthless, Chelsea are faltering, teams will soon figure out how to beat Nottingham Forest, Newcastle are the in-form team now but are one injury away from Alexander Isak getting into trouble.
Liverpool will end up as the last team standing, in a Premier League season in which the overall quality has leveled out, with no single giant to outshine the rest.
Nick Miller
It seems to me that only supporters of other clubs are certain that the 2024-25 title will arrive at Anfield.
If not, they should have the opportunity to say that Liverpool are suffocating. You build them up, you tear them down.
Like many Liverpudlians, I’m pretty sure the season will end with good championship luck for Arne Slot’s team. But caution should also be exercised because of recent memories as well as older ones. Under Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool have led the way in three events at this level of the season, but have only once found themselves in the same position when the music stopped after 38 games.
Further afield, the promise of groups led by Roy Evans, Rafael Benitez and Brendan Rodgers showed in the spring before hopes were dashed at the start of the school year.
For these reasons, I will only be sure of the odds related to Slot’s Liverpool when those who have been chasing them lately can no longer catch up.
Simon Hughes
(Top photo: Phil Noble/AFP Getty Images)