Predicting which team will win the Champions League is almost an impossible task.
The favourite often wins the final – though Liverpool were underdogs in 2005, never mind the longshots they were by half time in Istanbul – but at the beginning of the knockout phase it’s a very tall order to pick the winner.
Prediction models such as FiveThirtyEight’s attempt to forecast the remainder of the tournament, and they have Manchester City as favourites with Bayern Munich second and the Reds in third.
That sounds reasonable enough at this point, but what if two of those teams are drawn together in the next round, as could easily happen?
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There’s a case to be made that it’s more sensible to look at the characteristics of previous winners to see how the current contenders measure up against past European champions.
This is exactly what Ryan O’Hanlon has done in an article on ESPN. He has studied 10 key statistics and how the last 11 Champions League winners performed in those areas.
The good news for Liverpool and their supporters is that they tick all but one of the boxes, and the one for which they fall short, they do so by the tiniest of margins.
The data starts off in simple fashion, with a look at whether teams score enough goals while not conceding too many at the other end.
The Reds have no problems here. Bayern are the only team from the big leagues who are averaging more goals per game in 2021/22 while only five are conceding fewer.
To post such attacking statistics, teams need to have plenty of shots. It’s a little surprising to read that Liverpool had the fewest shots of Champions League winners from the previous 11 years when they went all the way in 2018/19.
But with an eye on this season’s competition, it’s good to see that their 15.1 per game average from three years ago has become 18.8 (again, second only to Bayern) this term.
It’s also important to have field control, which is calculated as a percentage of the total final third passes in a match which a team completes.
Jurgen Klopp’s team measure up well here. Their figure of 71 percent is not far short of the 74 percent posted by the Barcelona side of 2014/15, the best recent kings of Europe in this regard.
Such dominance means opposing sides struggle to create opportunities against Liverpool and this is also reflected in a section of the article called ‘protecting your box’.
This looks at the number of touches the opposition have in a team’s penalty area, and once again the Reds are one of the best teams around.
Only five teams in England, France, Germany Italy or Spain have conceded fewer penalty box touches per game this season, and only two of them remain in the Champions League.
The Reds also cover another metric which looks at defensive control, which is fouls per game, though as there are fewer free-kicks awarded in the Premier League than other top leagues, they do hold an advantage over non-English sides in this regard.
Other statistics which the article looks at include the percentage of final third passes which are crosses, and pressing.
Liverpool obviously have no issues here, and the latter is particularly interesting. For the purposes of this study, pressing is measured by a team’s opponents having a low pass success rate.
Per FBRef, the Reds are the joint-best team in Europe’s top five leagues (along with Cologne) with the clubs who have faced them only completing 73 percent of their passes in 2021/22.
With two statistics to go, Liverpool are one of just four teams left in the running, the other 12 having fallen short in at least one of the previous categories.
For pace of play ( for which they’ve varied greatly in their last two league matches ), Klopp’s boys are bang on the money.
The ESPN article states that “since 2010, the average winner has moved the ball upfield at a rate of 1.54 meters per second,” and that is the exact rate the Reds have recorded so far in this league campaign.
It’s this hurdle which trips up the slow play of Manchester City, but the final one unfortunately takes care of Liverpool.
However, missing the pass completion benchmark by 0.4 percent doesn’t feel like an insurmountable issue.
Even if it is, as Liverpool have eight of their remaining 14 league matches at home they should get their house in order on this front.
After these statistics have been assessed, Ajax and Bayern Munich are the two teams remaining. If that turns out to be the final in St Petersburg, there could be something in this system.
