‘John, Paul, George and Ringo’ trips off the tongue a little easier than ‘Bobby, Sadio, Mo and Phil’, doesn’t it?
Nonetheless, both are quartets associated with Liverpool, though the former had much greater success as a unit than the latter managed.
And after ‘Being: Liverpool’ I doubt anyone at Anfield will be commissioning Peter Jackson to make a ‘Get Back’-style documentary on the Reds anytime soon.
There’s one other important issue too. Where Jurgen Klopp once had a Fab Four, he now arguably has a Famous Five.
Klopp recently admitted the current Liverpool roster is the best group of players with which he has ever worked.
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"This is the strongest squad, of course, there is no doubt about that,” he said. "If that wasn't the case then that means that we have gotten weaker over the years. We've always had a strong squad.”
ESPN’s Ryan O'Hanlon has put this theory to the test for an article by looking at a variety of statistics. They largely agree with the notion that this is the best Liverpool team of the modern era.
But while a wealth of interesting data has been unearthed, there is one section which truly highlights the potency of the Reds’ attacking options.
It regards players in the Premier League who average at least 0.7 non-penalty expected goals and assists per 90 minutes and have featured for over 200 minutes this season:
“You've got Man City's Phil Foden (0.76) and the now-at-Barcelona Ferran Torres (0.75), the mostly injured Leeds striker Patrick Bamford (0.74), and then all five of Liverpool's star attackers: Diogo Jota (0.93), Salah (0.90), Roberto Firmino (0.77), Sadio Mane (0.74) and the recently arrived Luis Diaz (0.73).”
It’s not just that Liverpool possess five of the top seven currently plying their trade in England, but they have the leading trio while also adding Diaz, who has hit the ground running with elite-level performance.
What’s more impressive, both on a player and team level, is that the only instance of one of the five players having better underlying statistics in the last five years was Salah in 2017/18.
The season in which he scored 32 goals and provided 10 assists in the league alone, in other words.
Equally, it’s reasonable to note that they help each other out, so the success of one can power the stats of another.
For instance, seven of the 10 clear-cut chances Mane has set up in all competitions have been for Salah.
His better moments for expected assists help the Egyptian’s expected goal figures, and the data for both looks more impressive as a result.
But even then, the chances set up and taken within this group of five forwards only accounts for approximately a sixth of Liverpool’s expected goals this season, and such players linking up is clearly the idea anyway.
Their work has powered Liverpool to new heights. Liverpool have scored the most goals they’ve ever mustered after 26 matches of a top flight campaign and the ESPN article reveals their current goal difference is the third best by any team at this point too.
While expected goal models are obviously only a recent thing, Liverpool’s xG difference is the best for the first 26 games by any Premier League team since 2009/10 too.
The main way in which Manchester City have held an advantage over Liverpool in recent years has been the depth of their squad, with Pep Guardiola able to rest and rotate his attackers without seeing a drop-off in the team’s output.
But it’s looking like the Reds are now in the same position. Pick any three from Diaz, Firmino, Jota, Mane and Salah and watch the sparks fly.
