Liverpool have dropped off massively this season, and Sir Alex Ferguson might have seen it coming. Jürgen Klopp must now identify and solve the problem.
Even the most pessimistic Liverpool fan would have struggled to predict such an utter capitulation this season. Jürgen Klopp’s side came within two matches of an unprecedented quadruple last year, before striking a potentially record deal for Darwin Núñez — a place in the top four, at the very least, looked like a given.
Now, finishing in the Champions League spots looks like the height of Liverpool’s ambitions. It’s not the first time Klopp’s side has had to adjust expectations, with only an incredible late run salvaging a place at Europe’s top table in 2020/21, but this time it is harder to pin it all on injuries.
Klopp has undoubtedly been unlucky in this department, with all but four of his senior players having missed at least one match. Within that, there are some long-term absentees, including Luis Díaz and Diogo Jota. Even so, it does not rank in the same sphere as all of the senior center-backs succumbing to injury at once: unfortunately, the present problems seem more underlying.
And in hindsight, even though Liverpool excelled last season, a few early warning signs were there. The two victorious finals were 0-0 draws that required penalty shootouts. Klopp’s side drew a blank again in the Champions League final. And Carlo Ancelotti’s comments about predictability hinted at a team that was reaching the end of the road.
But perhaps the biggest bellwether — an economic term for a reliable predictor of change — has been Fabinho. He was a regular absentee in the injury-hit campaign of 2020/21, missing three separate spells for a total of 11 games.
And while he mostly stayed fit last season, he suffered another muscular complaint at a crucial time. Rushed back for the Champions League final, he looked a shadow of his former self against Real Madrid.
Ironically, he is one of the four senior players not to have picked up an injury so far this season. But he looks to have been among the worst-hit by the relentless barrage of games over the past few campaigns. He is a microcosm of Klopp’s wider problem: Liverpool still have most of the same players from their recent heyday, but they are no longer offering quite the same output.
And while no Liverpool supporter would have predicted such a dramatic collective plummet off the precipice, more neutral observers might just have had an inkling. Sir Alex Ferguson might have had a shrewd idea too.
At the end of last season, Rahul Iyer plotted a graph of the number of minutes accumulated by players in Europe’s top five leagues across their entire careers, compared to the age of those players. That returned an average of how many minutes a player of a certain age can have been expected to play. Fabinho was a major outlier.
The Liverpool midfielder was not even an especially early bloomer. He moved to Europe without having played a senior game in Brazil, and was initially limited to appearances for Real Madrid’s ‘Castilla’ reserve side. But from mid-2013 onwards, the high-level matches began to pile up, first at Monaco and then for Klopp’s side.
At the start of this season, Fabinho had amassed 34,133 minutes, just a little under what would typically be expected of a 34-year-old. He has since added a further 1,177 minutes. At 29, he is one of Klopp’s younger options in the centre of the park, but this burnout was more or less inevitable. The only surprise is that it’s been held at bay for so long.
It’s even worse for Jordan Henderson, who has played a staggering 39,274 minutes across the course of his career. That makes him around 37 in ‘football years’. James Milner, who is actually 37, has played a mind-blowing 48,658 minutes, the equivalent of more than a month’s worth of non-stop football. His football age is 42, give or take.
A Manchester United legend, Ferguson certainly does not class as neutral, but his glasses are tinted a slightly different shade of red. And he, too, arguably warned Klopp of exactly this crisis, by way of his views on Liverpool’s treatment of Michael Owen a generation ago.
Describing his injury woes, Owen highlighted the accumulation of games at a young age, and Ferguson’s damning verdict on it:
“I often wonder if it was just a freak injury. Until then I was solid as a rock, never missed a game. Sir Alex Ferguson always says if I’d signed for Manchester United as a kid it wouldn’t have happened, he would’ve protected me.”
It’s a simple truth, but games catch up to players. Ferguson knew it, and Klopp should belatedly act on it. He doesn’t just have an old midfield, he has a tired one. Meanwhile, he is increasingly relying on very young players to try and counteract that, in turn exposing them to the risk of burnout later down the line.
Liverpool needs a complete refresh of the midfield. Klopp missed the chance to ‘do a Ferguson’, strengthening from a position of strength, but the club still has time to make amends, before getting back on its perch starts to look like too much of a distant possibility.
