Deserve?

Let’s not go too far down that road, lads. You’ll lose. Again.

As we all must now surely accept, Liverpool Football Club will, at least mathematically, soon be crowned champions of England for the twentieth time, drawing level with Manchester United at the top of the English game’s roll of honour for the first time since 2011.

To say this is an unexpected end to the 2024/25 season would be an understatement, at least from the vantage point of last August. Having lost a totemic figure in Jürgen Klopp over the summer and replaced him with a relatively unknown quantity in Arne Slot, while also having supposedly lost out on first-choice replacement Xabi Alonso, few of us would have predicted a twentieth league title for the club ahead of the season opener at Portman Road. This simply isn’t supposed to happen with new managers, especially ones whose sole reinforcement ahead of the campaign had all the hallmarks of an impulse buy motivated as much by Federico Chiesa’s greatly diminished price tag (£13m) as his actual ability.

Of course, as the months went by, as the team lost just one of its first 30 in the league, as Mo Salah ascended to the top of both the goals and assists charts, as the questions around easy fixtures and the tougher road ahead were answered emphatically at every turn, all while the team was also topping the inaugural 32-team group stage in the Champions League and making it to a domestic cup final at Wembley, all things became increasingly possible.

But between the manager leaving and question marks persisting over what was still a relatively new team, one that had fallen off a cliff in the closing weeks of the previous campaign and particularly a midfield that had been completely overhauled as recently as the previous summer, and with uncertainty abounding over the futures of three of its foundational pieces, all while champions Manchester City and recent challengers Arsenal were looking stronger than ever, you may have been forgiven for feeling that Liverpool’s best chance of a twentieth league title any time soon would be courtesy of the 115 charges hanging over City and the (albeit unrealistic) possibility that the outcome of that case may involve stripping them of the 2013/14 title that Liverpool had come so agonisingly close to winning. Hey, perhaps that will still happen?

I’ll wait for you to stop laughing at that one… … … … …ok, finished? Then let’s continue.

But what none of us could have expected was for Arsenal supporters to gift us one. No, no, not the 2024/25 version, which, in the grand tradition of these things, has been won by the best and most consistent team over an entire nine-month season, but the 2001/02 Premier League title which now pushes the Gunners back to twelve and Liverpool into the lead by themselves on twenty-one.

Confused? Don’t be. You see, it turns out that we’ve been looking at this league title stuff all wrong for well over a century. It doesn’t matter who gets the most points, who wins the most games or loses the fewest, not nearly as much as how many obstacles (injuries in particular) have been thrown in the path of that team’s rivals and how many theoretical points the runners-up would have otherwise accrued. Get it? Actual points are good, desirable even, but in a certain mindset, in a certain arena of discussion and (I use this term loosely) thought, theoreticals and hypotheticals become just as valuable when it comes to making judgments on who “deserves” to take the trophy at the end of the season.

And so it comes to pass that, for example, the injury suffered by Bukayo Saka at Selhurst Park on 21st December, at which point Arsenal were already six points behind leaders Liverpool with a game more played, allegedly becomes a defining factor in Liverpool’s title win. Or what about William Saliba’s (self-inflicted) absence from the game between the sides at the Emirates in October, which apparently directly allowed Liverpool, themselves without their first-choice goalkeeper and centre-forward due to injury, to secure a 2-2 draw? Or what about Kai Havertz’s season-ending injury in February, at which point Arsenal were seven points adrift of first? How many actual points lost actually become theoretical points gained when you factor those in?

I briefly allowed myself to seriously entertain this train of thought recently, and my mind was immediately cast back to the events of 13th October 2001 and the 1-1 draw between fellow title challengers Liverpool and Leeds United at Anfield. Not the goals, scored by Harry Kewell for the visitors and Danny Murphy for the home side, nor the disappointment at two points dropped in a season brimming with possibilities, but events that unfolded at half-time when Liverpool manager Gérard Houllier was taken to hospital in an ambulance after suffering chest pains. He subsequently underwent emergency surgery to repair an aortic dissection and was absent from the club for the next five months. He would miss 24 Premier League games that season.

In Houllier’s absence, assistant manager and club legend Phil Thompson took the reins. This caretaker spell of five months would represent the sum total of Thompson’s time in football management. Five months, total: never before, never since. Given this complete absence of experience leading a team of players and coaches, with ultimate responsibility for everything from pre-match preparations to team selection to in-game tactical tweaks to media duties, Thompson achieved something quite remarkable in keeping the team alive in both the title race and the Champions League during Houllier’s absence. (To be fair, it might also be the best indicator of just how good that team of players actually was, more even than the treble the previous season: to lose your manager for five months and barely miss a beat, at this level especially, is phenomenal.)

Now, I know a certain type of Arsenal supporter (not a majority by any means) might scoff at this and immediately outline their preference to trade a cleaner bill of health amongst the Gunners playing staff this season for Albert Stuivenberg (who has, at least, managed in his career) overseeing them on the sideline for most of the campaign in Mikel Arteta’s place. But the truth is that this situation is truly unprecedented outside of the 2001/02 season: not only for a team to lose its manager seven games into a 38-game season, but to then maintain a title challenge all the way into its closing stages. It remains kind of unfathomable in a way.

That Liverpool team ended the season with 80 (actual) points, but I wonder how many of those important theoretical points they lost due to Houllier’s absence? They dropped 23 in total on Thompson’s watch: would Houllier have been able to pick up more? Would they have dropped five points to mid-table Southampton in the month of January? Would they have fashioned winners against Fulham and Bolton at home or West Ham away in December, a trio of games where they managed just two goals and dropped a collective total of six points? Would a Houllier team have collapsed 0-4 at Stamford Bridge the same month? Would they have lost to Arsenal at Anfield the following week? Even a draw in that game would have cut the eventual deficit to four points, wouldn’t it? And would they have even managed a winner at Highbury the following month? With Houllier rather than Thompson calling the shots, on all of these games? What do you think?

As for injuries on the playing side during 2001/02, hold onto your hats. Has your team ever lost a German international with 50 caps in his prime years and with over 200 appearances for top European clubs like Bayern Munich and Liverpool to something called Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rapid-onset muscle weakness caused by the immune system damaging the peripheral nervous system? Well, Liverpool have. Markus Babbel, who had formed a vital part of the team that had won three trophies the previous season and had opened the scoring in the 2001 UEFA Cup final, managed to play in the first two Premier League games of 2001/02 and that was it for the season. Barring a handful of appearances in the 2002/03 campaign, that was also it for Babbel’s Liverpool career. The rest of the 2001/02 season and beyond saw Jamie Carragher, Abel Xavier and, at times, Steven Wright filling in at right-back but never coming close filling Babbel’s boots. No one really did until Steve Finnan’s arrival in 2004.

So, to summarise: Liverpool’s 2001/02 season saw them losing their manager for five months (24 games) due to an aortic dissection, with a man who had never managed before taking his place, and their starting right-back for nine months (36 games) due to a rapid-onset muscle weakness caused by the immune system damaging the peripheral nervous system. Oh, and for good measure, the club captain (Jamie Redknapp) managed four Premier League appearances for the season. How many fucking theoretical points are we up to now? Anyone keeping count?

Naturally, I’m not seriously suggesting that Arsenal didn’t “deserve” to win the 2001/02 Premier League title because of Liverpool’s (admittedly bizarre and unprecedented) misfortunes, nor have I at any point in the intervening 23 years. By the same token, I have never suggested that Manchester United didn’t “deserve” to win the league in 2008/09 because Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard were only able to line up together in around one-third of Liverpool’s games that season, or that Manchester City, eight points behind reigning champions Liverpool with a game in hand on Christmas Day, didn’t “deserve” to win in 2020/21 because injuries obliged the Reds to cycle through a staggering twenty centre-back partnerships during the campaign before finishing with the Championship-calibre duo of Rhys Williams and Nat Phillips. When the media wolves started circling managers Rafa Benítez and Jürgen Klopp respectively, I absolutely put forth those points for context, but never as a means to detract from the achievements of their opponents.

With all of that said, however, if we’re really getting into a discussion about luck apportionment relative to the merits of a league title win, then you will never find a better example of circumstances conspiring against a title contender than 2001/02. And I would confidently and passionately argue that point to the death against any Arsenal supporter who may be minded to make similar claims regarding the 2024/25 season, not only because it’s true but to give them a taste of their own wretched medicine. So, congratulations to Ged and the lads on the deserved league title that was robbed of them at the time, right? Unless, of course, those same Arsenal supporters are only trying to diminish another team’s achievement as a means to comfort themselves, in which case…

How fucking pathetic?