Liverpool FC finished the 2018-19 Premier League campaign with 97 points and did not win the league. The inability to finish first marked the end of season number 29 without a title. Liverpool have been top at Christmas three separate times this past decade and have yet to win the title. These stats are all disheartening -- after all, the title drought for Liverpool extends to the start of the Premier League's founding -- but are not a be-all, end-all of the club, let alone life itself.
As Jurgen Klopp noted in pre-game thoughts before the final kick-off of the year at Anfield against Wolves, a win meant it would be a good season no matter what resulted occurred in Brighton. In every other season but two in Premier League history, Liverpool win the league with 97 points. It just so happens that the two seasons they don't are this season and last season, where Pep Guardiola helms perhaps unarguably the most cohesively talented roster the Premier League has ever seen. Led by Sergio Aguero who despite being thirty still cannot stop scoring and Raheem Sterling, who once upon a time was seen as one of the most overrated players in the game when looking at transfer fees, along with Bernando Silva, Leroy Sane off the bench, Fernandinho and Aymeric Laporte, captain Vincent Kompany and veteran David Silva, and so many more, this City team is an embarrassment of riches.
When you look at the league last season and see the lack of competition at the top of the league, there is some semblance of great achievement to merely stick with City. While the league was once upon a time in the grasp of Liverpool after the festive period, even after facing City twice, calling a team 'bottlers' because they dared to drop points over the course of a season seems asinine when looking at the rest of the league and how they finished. In the Champions League next season, Liverpool and City will be joined thanks to league qualification by Chelsea and Tottenham (who Liverpool will see once more this season in Madrid in the Champions League Final). After starting the season on a twelve-match unbeaten run, Chelsea slipped off the pace but recovered to the tune of a third-place finish. Spurs lost seven of their final twelve matches, which is two more losses than City and Liverpool combined for over the course of the entire season. They drew two more. The three wins came at home to bottom-place Huddersfield, 17th-place Brighton (only coming in the 88th minute), and home to Palace.
Other top four contenders included Arsenal -- losers of four of their last seven -- and Manchester United -- finishing equi-distant from top of the table to relegation. And yet, between these six teams England dominated Europe. We stare into a pair of all-English European finals and the two sides that did not make it are City and United, who beat PSG to get to Barcelona. The Premier League is the toughest league in the world. The Premier League has the most money involved in the world. Is there correlation? Almost certainly. But over just a brief time period, Europe has shifted to English domination.
Let's travel back in time to the 2015-16 season. Jurgen Klopp had just taken over at Liverpool while Manuel Pellegrini was wrapping up his time at Manchester City. Leicester City was about to win the league. Jose Mourinho was getting sacked at Chelsea, and Sam Allardyce was guiding Sunderland to a great escape. This feels like ages ago but in reality this was a mere three years ago. La Liga saw seven teams qualify for European competitions. Of the seven, just one team was eliminated by a non-Spanish side -- Villarreal in the Europa League semifinals. Spain held three of the four finalist spots and took home both competitions. Half of English sides were eliminated by a Spanish opponent. This season, of the six European sides who made a group stage, all six made it to the knockouts and just one (Manchester United, by Barcelona) were eliminated by non-Spanish opposition. That La Liga foe, was knocked out the next round by Liverpool. Poetic justice for the Merseyside club that had the same exact thing happen to them proving that what goes around well-and-truly comes around.
We are at the stage where the Premier League is doing things that qualify them to be known as the best league in the world. La Liga, thanks to their European success, were the shining example of a league to model success off it. These periods of time come and go given the situations surrounding world football. We are now in an era, though, where the biggest money and best managers reside in England. Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG, Juventus, these are all some of the biggest clubs in the world, and surely the biggest ones in their countries. These clubs are spending ludicrous amounts of money despite consistently winning their leagues year-in and year-out. Focusing back to the Premier League, you can add Manchester City into this list as well. They are all searching for glory in the world's largest competition. A competition that on June 1st, in Madrid, Spain, will see two teams that have had at least one of the last three seasons in the black when looking at net spend.
The League:
What, now, you may ask, was the point of me going through four of the six top teams in the league and poking at each of them. This is a league with the absolute best of the best when it comes to talent. Wolves, who finished seventh, are absolutely loaded with talented players, and they did not even sniff the top six. That is the same for the likes of Leicester and Everton. This league is hard. For a side like Liverpool to come out and despite falling short, but run roughshod over a league for the vast majority of games that we have only seen one other team do in this 'new money' era of the league is cause for celebration, second-place or not.
There is a certain frailty of a season that can be done and undone over a matter of minutes and centimeters. John Stones never makes a goal-line clearance and Liverpool go up 1-0 against City on January 2nd, I am almost surely writing a different article. That could very well be the case too if Burnley's Matt Lowton heads a ball fully clearly instead of nodding it onto his foot. If Liverpool and Everton play one or two minutes less stoppage time at Anfield, and if Jordan Pickford jumps an inch higher, City probably run away with things earlier. If Arkadiusz Milik of Napoli hits the ball four-to-six inches to Alisson's left or right, this post probably has a much more nihilistic tone. Inches matter. This title race was about as close as you can get when you have two uber-talented teams winning every single league match for nine straight match-weeks. All it would have taken is one moment of magic, or one brief spell of fatigue, for either side to fall off the trail. And down the home stretch of the season, neither team did that.
And so we come now to the ultimate measure of glory: titles. Every single sport has this debate. Charles Barkley is not an all-time great NBA basketball player because he has no rings. Kevin Durant needed a ring to prove himself at that elite caliber. Ray Bourque, Brett Hull, and Luc Robitaille are just three of the early-2000s players that signed on to 'ring chase' as a parting gift to already elite careers. If every single team that does not win the league in a given year were to be considered failures, then you are overlooking some of the greatest teams in any league's history and throwing them down the drain. Now Liverpool are not in contention for the dry spell snapping title they may have desired, but there is still a possible Champions League waiting for them. That is not the point and this statement will still hold up if Liverpool lose to Tottenham in Madrid: This season was a resounding success. Liverpool played host to two Golden Boot winners, the best player in England, the best goalkeeper in England, and the best two full backs in the country. You cannot throw away progress and success simply because the end table does not show you as first place. You must take the positives and work from there.
Sports can easily be considered all wins and losses, but it is not that. A society that was not so heavily based around sports could perhaps allow that, but here in the current-day you have supporters groups of all teams in England based in so many countries and cities. Liverpool alone have 280 official supporters groups in 90 countries. Tottenham boasts over 200. Liverpool's club slogan rolled out this season of 'This Means More' serves a much larger purpose than just for its own club. Seasons can be successful without a title at the end of it. Look no further than clubs avoid relegation, or achieving a top four finish. While the end result may not be as sweet, and the trophy cabinet is just as bare as it was the season before, as a fan and spectator, there will still be something special about the trophy chase of 2019.
Follow me on Twitter @RMAB_Ryan for more LFC coverage, including live Tweets during the matches, as well as AFC Ann Arbor and Michigan basketball coverage!
As Jurgen Klopp noted in pre-game thoughts before the final kick-off of the year at Anfield against Wolves, a win meant it would be a good season no matter what resulted occurred in Brighton. In every other season but two in Premier League history, Liverpool win the league with 97 points. It just so happens that the two seasons they don't are this season and last season, where Pep Guardiola helms perhaps unarguably the most cohesively talented roster the Premier League has ever seen. Led by Sergio Aguero who despite being thirty still cannot stop scoring and Raheem Sterling, who once upon a time was seen as one of the most overrated players in the game when looking at transfer fees, along with Bernando Silva, Leroy Sane off the bench, Fernandinho and Aymeric Laporte, captain Vincent Kompany and veteran David Silva, and so many more, this City team is an embarrassment of riches.
When you look at the league last season and see the lack of competition at the top of the league, there is some semblance of great achievement to merely stick with City. While the league was once upon a time in the grasp of Liverpool after the festive period, even after facing City twice, calling a team 'bottlers' because they dared to drop points over the course of a season seems asinine when looking at the rest of the league and how they finished. In the Champions League next season, Liverpool and City will be joined thanks to league qualification by Chelsea and Tottenham (who Liverpool will see once more this season in Madrid in the Champions League Final). After starting the season on a twelve-match unbeaten run, Chelsea slipped off the pace but recovered to the tune of a third-place finish. Spurs lost seven of their final twelve matches, which is two more losses than City and Liverpool combined for over the course of the entire season. They drew two more. The three wins came at home to bottom-place Huddersfield, 17th-place Brighton (only coming in the 88th minute), and home to Palace.
Other top four contenders included Arsenal -- losers of four of their last seven -- and Manchester United -- finishing equi-distant from top of the table to relegation. And yet, between these six teams England dominated Europe. We stare into a pair of all-English European finals and the two sides that did not make it are City and United, who beat PSG to get to Barcelona. The Premier League is the toughest league in the world. The Premier League has the most money involved in the world. Is there correlation? Almost certainly. But over just a brief time period, Europe has shifted to English domination.
Let's travel back in time to the 2015-16 season. Jurgen Klopp had just taken over at Liverpool while Manuel Pellegrini was wrapping up his time at Manchester City. Leicester City was about to win the league. Jose Mourinho was getting sacked at Chelsea, and Sam Allardyce was guiding Sunderland to a great escape. This feels like ages ago but in reality this was a mere three years ago. La Liga saw seven teams qualify for European competitions. Of the seven, just one team was eliminated by a non-Spanish side -- Villarreal in the Europa League semifinals. Spain held three of the four finalist spots and took home both competitions. Half of English sides were eliminated by a Spanish opponent. This season, of the six European sides who made a group stage, all six made it to the knockouts and just one (Manchester United, by Barcelona) were eliminated by non-Spanish opposition. That La Liga foe, was knocked out the next round by Liverpool. Poetic justice for the Merseyside club that had the same exact thing happen to them proving that what goes around well-and-truly comes around.
We are at the stage where the Premier League is doing things that qualify them to be known as the best league in the world. La Liga, thanks to their European success, were the shining example of a league to model success off it. These periods of time come and go given the situations surrounding world football. We are now in an era, though, where the biggest money and best managers reside in England. Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG, Juventus, these are all some of the biggest clubs in the world, and surely the biggest ones in their countries. These clubs are spending ludicrous amounts of money despite consistently winning their leagues year-in and year-out. Focusing back to the Premier League, you can add Manchester City into this list as well. They are all searching for glory in the world's largest competition. A competition that on June 1st, in Madrid, Spain, will see two teams that have had at least one of the last three seasons in the black when looking at net spend.
The League:
What, now, you may ask, was the point of me going through four of the six top teams in the league and poking at each of them. This is a league with the absolute best of the best when it comes to talent. Wolves, who finished seventh, are absolutely loaded with talented players, and they did not even sniff the top six. That is the same for the likes of Leicester and Everton. This league is hard. For a side like Liverpool to come out and despite falling short, but run roughshod over a league for the vast majority of games that we have only seen one other team do in this 'new money' era of the league is cause for celebration, second-place or not.
There is a certain frailty of a season that can be done and undone over a matter of minutes and centimeters. John Stones never makes a goal-line clearance and Liverpool go up 1-0 against City on January 2nd, I am almost surely writing a different article. That could very well be the case too if Burnley's Matt Lowton heads a ball fully clearly instead of nodding it onto his foot. If Liverpool and Everton play one or two minutes less stoppage time at Anfield, and if Jordan Pickford jumps an inch higher, City probably run away with things earlier. If Arkadiusz Milik of Napoli hits the ball four-to-six inches to Alisson's left or right, this post probably has a much more nihilistic tone. Inches matter. This title race was about as close as you can get when you have two uber-talented teams winning every single league match for nine straight match-weeks. All it would have taken is one moment of magic, or one brief spell of fatigue, for either side to fall off the trail. And down the home stretch of the season, neither team did that.
And so we come now to the ultimate measure of glory: titles. Every single sport has this debate. Charles Barkley is not an all-time great NBA basketball player because he has no rings. Kevin Durant needed a ring to prove himself at that elite caliber. Ray Bourque, Brett Hull, and Luc Robitaille are just three of the early-2000s players that signed on to 'ring chase' as a parting gift to already elite careers. If every single team that does not win the league in a given year were to be considered failures, then you are overlooking some of the greatest teams in any league's history and throwing them down the drain. Now Liverpool are not in contention for the dry spell snapping title they may have desired, but there is still a possible Champions League waiting for them. That is not the point and this statement will still hold up if Liverpool lose to Tottenham in Madrid: This season was a resounding success. Liverpool played host to two Golden Boot winners, the best player in England, the best goalkeeper in England, and the best two full backs in the country. You cannot throw away progress and success simply because the end table does not show you as first place. You must take the positives and work from there.
Sports can easily be considered all wins and losses, but it is not that. A society that was not so heavily based around sports could perhaps allow that, but here in the current-day you have supporters groups of all teams in England based in so many countries and cities. Liverpool alone have 280 official supporters groups in 90 countries. Tottenham boasts over 200. Liverpool's club slogan rolled out this season of 'This Means More' serves a much larger purpose than just for its own club. Seasons can be successful without a title at the end of it. Look no further than clubs avoid relegation, or achieving a top four finish. While the end result may not be as sweet, and the trophy cabinet is just as bare as it was the season before, as a fan and spectator, there will still be something special about the trophy chase of 2019.
Follow me on Twitter @RMAB_Ryan for more LFC coverage, including live Tweets during the matches, as well as AFC Ann Arbor and Michigan basketball coverage!
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