Something broke
in year two.

Liverpool's expected goals dropped by nearly a third.

Slot's first season was efficient - fewer shots, better quality, same output. Year two lost both. This is not a finishing slump. The underlying chances themselves got worse.

Every number moved in the wrong direction.

Slot Y1 had a coherent model - fewer shots, higher quality, same goals. Y2 broke that model without replacing it. Look at the Gap column.

The Gap column tells the finishing story. For the first 30 matches of Y2 the gap was −0.21 - consistent with Klopp and Slot Y1. Matches 31–37 saw unusual overperformance; then the final match at Brentford (2.99 xG, 1 goal, 1–1) reversed much of it. The full-season gap settled at −0.11 - closer to the historical pattern than the late-season scoring suggested. The underlying xG of 1.77/match, down 29%, is the story.

Gap = Goals/match minus xG/match; a small negative gap means goals just below xG (normal finishing), a large negative gap is the signature of bad luck. Slot Y2: 38 of 38 matches - season complete. xG data: Understat (full seasons). PPG: official PL record (38 matches each). xG/shot and set-piece xG based on first 30 matches of Y2. Highlighted cells are the strongest figure in each column - highest for attacking metrics, lowest for opponent xG.

These changes are real, not noise.

The xG picture above comes from Understat. The following comes from a second dataset - SportsMonks match statistics across full Premier League seasons.

Statistical rigor: All four metrics passed a Mann-Whitney U test with Bonferroni correction across 44 variables (α/44 ≈ 0.00114) and showed large to very large effect sizes (Cohen's d between 0.89 and 1.06). See the methodology for full details.

The investigation into Liverpool's decline.

The first piece covers the headline xG decline, while subsequent threads explore pressing and set pieces in detail.