Objective Data: Liverpool The Best Team in the League This Season

Unacceptable refereeing and unfair suspensions, but still the Reds are top when weighted for game difficulty

One of the problems even with xG league tables earlier in the season is that, even if it shows more granular detail of performance compared with just the normal league table (which is skewed by all kinds of factors), it doesn't take into account the quality of who each team has played, and whether or not it was home or away.

Even without any kind of ratings system, I could tell that Liverpool had gone away five games to three, which is a huge differential at this stage (“5 is a 66.7% increase of 3”.) This is far more of a factor than it being after 25 or 30 games. Liverpool have a 100% record at home in those three home games.

Then, it's been away at Chelsea (biggest spenders by far in the past year or so and full of opening-day optimism); Brighton (European team now, and best team, pound for pound, last season); Newcastle (now a Champions League team); Spurs (now a Champions League team); and Wolves (tough to beat at their place).

At home it's been Aston Villa (European team now) and West Ham (European team now). Plus Bournemouth, beneficiaries of a dreadful red card to Alexis Mac Allister.

Even a ratings system can't take into account how long you've played with 10 men, with four very harsh red cards to the Reds, one of which reduced Jürgen Klopp's XI to a IX, at which point the damn finally burst in the 97th minute to an own goal.

But we can say that, with the full XI, Liverpool's numbers have been excellent. We cannot ignore the extra difficulties placed on the Reds by just the worst officiating seen in all sport, ever (slight exaggeration, but only slight).

It cannot take into account the cost of not allowing Luis Díaz's goal at 0-0, and how the injury to Cody Gakpo, and the ludicrous two yellows to Diogo Jota, were influenced by straining with 10 against 11; and the suspensions to Jota and Curtis Jones, the latter missing 3.6 games including the time after his dismissal, especially when rivals can make far worse tackles and repeated fouls involving studs into the achilles and studs into the ankle and stay on the pitch. The inconsistency is beyond shocking, and the suspensions or lack therefore skew the integrity of the competition.

Or that this, below, is not a goalscoring chance, when you only have to think back to Gakpo's goal from an almost identical situation at Spurs, with the ideal of not facing the goal ignoring the swivel shot, compared to what the laws actually mean, in terms heading away from goal in the box, say towards the corner flag or back towards the joining of the 18-yard lines, for example.

(And the ball only has have a reasonable chance of being controlled according to the laws, as Newcastle's Isak didn't have control of the ball when Virgil van Dijk was so harshly sent off, certainly when compared to what's applied to Liverpool. If you were to purposefully take out the attacker just over halfway, who still has 10 yards to run to the ball, but the keeper is 20 yards away, that's a red card. The ball is not remotely under control and he's hasn't yet got near it, let alone touched it.)

Is this a “goalscoring chance” for Gakpo last week? His touch took him completely away from goal, if you want to be an ignoramus about it. (Again, the humans need to understand football.) At least Szoboszlai was facing the goal. But given that footballers can – shock – swivel, it’s yet more bullshit from the PGMOL and its cronies.

And of course, it's also now 302 league games since a player was sent off for two yellows against the Reds, with a single minute of Klopp's tenure spent in that game-state (in his second ever game, and nearly 30,000 minutes of football including added-on time).

And Liverpool had to have two players fouled in the box to get a penalty. (Anthony Taylor didn’t even give the first one, but at least he gave one of the two.)

But this piece is not about the officiating, even if the refs, the VARs and PGMOL have screwed Liverpool out of 4-6 points, excluding the extra damage of the bans on squad selection.

Even so, a Relative Performance Index (that cannot factor that in) shows Liverpool to be the best team in the league so far this season; even without factoring in those major, jaw-dropping caveats.

The actual league table is distorted by some clubs only playing the good sides, while others have only played the chaff.

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