Liverpool might be a mess, but Trent Alexander-Arnold is fine
How Trent Alexander-Arnold is still one of the best right backs in the world
Liverpool might be a mess, but Trent Alexander-Arnold is fine
Liverpool’s season from hell has been overstated. Really, it has been a 2021 from hell. Liverpool was atop the Premier League with 33 points and the best goal difference on December 30th, 2020. Since then, Liverpool has played 13 games and picked up a grand total of 13 points. The list of reasons why Liverpool has struggled is as long as a Trent Alexander-Arnold full-field switch.
The season-ending injuries to their top three center back choices, Virgil Van Dijk, Joe Gomez, and Joel Matip, not only did in the center of their defense but also took away from their sneakily dominant midfield. The injuries, for a time, forced Fabinho and Jordan Henderson to fill the void, who are both elite in their roles of winning the ball back, covering for advanced fullbacks, and shepherding the ball to Liverpool’s most dangerous attackers. Not to mention, the congested fixture schedule has done the team no favors either as each injury made sensible rotation more and more impossible. The result has been a squad that has looked tired as they battle their way through the Premier and Champions League.
However, the architect of so many Liverpool attacks, Trent Alexander-Arnold (TAA for short), has been skewered for his lack of form and has been portrayed as a chief culprit for Liverpool’s tumble down the standings. His star has diminished so much this season that England manager Garreth Southgate has dropped him from the England squad entirely. It’s easy to see why people believe TAA has fallen off, after consecutive double-digit assist seasons TAA has only produced three assists from 27 appearances this season. The problem is, TAA hasn’t dropped off at all.
(If you understand expected stats feel free to skip over this paragraph, if not, it’s required reading)
The stat de jour in major professional football has become expected goals, and as a product so have expected assists. What makes expected goals so useful is that it tells us how often a player is actually producing high-quality goal-scoring opportunities instead of simply telling us the results. For instance, if a player plays a simple pass to an attacker outside of the box and there are still defenders in front of him and then that attacker scores an incredible goal the passer gets an assist and the shooter gets a goal. The play is marvelous, and I’m sure images of your favorite goals come streaming back, but if those two did that 20 more times what are the chances they would score another goal? The expected numbers would say that was a long shot to be a goal and rewards or doesn’t reward, the players involved accordingly. Scoring in football is so random that looking at the results, especially over smaller samples, can be misleading. Expected goals look to strip away the randomness and tell you how good a player truly is at producing dangerous attacking situations.
Now back to TAA. It is true that the future Sir Trent Alexander Arnold has seen a massive dropoff in his assist numbers but his expected assist numbers have held relatively steady. Looking at the past three seasons it’s clear that TAA is still creating chances, even if he isn’t generating assists like he used to. (All stats are via Understat.com)
After two seasons of overperforming his expected assists totals, TAA has finally had to weather the negative regression storm that was always coming. It can’t be sugar-coated, TAA is performing below the incredible standards he set over the previous two seasons, but that while that’s true on the surface, it isn’t entirely a good faith argument. When Liverpool lost Virgil Van Dijk they lost the single greatest set-piece weapon in the world.
Last season, seven of TAA’s 13 assists came from set-pieces, and in 2018/19 four of his 12 came from dead-ball situations as well. In 2020/21, TAA has a grand total of zero assists from set-pieces. TAA was always due to experience regression from corners, over the previous two seasons he had produced 3.8 xA compared to 9 actual assists but part of that over performance can be chalked up to having the biggest, baddest, and best set-piece target in all of world football.
Over the two seasons where TAA was setting and then resetting the Premier League assist record for a defender, he averaged 0.21 expected assists per 90 minutes from open play. This season, where his form has dipped tremendously and seen him removed from the national team, he’s averaging 0.17 expected assists per 90 minutes from open play. Has Trent been as good as he was before? Not quite, but it’s close, and he’s still second in the Premier League in expected assists for a defender and is fourth in expected assists per 90 minutes of all players who have played over 1000 minutes.
The final, most obvious reason for TAA’s dip, is that when Liverpool lost their center backs, the roles of their fullbacks had to change as well. Joe Gomez and Virgil Van Dijk are two of the fastest center backs in the world and their incredible speed allowed Liverpool to aggressively deploy their outside backs high up the field in dangerous areas without the risk of getting brutalized on the counter. Their absence forced Liverpool to alter the structure of their midfield, which in turn has forced TAA to do more in build-up as well as track back on defense.
Liverpool has experienced a drop-off in 2021 but it has nothing to do with Trent Alexander-Arnold. He’s been as good as ever as an offensive-minded outside back that remains elite at setting up his teammates. As they say, it takes two to tango, and it takes two to make an assist. If Liverpool’s finishing had been better this wouldn’t be a discussion at all. Trent has held up his end of the bargain, it’s the rest of Liverpool that has let him down.