Are these the problems that Liverpool need to address?

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A squad ravaged by injury:

Speaking of injuries, losing Daniel Sturridge (a man who has only performed for 290 minutes this season), Danny Ings (missed 44 matches), Martin Skrtel (13 game absence) and Divock Origi (8 missed games) have accounted for some of the missing firepower, and fans of the Reds can breathe a sigh of relief as the majority of those are now back in training. So, maybe their luck is turning around. Luck is obviously a fickle concept, but the folks at Footballintheclouds have attempted to quantify it and the results have been unkind to say the least to The Reds. Their metric of choice is called PDO (PDO = Shooting% + Save%). Basically, this is a proxy for good or bad ‘luck’. 100% is the average, while above this point is considered ‘lucky’ and below is ‘unlucky’. PDO regresses toward 100% over time and can be very erratic.

Currently, Liverpool’s score stands at 87%, and only Aston Villa have had it worse at 86%. In comparison, everyone’s favorite Cinderellas from Leicester are at 109%. Coaching and ownership should also shoulder some of the blame – as Klopp’s gegenpressing and other magic has not really been effective, while ownership/management have allowed their arguably two best players in Luis Suarez and Raheem Sterling to leave with the “let us pillage Southampton for talent” strategy as their contingency plan. While I’m all for plundering talented teams (and the Saints have to be given credit for churning out defensive players), when you get onto multiple lists for worst signings in the 21st century that is not a very good sign. To be fair, since taking over in 2010, FSG have made 5-6 excellent signings (Suarez, Sakho, Sturridge, Coutinho, Henderson, Moreno), but also lost the plot on Mario Balotelli, Andy Carroll, Stewart Downing, Joe Allen, Lazar Markovic, Fabio Borini and Iago Aspas. The final verdict in terms of blame is thus injuries 5%, bad luck  5% + coaching 5% + ownership 5%.

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