Will Liverpool’s now surely inevitable Premier League title failure be a true bottle job or mere collapse?
Liverpool drew away at Aston Villa and while drawing away from home against fellow Champions League last-16 qualifiers to move eight points clear at the top of the table might not seem like a complete disaster it apparently is exactly that.
With one Mailboxer not just re-opening the title race but actually ruling Liverpool out of it altogether and the media sniffing a full-scale disaster, it is clearly the right time to determine whether Liverpool’s now-inevitable late-season crumble will constitute a full-scale bottle job or just a merely unedifying collapse.
Luckily, we can work this out properly with all science and maths and sh*t. Two years ago, when Arsenal were the bottle job in question rather than those seeking to cause one elsewhere, we came up with eight factors that separate the true choke from the mere collapse.
Let’s go through them and see how Liverpool fare.
Size of lead
Liverpool have actually been very clever here, presumably having consulted the sacred text and read the following:
Unofficially, anything in double figures is going to be pretty hard to explain away as anything else, but relatively small leads can be deemed bottle jobs in the right conditions.
They’ve taken great care to avoid getting that lead into double figures and it all makes sense now, doesn’t it?
But a lead of eight points this deep into the season feels very much like it’s firmly in potential bottle-job territory. And let’s get this said early: bottle-job determination remains more art than science despite everything we’ve said and are about to say. Things like ‘games in hand’ can be included or excluded as required to fit whichever narrative is being constructed. Those are the rules.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 8/10. Obviously.
Games remaining
This is where Liverpool might have really f*cked it, for us. Liverpool are, of course, the embodiment of the late bottle job back in 2014, but that is extreme and unusual. Most teams with a decent lead at that stage of the season actually will manage to win the league, which is good.
More common is the complete reverse; teams doing their bottling so early in the season that nobody even really notices they’ve bottled it. This is what’s known within bottle-job academia as The Arsenal 2015/16 Gambit. Chelsea themselves pulled it off in that very 2013/14 season, reduced by the time of their infamous 2-0 win at Liverpool to mere agents of chaos rather than genuine contenders.
The scary thing for Liverpool right now is that they exist slap bang in the sweet spot between those extremes. It’s too early for their lead to be watertight, too late for it to be forgotten in the final analysis. It is going to look very bottle-ish.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 9/10
Strength of challenger
Not good for Liverpool, this. Not good at all. Arsenal have been able to at least in part explain away their own failure to win the last two league titles by pointing at Manchester City and shrugging at the sheer impossibility of toppling them for reasons on-field and off.
Liverpool have no such cover here if they come a cropper against a notoriously bottle-ish, famously trophy-averse Arsenal team without a league title of their own in over two decades. Getting reeled in by Pep’s ruthless City machine or even peak Fergie United is one thing, but you really don’t want to get mugged off by a team and their manager who have become a byword for nearly men.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 10/10
How much other clubs’ fans hate you
Less of a factor in general now that everyone hates absolutely everyone else and the days of ‘soft spots’ being largely non-existent in the Very Online crucible in which Liverpool’s bottling status will ultimately be decided.
It’s an interesting one, though, because we do get the impression Liverpool are most neutrals’ lesser of two evils in this fight. With Arne Slot rather than Jurgen Klopp in charge of Liverpool’s title tilt, there is slightly less of the messianic cult vibe to Liverpool’s support. Arsenal have been the more annoying, with the whole ‘stay humble’ thing from which everyone involved emerged with so much credit sending a good few fence-sitters to Liverpool’s side of the equation.
None of this actually matters, of course. Your football club being hated is massive fun in lots of ways and generally speaking, far more satisfying than being ignored or patted on the head and patronised.
But our tentative hypothesis that Liverpool are the neutrals’ choice in this race does mean that accusations of bottling are likely to be very loud from Arsenal in particular, and with pointed reference to the popular view of their own recent failures, but perhaps more muted from elsewhere.
We might also be very wrong on this, because Arsenal were definitely the neutrals’ favourite in that first fight with City and absolutely everyone called them bottle-less choking disgraces at the end of that season anyway.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 5/10
Humorous or slapstick catastrophe
Nothing yet for Liverpool here (although see below). No equivalent embarrassment to compare with Gerrard’s Slip or Keegan’s Interview or the Battle of the Bridge.
That might be because for a team apparently in the grip of a potential bottle-job they are also quite unhelpfully top of the form table and unbeaten in 22 games having amassed more points after 26 games than either Man City or Arsenal themselves managed at the same stage of last season.
These are things that would appear to suggest it isn’t any kind of bottle job at all, but that can’t be right so let’s just ignore it and move on.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 1/10
Kodak Moment
We reckon James Tarkowski’s equaliser and the post-match scenes that everybody wants to see qualify here rather than the previous category.
As we said in our original essay – and it was and remains a deeply scholarly work:
It definitely makes things worse if there is one specific moment that comes to sum up the entirety of a bottle job. One particular image that becomes burnt into the collective football memory of the nation. You’re literally already picturing a slippy Steven Gerrard right now, aren’t you? Or Kevin Keegan, face reddening under his massive headphones and jabbing a finger at a Sky Sports camera. Or Eric Dier booting people into the Stamford Bridge sky. Or William Gallas’ sit-in protest at Birmingham. Or Rafa Benitez’s facts.
It really doesn’t matter whether the moment is actually that pivotal or significant. Only that it be memorable and part of a wider collapse for a team in need of the Heimlich manoeuvre.
Dramatic and brilliant late equaliser in the final ever Goodison Derby followed by widespread head-loss and red cards out the wazoo definitely feels like it could have a place in this collection.
It absolutely isn’t and won’t be the reason Liverpool don’t win the title if indeed that proves to be the case, but nor were lots of the others and as we’ve already said, that doesn’t actually matter.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 8/10
Previous reputation for bottle-iness
A woolly but significant one. Essentially it’s confirmation bias. People are obviously going to be quicker to sense a bottling when it’s Arsenal or Tottenham than with City or Chelsea. Reputation is everything.
Liverpool have a couple of infamous bottlings in their locker but we don’t think they have quite the same status here as the north London pair. It’s a middling score in this round.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 5/10
Unexpectedness of pre-bottling situation
We mentioned this one specifically to overrule its pertinence. Expectations shift and change over the course of the season. Nobody expecting you to be in a title race before you take charge of said title race offers only the flimsiest defence if you then fail to see it out having got into a position of great strength.
“Nobody even expected us to be challenging,” can explain away the failure to mount a challenge at all. It cannot explain away the failure to finish the job once, say, eight points clear two-thirds of the way into the season.
It was as true for Arsenal in 2023 as it is for Liverpool in 2025. It isn’t particularly fair but it’s the way things are. Life isn’t fair.
Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 10/10
Overall Liverpool 2024/25 Bottle Job Rating: 56/80
There you have it. Based on meticulous, dispassionate and objective science calculated from all currently available data, Liverpool failing to win the Premier League title from their current position would represent a significant but not record-breaking bottle job. Not as bad as a Newcastle 1996, but probably worse than an Arsenal 2023.
Yeah, science!