Liverpool are top of the Premier League but nobody’s really talking about them which seems… unusual

Liverpool are top of the Premier League.

We state it so baldly there because, well, this feels like something that isn’t really being talked about a great deal and it’s genuinely quite hard to imagine how the football climate in this country in 2023 can create a situation where Liverpool are top of the league and nobody’s really talking about it.

At this stage last season we were hearing an awful lot about Arsenal being top of the league. We’ve already this season heard a huge amount about Tottenham being top of the league. Liverpool go top and… nobody really seems that interested.

That’s a strange thing, isn’t it? Liverpool, the one club with the one manager who has managed to go toe-to-toe with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City and last the pace, are currently out in front and it’s not really being treated as a particularly significant moment in the season.

There remains a widespread belief that Liverpool aren’t quite title contenders this season, that the hurried midfield regeneration they had to – albeit very smartly – conclude in a single summer will ultimately cost them, that their defensive frailties are too great to last the pace.

READ: Ranking Klopp’s kids by their chance of ‘making it’ at Liverpool after USG defeat

It’s all perfectly valid, but the fact remains we are here talking about the only club with proof of concept when it comes to keeping pace with Manchester City at their very best – as Liverpool did on that absurd run-in to the 2018/19 season when they both just kept winning game after game after game for month after month after ludicrous month – and the only club to actually prevent City currently being on a run of six straight titles. It’s often mentioned how far Liverpool were clear in 2019/20, eventually winning the title by 18 points. But City were still another 15 points clear of anyone else.

Now this Liverpool team is certainly not quite that Liverpool team. We definitely don’t think they’re going to go and win the title by 18 points, for one thing. But Mo Salah is still there, Alisson is still there, Virgil van Dijk is still there, Trent Alexander-Arnold is still there. And most importantly Jurgen Klopp is still there. We’re not talking about Trigger’s Broom here. Or the Sugababes, if you prefer your references (ever so) slightly less creakily out of date.

They are the only club that can say “We can take down Pep’s City” and point to evidence of actually doing so rather than finishing trailing in their wake and coughing on dust. So the fact that this is the team that currently sits top of the league while City have one of those first-half-of-the-season stutters which are the only real sign of weakness they ever display feels like it should be more significant than it appears to be.

There are a couple of reasons why, we think. For one, there’s a slight seat-of-the-pants element to Liverpool’s formline. While on the one hand they have suffered only a solitary defeat (something that nobody else can claim) and that defeat was a nonsense, they have also won a quite absurd number of games from unlikely positions. Their dominance of our favourite stat marks them out as a tremendously fun and courageous side, but it’s also one doesn’t really want to have to keep going to game after game after game.

Arsenal had a run last season where they seemed able to rescue results from almost any position. Right up until they stopped being able to do that and handed the title to City in the end rather limply. It is emotionally as well as physically exhausting to continuously win games like that. It can catch up with you.

The most obvious reason Liverpool aren’t being talked about more is probably those valid concerns over the defensive and midfield areas. But such concerns didn’t shut down the noise around Arsenal last season. It definitely didn’t silence anything about Spurs in the first few months of this season.

Our theory goes something like this. Liverpool just aren’t the most interesting story in this season’s Premier League. They are definitely one of its most interesting sides, probably our favourite to watch alongside Spurs purely for the near guarantee of drama and nonsense. No coincidence that the game between those two is (and is likely to remain) the season’s high watermark for both drama and indeed nonsense.

But as a story, ‘Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool mount title challenge against Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City’ lacks freshness. We’ve seen that before. Liverpool can never be under the radar, because they are Liverpool. It feels inherently weird to even be writing anything along the lines of ‘Hey, you know who we should be hearing more about: Liverpool’. They and Manchester United remain the only clubs who can drive all the traffic and attract all the attention whether they happen to currently be good, bad or indifferent.

Liverpool right now, though, find themselves in an unusual position. They are neither the likeliest challengers to City’s four-in-a-row quest – that is still Arsenal, about whom there remains a certain novelty as they make another attempt on City’s crown but this time with a midfield – nor the most leftfield and exciting; that would be Unai Emery’s absurdly excellent Aston Villa.

Klopp’s side, more plausible than Villa but less convincing than Arsenal, sit somewhere in the middle and at the moment the focus remains on the Gunners and the Villans.

Liverpool should enjoy that relative anonymity while it lasts. One way or another, Sunday’s game against crisis-riddled Manchester United is going to blow their cover.