Liverpool have been regularly outrun in the Premier League this season – but their problems run far deeper, writes Paul Gorst
16:43, 23 Mar 2026Updated 22:13, 23 Mar 2026
Arne Slot’s Liverpool have now not win in three Premier League games(Image: Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
The roars from the Kop were probably still echoing around Anfield on Wednesday night when Arne Slot looked to temper expectations.
A 4-0 win over Galatasaray that bore all the hallmarks of a classic European night under the lights, secured the Reds’ passage into the last eight of the Champions League but Slot, whether by design or mistake, then deflated a buoyant mood.
Speaking after the win over the Turkish side last week, Slot said: “It’s not as simple as you think to say: ‘Okay, if you can bring this tonight, you can bring this effort every single game you have.’
“There’s an opponent to play against, there’s a style of play. There are so many factors that why we could bring tonight what we could bring.
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“Unfortunately, for the fifth, sixth time now, I think that we only get two days’ rest to go to Brighton, early kick-off. For me, that’s not realistic.
“You see more and more players get injured in this period of time because it’s such a tight schedule. We should have [been] given a bit more rest but that hasn’t happened a lot to us this season.
“Brighton is an intense team we’re going to face and we will bring the best game possible again on Saturday. But you cannot compare Brighton to Galatasaray, or you cannot compare Tottenham to Galatasaray.”
Slot will feel he was within his rights to highlight the lack of turnaround time between Wednesday night and Saturday lunchtime, over 200 miles away from Merseyside, but offering up a view that fatigue could be a problem only gave the players involved a ready-made excuse in the event of a defeat.
It was something goalscorer Milos Kerkez admitted after the 2-1 loss on the south coast, saying: “It was a tough day – I think you could see some of us were maybe a little bit tired.
“But I don’t like using it as an excuse. We know where we are in the Premier League standings, and we know we have to push. Of course, it’s maybe a bit of an advantage (to Brighton), but still, very disappointed that we couldn’t win.”
Liverpool had just 62 hours between the final whistle against Galatasaray and kick-off at the Amex with Slot admitting in the embargoed section of Friday’s press conference that he only had 15-20 minutes training time as a result.
In the same week that saw him lose Mohamed Salah and Alisson Becker, that was not ideal and Hugo Ekitike’s departure inside 10 minutes after a tangle with James Milner was fortunate that it was only a dead leg that won’t sideline him further.
But Liverpool were once more outrun in Saturday’s defeat to Brighton and a popular statistic across social media over the weekend highlighted that the Reds have covered less ground than their opponents in 27 of the last 31 games.
Against Tottenham earlier this month – a disappointing 1-1 draw with a side in dramatic free-fall – Spurs covered 118.27 km compared to their hosts’ total of 109.6 km. November’s 3-0 loss to Manchester City at the Etihad was the starkest disparity with the new Carabao Cup holders covering nine kilometres more than the Reds.
Liverpool, famously, were formerly one of the hardest-running sides in world football but those statistics have regressed significantly under Slot. The alternative view is that ‘being outrun’ is not such an obvious indicator of under performance.
Liverpool ranked 16th in that table last term en route to winning the Premier League by 10 points and with four games to spare. Four years ago, Jurgen Klopp’s side were beaten on running metrics 26 times in a campaign when they finished with 92 points. Those statistics alone are not proof of a poor team.
But with 10 defeats and a place in next season’s Champions League far from certain as we head into the penultimate month of the campaign, covering less ground than the opposition on a weekly basis is another indictment of a squad who have had accusations of their fitness levels thrown at them all season.
Certainly the scheduling of last week was not conducive to performing at the requisite levels but bemoaning the fixture list and using it as an explanation for a bad result surely cuts little ice when you glance back just a few weeks to the 1-0 win over Nottingham Forest.
Liverpool, in the build up to that game, had a few days off to rest and recover before preparing fully for their one fixture that week. Forest, in contrast, played in Turkey on the Thursday evening, where they beat Fenerbahce 3-0, before hosting Slot’s men in the 2pm kick-off on the following Sunday.
Liverpool subsequently put in one of their worst first halves of the season at the City Ground despite being the much fresher team and eventually won the game against a relegation-threatened side via a 95th-minute effort from Alexis Mac Allister.
There would have been a more sympathetic reaction to Saturday’s defeat had it not been in-keeping with what this squad has served up since mid-September.
Since the 2-1 triumph over Everton on September 20, the Reds have secured only nine wins, accumulating just 34 points from the last 78 available.