Liverpool Set Damning Premier League Record to Sum Up Woes

Anfield, Sunday afternoon: the clock had already ticked past 93 minutes when Erling Haaland stepped forward, dispatched the penalty low to Alisson’s right, and etched Liverpool’s name into Premier League infamy. The strike sealed a 2-1 win for Manchester City and, more painfully, confirmed that the reigning champions have now conceded four stoppage-time winners this season—matching the competition’s all-time worst mark for a single campaign.

No club with genuine title aspirations has ever flirted with such a statistic. Watford (2017-18 and 2021-22) and Southampton (2023-24) occupied the unwanted slot before them, but each was fighting relegation with threadbare squads. West Ham, the other previous holder, at least had the mitigating factor of a draining Europa League run that ended in the semifinals. Liverpool, by contrast, arrived at this juncture with a fully stocked dressing room and ambitions of retaining the trophy.

Head coach Arne Slot, usually measured in public, has grown visibly weary of discussing the pattern. “We see a lot a team scores a goal you don’t expect in added time. So is it then a surprise?” he asked rhetorically in January. Three months later the question still hangs, unanswered, over the club’s training complex.

The four goals share no single tactical fingerprint. Crystal Palace’s Eddie Nketiah and Bournemouth’s Amine Adli both punished hesitant clearances from long throws, finding the bottom corner from near-identical positions. Chelsea’s Estêvão ghosted in at the back post after Mohamed Salah failed to track Marc Cucurella’s under-lapping run. On Sunday it was a late dart by Matheus Nunes, latching onto Bernardo Silva’s clever pass beyond the advancing Milos Kerkez, that drew Alisson into the rash challenge which handed Haaland the decisive spot-kick.

Slot insists he has exhausted every remedy. “I’ve made defensive substitutions and the ball went in; I kept playing the same players and the ball went in,” he lamented this week. “Sometimes it feels… I can fairly say we haven’t been lucky. Is it then unlucky or is this part of who we are?”

The Dutchman has three or four months to discover the answer, but the arithmetic is already stark. Add two stoppage-time equalisers to the four late winners and Liverpool have hemorrhaged eight points after the 90th minute. They enter the midweek programme four points behind Chelsea in fifth—the position currently projected to claim the final Champions League berth.

Slot refuses to downplay the stakes. “If we don’t have Champions League football it has definitely not been an acceptable season,” he admitted. The manager then delivered a sobering reminder of the ripple effect: “When I arrived here we could only sign Federico Chiesa and that was after a Europa League season… that does have an enormous impact on the way this club is run.”

Virgil van Dijk, standing amid the mixed zone debris after City’s celebrations had subsided, offered a blunter verdict. “The fact is we conceded late on and I keep saying it but we have to do better in this,” the captain said. Whether Liverpool can arrest the slide before the record becomes theirs alone will shape not only the remainder of this campaign but the complexion of the summer window that follows.

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