Liverpool’s Champions League away form is a puzzle

Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have a poor Champions League away record, but need a win against Bayern Munich at the Allianz Arena.

There’s no meaningful subset of games in which Liverpool have been more disappointing under Jurgen Klopp than Champions League away matches. They’ve played 10 of them, won four, lost four and drawn two, which would put them on pace for 53 points over a 38-game league campaign, good for eighth place in last season’s Premier League.

Of course comparing European fixtures to domestic ones is a risky game, but a closer look at those 10 matches certainly doesn’t make Klopp look much better (even if it doesn’t make him look much worse either).

First, three of the wins came against Porto, Maribor and Hoffenheim, and the fourth came in the second leg of last year’s quarterfinal against Manchester City — an excellent result, no doubt, but one that also owed a lot to a botched offside decision and the fact City spent most of the match playing with one defender as they tried to overturn a 3-0 first leg deficit.

Those four wins also all came in last season’s competition. Their away record in this season’s has been plain old awful: played three, lost three, scored one, conceded six. The defeats away to Napoli and Red Star Belgrade, in particular, were bad, among the worst Liverpool performances since Klopp took over the club in 2015. Over all three group stage away games, the Reds managed five shots on target, one of which was a penalty.

Perhaps more pertinent than the record itself is the way Liverpool have approached these games. Last season, their most troubling European away performances (Sevilla, Spartak Moscow, Roma), like their most troubling home ones, were wild, end-to-end contests in which they failed either to establish any sort of control with the ball or display any sort of good sense or composure without it, thus undermining their lethal attack in more or less the only way possible.

This sort of thing has been mostly eradicated in 2018-19, as Klopp’s side have mounted a title challenge by deliberately shunning the attack-first-second-and-third approach that saw them break the record for goals scored in a single Champions League campaign in 2017-18. This year there has been a much greater focus on defensive solidity and controlled possession in midfield. It’s been a success, as their league position indicates.

But it’s also impacted the attacking output. Liverpool are averaging 15 shots a game in the Premier League this season, down from 16.8 the two previous campaigns, per WhoScored. This decline is even more stark away from home. In 2016-17, Klopp’s first full season, the Reds averaged 16.2 shots per league away game. That dropped to 14.6 in 2017-18, and is at 11.9 so far this season.

What this means in practice is that, when they play poorly away from home, it’s less bad than it is aggressively uneventful, a strange development for a team managed by Klopp. It’s the reason Liverpool have drawn so many games this season (seven, to be exact, five of which came on their travels), as most recently demonstrated at Old Trafford and Goodison Park. And if there have been any games this season less exciting to watch than the Reds’ trip to Napoli in October, please don’t tell me about them.

The question now is whether there are any lessons here. It’s ludicrous to suggest Liverpool will lose to Bayern in Munich because they lost to Red Star in Serbia, or Napoli in Naples, or PSG in Paris, let alone because they couldn’t beat Spartak Moscow in Russia in 2017. This team is very different to that one, both in terms of tactics and personnel, and two-legged knockout ties all come with their own set of mitigating circumstances.

But it is worth noting that on Wednesday Klopp’s Liverpool will be in a position they’ve never been in before: playing a Champions League second leg away from home without a lead to defend. And it’s also worth noting that while this Reds team seem ideally-suited to playing on the road in Europe (especially against opponents who failed to score an away goal in the first leg), they’ve moved definitively away from the counter-attacking style that we still tend to assume will make them such a threat in these games.

This is the context in which Liverpool travel to Munich, and in which Klopp must decide how to set up his team. For all the exciting attacking play Liverpool have produced since he arrived on Merseyside, and all his talk about the importance of creating a spectacle fans can enjoy, the German has flashed a real conservative streak this season.

This is evident not just in a more defensive tactical setup, but also in his team selection: James Milner and Jordan Henderson, in particular, have been go-to players in big matches, even when there seem to be better options available. This mostly works, because Milner and Henderson are excellent players, but possibly even more so because they are supreme hustlers, artisans of those little moments of athletic exuberance — a 60-yard sprint to press the opposition keeper here, a sliding header there — that are the foundation of every great Liverpool display under Klopp.

All of which is really just to wonder somewhat meanderingly how Klopp plans to approach Wednesday’s match. Bayern, with a cobbled together back line and missing one of their best players in Joshua Kimmich, are vulnerable in transition. They are also much more technically adept in midfield, and could dominate a slow, methodical match. Liverpool, meanwhile, had a lot of success pressing the German side in the first leg, and could easily have won by a couple of goals.

There are good reasons for Klopp to adopt the heavy-metal approach that took Liverpool to the final of this competition last season. But again, this team is very different to that one, and much harder to predict.