Why Alisson Becker is Liverpool's 2021/22 Player of the Season
The Brazilian's consistent excellence has been absolutely integral to Liverpool's success.
After a season in which Liverpool scored a total of 147 goals across 63 games in all competitions, the highest ever tally in a single campaign in the club’s 130-year history, it feels somewhat incongruous not to pick one of the forwards as player of the season. Or, perhaps, Trent Alexander-Arnold, who directly contributed to 20 of those goals from right-back.
With no shortage of worthy candidates, narrowing it down to just one is no straightforward task, but for me, Liverpool’s star of the 2021/22 campaign is the big, burly, bearded Brazilian who kept 27 clean clean sheets and produced a plethora of pivotal, match-defining contributions that kept Liverpool in the hunt for all four trophies right until the very end.
By his exceptionally high standards, Alisson Becker endured a below par 2020/21 season overall, making a handful of uncharacteristically calamitous errors and not performing with the consistency we’ve become so accustomed to since his arrival from Roma in the summer of 2018. The impact of playing in empty stadiums, in a Liverpool team decimated by injuries to key figures, and of course, suffering a personal tragedy with the death of his father, are significant mitigating factors to note – and Alisson was by no means the only Liverpool player whose levels dipped quite noticeably.
Perhaps it’s slightly overdramatic to pinpoint his spectacular winning header against West Brom at the back end of last season as a personal turning point – it’s not as if Alisson simply stopped being a world class goalkeeper within the space of a few months – but since the start of this season, continuing all the way through the campaign, he has been back to his imperious best.
Playing behind the likes of Virgil van Dijk, Joel Matip, Ibrahima Konate and Fabinho helps considerably, but Alisson recorded the highest clean sheet rate (55.6%) of any goalkeeper in the Premier League in 2021/22, narrowly ahead of his compatriot, Ederson (54.1%). His save percentage, meanwhile, was 75.3% – bettered only by Brentford’s David Raya (76.8%) and Wolves’ Jose Sa (79.3%). Whereas Raya and Sa both faced more than four shots on target per 90 minutes on average, Alisson faced just 2.69, which highlights the fact that despite having relatively little shot-stopping to do in comparison to most other sides, his unbreakable focus and concentration is what enables him to spring into action whenever required.
Drill a little deeper and you get an even more comprehensive sense of Alisson’s influence. In contrast to expected goals, which simply measures the value of any given shot resulting in a goal before the shot is taken, post-shot expected goals (PSxG) measures how likely a shot is to result in a goal after it has left a player’s foot (or other body part). It factors in all kinds of information, including the speed and trajectory of a shot, to give a best estimation of how likely it is to end up in the back of the net.
Unlike with xG, any shot that’s off target will automatically score zero on PSxG, because there’s no chance of it going in. A 30-yard screamer, on the other hand, might have a very low xG value (because most shots from that far out don’t go in), but a much higher PSxG value if it’s hit with venomous power and is headed directly towards the top corner.
It’s not an exact science, but it’s an extremely useful indicator of goalkeeping performance. If, over the course of a season, a goalkeeper ends up with a positive value for PSxG minus actual goals conceded, that indicates an above average ability to keep the ball out of the net. A negative value, meanwhile, indicates that the goalkeeper has conceded more than they should have done given the quality of the shots they faced.
Using this metric, Alisson ended up preventing 4.1 goals more than expected given the quality of the shots he faced in the Premier League, placing him joint-fourth out of all goalkeepers, level with Martin Dubravka, and behind Nick Pope (+4.4), David de Gea (+6.7) and Jose Sa (+9.2). Again, it’s worth taking into account that these goalkeepers play for much worse defences than Liverpool, so they are more regularly drawn into action. One of the hardest things for any goalkeeper is to stay fully concentrated when they have little to do for large chunks of a game, which makes Alisson’s numbers even more impressive.
For context, Ederson (-2.2), Edouard Mendy (-0.5), Hugo Lloris (-0.5) and Aaron Ramsdale (-4.6) all finished the season with negative values for PSxG minus actual goals conceded.
Interestingly, Alisson recorded the most defensive actions (i.e. a tackle, interception or header) outside of the penalty area per 90 minutes (1.75) out of all Premier League goalkeepers – and it’s this statistic that underlines just how integral he is to Liverpool’s entire system, in a way which cannot be said for most other goalkeepers. A massive part of the reason Liverpool are able to pen teams back in their own half and dominate games high up the pitch is because of their high line.
When opposition teams break in behind and score an offside goal, pundits will often lazily claim that Liverpool “got lucky” and were “saved” by the presence of VAR, when in reality, it’s a conscious, finely tuned strategy that they deploy better than any other team by an enormous margin. That’s demonstrated by the fact that Liverpool caught their opponents offside 144 times in the Premier League in 2021/22. The next highest was Man City, with 94.
Part of the reason Klopp is able to deploy such a high-risk, high-reward system which such confidence is because the back four, marshalled expertly by Van Dijk, is so well drilled in holding the line, and also because when teams do successfully break the offside trap, the likes of Van Dijk and Konate have the recovery pace to get back and deal with the situation.
It’s impossible to get it right every time, though, which is why Alisson is so integral.