Mohamed Salah at It Again for Liverpool, and Boxing Day Bonanzas

By Opta Analyst | Created at 2024-12-24 15:34:28 | Updated at 2024-12-25 05:50:07 14 hours ago

Stat, Viz, Quiz is the Opta Analyst football newsletter. This week’s edition looks at Boxing Day goals, Mohamed Salah, and being top at Christmas.

The big day is almost here. Many look forward to it all year long, bringing families together and turning some into big kids again.

Yes, Boxing Day football will soon be upon us, and in this week’s SVQ we’ll look at goal numbers from Premier League fixtures that have taken place on 26 December in recent years.

We’ll also revisit an old favourite subject, talking about Mohamed Salah’s various achievements. The Liverpool star was excellent again on Sunday, and we have a goal map that shows just how proficient the former Roma man has been on Merseyside down the years.

We’ve recently released the 2024 Opta Analyst Quiz, which, if you haven’t played already, we can assure you is so much fun that it’ll have you laughing/crying/arguing with friends and family in no time at all. But if you fancy some bitesize trivia as a warm-up before tackling that, we have our weekly quiz here too, as well as a Christmassy Ask Opta question.

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, we hope you have a wonderful time, starting with consumption of the latest SVQ.

If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe below for free to receive SVQ every Tuesday.

STAT – Boxing Day Bonanzas

It wouldn’t be Christmas if we didn’t have the obligatory reference to Boxing Day 1963 when there were 66 goals across 10 games in the English First Division.

Apart from Leicester City’s 2-0 win over Everton and Sheffield Wednesday beating Bolton Wanderers 3-0, every other game in the top flight featured at least six goals that day, including an 8-2 win for Blackburn Rovers at West Ham and a 10-1 victory for Fulham against Ipswich Town.

As we suggested a couple of years ago, it has become trendy in recent times to hark back to that day as a sign that Boxing Day is chaos every year due to players being too full of turkey and joy to be bothered defending.

Then again, Tottenham 3-6 Liverpool on Sunday maybe points to it being a thing after all, albeit that wasn’t on Boxing Day, of course.

Is there anything in it? Well, we’ve looked back at the last few years in the Premier League.

There were 19 goals in five games on Boxing Day last season (3.8 per game), 25 in seven games the season before (3.6 per game), and a whopping 28 goals in just six games in 2021-22 (4.7 per game).

As you can see from the table below, the numbers have fluctuated a bit since 2014-15, but in the main we have been seeing more goals the day after Christmas than usual over the last decade.

Goals per Game Boxing Day since 2014-15 PL

The average goals per game in the Premier League ranged between 2.6 and 2.9 from 2014-15 to 2022-23, before a rise to 3.3 in 2023-24.

There are eight games to be played on Boxing Day this year, and we are seeing an average of 3.0 goals per game this season after 169 games. How many goals will we see on Thursday? Well, ‘tis the season for indulgence.

Don’t feel like you have to stretch yourself too much if you happen to be a Premier League goalkeeper. Have another Bailey’s (other Irish creams are available).

VIZ – Mo the Fourth Be With You

It’s that time of year when a bearded man dressed in red brings joy to millions… of Liverpool fans at least.

And like jolly old Saint Nick, Mohamed Salah continues to deliver.

The Egyptian was at the centre of Liverpool’s demolition of Tottenham on Sunday, coming away with two goals and two assists, becoming the first player in Premier League history to reach double figures for both goals and assists in a season before Christmas.

Salah has at least four more goal involvements (33) than anyone else from Europe’s top five leagues in all competitions this season, and already has 26 in the Premier League. He needs 19 more in Liverpool’s last 22 games to break the record for the most in a 38-game Premier League season, a record currently held by Thierry Henry and Erling Haaland, and 22 to beat Alan Shearer and Andrew Cole’s overall record (47), achieved in 42-game campaigns.

Arguably most impressively of all, though, Salah moved up to fourth in Liverpool’s all-time goalscorers list. His two goals took him to 229 and edged him ahead of legendary figure Billy Liddell (228), a man so integral to Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s that the team was colloquially known as ‘Liddellpool’.

Considering Salah arrived at Anfield in 2017 with a reputation of being a ‘Chelsea flop’, it is quite incredible that only Gordon Hodgson (241), Roger Hunt (285) and Ian Rush (346) now stand in front of him.

He is in the final year of his contract at Liverpool, so time may be running out for him to catch anyone else, though he is only 12 goals behind Hodgson.

Whatever the future holds for Mohamed Salah, he will go down as one of the best players in Liverpool’s history, and indeed, of the Premier League era.

And he’s not finished yet…

QUIZ – Brentford Beaten, Isak’s Treble, and Man Utd’s Set-Piece Struggles

Here’s a selection of questions powered by Opta facts. Get all of them right and we’ll ask your boss nicely if you can have an extra day off… well, no we won’t, but it should still be fun. Answers at the bottom of the page.

1. Brentford’s 2-0 home defeat to Nottingham Forest was their first loss at the Gtech Community Stadium this season. Who were the last team to beat them there?

2. Alexander Isak’s treble against Ipswich Town was just the second time a Swedish player has scored a Premier League hat-trick. Who else managed it?

3. Arsenal (W8 D2) are the first team to remain unbeaten in Premier League London derbies across a full calendar year since who did so in 2005?

4. Who are the only team to have conceded more goals from set-pieces (excl. pens) in the Premier League this season than Manchester United’s nine?

5. Mohamed Salah has both scored and assisted 10+ goals in the Premier League this season (15 goals, 11 assists). With just 16 games played, it is the joint-quickest in terms of appearances by a player to hit double figures for both in a single campaign in the competition, tied with who from the 2020-21 season?

Ask Opta

This week’s question comes from Sarah Tomkins, who asks: “Which team has been top of the Premier League on Christmas Day most often?”

Do you have a stats-based football question you want to Ask Opta? If so, send it to editors@theanalyst.com and we’ll do our best to provide you with the answer in a future edition of SVQ.

Answer:

Great question Sarah, and not just because we’ve already written something this week looking at teams who have been top on Christmas Day.

Liverpool will be top on 25 December this year, leading the Premier League by four points and with a game in hand on those below them.

Arsenal were top at Christmas last season, but of course it was Manchester City who lifted the Premier League title in May. In fact, the Gunners have never won the Premier League when they’ve been top at Christmas.

Manchester United and Liverpool have been top the most often in the Premier League era, being the Christmas number one on seven occasions each. That’s two ahead of Chelsea (five) and three ahead of Arsenal (four). Man City have only been top at Christmas three times, so their famous powers of recovery in the second half of campaigns have often come in handy.

In total, there have been 16 occasions where the team who were top on Christmas Day have gone on to win the Premier League title, meaning it happens 50% of the time on average. Liverpool will be hoping that becomes 17 this season.

Our Opta data hubs have detailed team and player stats, predictions, expected league tables and much more. Click below to start your own data investigations.

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Quiz Answers

1. Brentford’s 2-0 home defeat to Nottingham Forest was their first loss at the Gtech Community Stadium this season. Who were the last team to beat them there?

Newcastle United (4-2 on the last day of the 2023-24 season)

2. Alexander Isak’s treble against Ipswich Town was just the second time a Swedish player has scored a Premier League hat-trick. Who else managed it?

Freddie Ljungberg for Arsenal at Sunderland in May 2003

3. Arsenal (W8 D2) are the first team to remain unbeaten in Premier League London derbies across a full calendar year since who did so in 2005?

Chelsea

4. Who are the only team to have conceded more goals from set-pieces (excl. pens) in the Premier League this season than Manchester United’s nine?

Wolves (16)

Harry Kane