Jermaine Pennant has labelled Liverpool as ‘the best team in Europe’ at the moment after their scintillating start to the season.
Many pundits predicted during the summer that the Reds would suffer a post-Jurgen Klopp hangover and fall away from contending for major trophies, but instead Arne Slot’s team sit top of both the Premier League and the Champions League standings, with the Dutchman winning 14 of his first 16 games in charge.
The initial accusations of a comparatively easy fixture list prior to the October international break have since been dismissed by LFC winning five of their subsequent six matches against high-quality opposition, most of whom are competing at the business end of their domestic leagues.
Pennant calls Liverpool ‘the best team in Europe’
Speaking on talkSPORT, Pennant pointed to those impressive results as substantiation for his claim that Liverpool are superior to every other team in Europe right now.
The former Reds winger said: “I think they are probably one of the best teams in Europe at the moment. Stats don’t lie. The way they are playing, they have had a tough run of fixtures, Chelsea, Leipzig, Arsenal, Brighton, Leverkusen – who are the champions of the German league – and they have come out unscathed. You gotta say at the moment, they are the best team in Europe.”
The numbers back up Pennant’s claim
Slot might simultaneously be flattered by Pennant’s high praise for his team while also imploring him not to talk up Liverpool in such a grandiose manner at such an early stage in the season.
Across 14 Premier League and Champions League games, the Reds have 37 points, an average of 2.64 per match.
Compared to the current leaders of Europe’s other ‘big five’ leagues, Paris Saint-Germain have 30 points from the same number of matches (2.14 per game), Bayern Munich have 29 from 13 (2.23), Barcelona have 42 in 16 (2.62), and Napoli – who aren’t in European competition – lead Serie A with 25 points from 11 games (2.27).
On that basis, the 41-year-old’s claim stands to reason, with only Hansi Flick’s side coming close to the points-per-game haul that Slot’s Liverpool have accrued up to now.
Those numbers will be rendered insignificant if the Reds don’t go on to lift major silverware this season, but for the moment it contextualises just how brilliantly they’ve been doing under their new boss.
Stern tests lay in store between now and the New Year, but if LFC can come through that period still looking down on the rest of the Premier League and Champions League, they’ll have earned the right to set their sights as high as possible for the second half of the campaign.
