Are Liverpool now England’s most successful club? – The Briefing

Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football action.

This week we owe a debt of gratitude to Gary Neville for definitively settling the debate about the identity of the most successful club in England, despite the fact that Liverpool and Manchester United have now won 20 league titles apiece.

The other talking points include the absence of any jeopardy in the Premier League, after Ipswich Town’s relegation was confirmed along with Leicester City and Southampton, and what that means for the other 17 clubs who have never had it so easy.

We also take a look at the rise of Adam Wharton and why the Crystal Palace midfielder is likely to be doing much more than just training with England when Thomas Tuchel picks his next squad.

Are Liverpool now the most successful English football club?

“The accolade of the most successful club — today the debate is over. It’s Liverpool Football Club.”

With a smile on his face, Gary Neville had just described it as a “sobering day” as he looked ahead to the possibility, or formality as he correctly saw it, of Liverpool winning the Premier League at Anfield and clinching their 20th top-flight title to draw level with Manchester United, the club where he spent his entire playing career.

In an interview with NBC Sports, Neville was reminded that his former United manager Sir Alex Ferguson had once said that his greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool, the dominant force in English football throughout the 1980s, off their perch (the expletive in between ‘their’ and ‘perch’ was left out).

Neville nodded. “Manchester United worked very hard to get ahead of Liverpool and I suppose the accolade of the most successful club was maybe in debate because of the importance of the league title,” he said. “But after today it’s not in debate. Liverpool go level with United and they’ve got more European Cups.”

Naturally, everyone at Old Trafford will accept that’s the case too.

As if.

Social media was quickly doing its thing with those comments — United supporters pointed out that domestic trophies should be part of the equation too (good luck trying to establish whether the Community Shield counts or not in that argument), and that Liverpool had only won two Premier League titles compared to United’s 13 (surely the old First Division doesn’t count less than the Premier League, right?).

Either way, it’s clear that the debate is far from over in the eyes of many, even if the two most coveted trophies for any English club to win are, unquestionably, the Premier League title and the Champions League/European Cup (where Liverpool lead 6-3).

United winning the Europa League this season will get them a pass into the Champions League but, in Neville’s eyes, it won’t make a blind bit of difference to the way he defines success.

Rightly or wrongly, I can’t help but think that we need some sort of formula here that attaches a specific value to each piece of silverware — where’s our data team on a Sunday evening when we need them?

Does any of this matter, you might ask?

You bet it does. United went 26 years without winning a league title and spent another 20 trying to chip away at Liverpool’s lead, which was always a huge motivation for Neville and his team-mates.

“It would be massive for us to get to 19 before them and become the outright most successful team in England,” Neville said in 2010. By 2013, United were up to 20 league titles and Liverpool were in their slipstream. Now they’re all level again. Well, kind of.

Where’s the jeopardy in the Premier League?

For the first time in Premier League history the three relegation places are confirmed with four games to spare. Not only that but the three promoted clubs have been relegated for the second year running — something else that has never happened before.

All of which means the established Premier League teams are able to massively underperform without any fear of losing their top-flight status. Thirty points for Premier League survival is the old 40. In fact, that’s being generous — 27 points was enough to stay up last season and, unless Leicester or Ipswich do something over the coming weeks that’s completely out of keeping with anything we’ve seen from them so far, the survival total will be less than that this year (Southampton are so far adrift they aren’t even part of this conversation).

That doesn’t so much take the heat off the rest of the Premier League as give them a free pass. Appoint the wrong coach, play poorly, make bad decisions in the transfer market, and just write the season off and start again, safe in the knowledge that the margin for error, or in this case the chasm between the Premier League and Championship, is now so big that it doesn’t really matter.

Three teams were promoted and the same three went back down, including Ipswich Town (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

Winless in seven, West Ham United have taken three points out of a possible 21 and lost nine of their last 16 Premier League games, leaving them 17th in the table — ordinarily, a precarious position with four games remaining. But the gap between West Ham and Ipswich, the team below them, is 15 points — the same as between West Ham and Fulham in eighth place (or the gap between champions Liverpool and second-placed Arsenal at the top, now you mention it).

Where, in short, is the jeopardy in the Premier League now?

Some will say that this is nothing to worry about, that it’s just a strange occurrence in the last two seasons that will come and go, and that history tells us promoted teams can, and will, survive. That has happened many times in the past and also recently (Fulham, Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest won promotion in 2022, stayed up and have thrived since). But Ruud van Nistelrooy, the Leicester manager, highlighted an obvious problem that we have not experienced before.

“If now, for a couple of seasons, the 17 teams (remain), they are all going to invest massive amounts of money and get better on top of how good they are,” he said last week. “So it appears, then, that the gap will only get bigger.”

That, clearly, is not something that will concern those 17 teams in the slightest and, quite frankly, why should it?

For the Premier League, though it’s not exactly a good look for their product if the closest thing to the drama of Survival Sunday — Juninho weeping on the pitch at Elland Road, Kevin Campbell pouring champagne over the head of Bryan Robson at West Brom, or Raphinha celebrating in the away end with the Leeds United fans at Brentford — is teams applauding their supporters on a Saturday afternoon in April, with another 12 points (in some cases more) still to play for, knowing that their return to the Championship is signed, sealed and delivered.

Good luck to Leeds, Burnley and whoever else wins promotion this season when it comes to finding a solution.

Onwards and upwards for Adam Wharton?

The last England squad turned out to be bad timing for Adam Wharton. The next one, at the end of the season, almost certainly won’t be, provided the Crystal Palace midfielder stays fit.

Against Aston Villa in the FA Cup semi-final on Saturday, Wharton showed a wider audience something that Palace supporters have known for a while: they’ve got a star on their hands.

(Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

A calming presence in front of the Palace defence, Wharton passed intelligently — what a lovely ball to Eberechi Eze in the lead-up to the penalty — and, during a pivotal 15-minute spell in the second half, bullied Villa’s midfield with his aggressive pressing, picking off Youri Tielemans (twice), Morgan Rogers and Jacob Ramsey one after the other.

The disguised pass to Eze was superb and highlighted Wharton’s game intelligence. A poor clearance from Ezri Konsa dropped at Wharton’s feet about 25 yards from goal and time momentarily stood still.

“Wharton hasn’t scored this season,” Steve Wilson, the BBC TV commentator, said to a backdrop of cries of “Shoooooot!” from the Palace fans behind the goal at Wembley. Showing why it’s never a good idea to listen to us fans, Wharton shaped to shoot but instead expertly guided a perfectly-weighted pass into the path of Eze. How many players would have been able to pick that ball at that moment?

Although Jean-Philippe Mateta missed the penalty that followed, the Palace striker and Wharton combined to set up a goal for Ismaila Sarr moments later. Tielemans didn’t see Wharton coming when he tried to play a ball around the corner inside his own half. But Wharton saw Rogers’ pass to Tieleman’s coming — an example of how he reads the game so well.

If anything, you wonder whether Palace could get Wharton on the ball a bit more (remarkably, it was the 10th minute before he had his first touch against Villa), especially as he is so comfortable taking possession in tight spaces.

None of this should be news to Thomas Tuchel. The England manager watched Wharton in back-to-back matches across the end of February and the start of March before naming his first squad since replacing Gareth Southgate.

Wharton was excellent in those two Palace games but he had only just returned from four months on the sidelines following groin surgery, prompting Tuchel to invite him to train with the senior squad in March but play for the Under-21s.

Wharton has continued to go from strength to strength since and in a way that makes a second England cap — he made his debut under Southgate in June last year — feel inevitable.

“An excellent holding midfielder,” Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager, said earlier this month. “He was in the national team already. “The impact has been really good, coming from the Championship to the Premier League, brilliant left foot, a really good player.”

Perhaps that’s a sign that something else is inevitable too — and apologies for saying this Palace supporters — which is interest from bigger clubs.

For now, though, Wharton couldn’t look happier, which is testament to the Palace manager Oliver Glasner’s coaching and the exciting group of players around him.

It is also a feather in the cap for Palace’s recruitment team — the £22million ($29.4m) they paid Blackburn Rovers in January last year looks like a bargain and, at the same time, makes you wonder what other young talent there is out there in the lower divisions.

Coming up

• The highlight of the week promises to be the back-to-back Champions League semi-final first legs across Tuesday and Wednesday, with Arsenal and Declan Rice’s free-kicks taking on Paris Saint-Germain first, and a free-scoring Barcelona side facing the defensive discipline of Inter the following night.
• Thursday delivers an odd mix of Premier League, Europa League and Conference League fixtures. Nottingham Forest versus Brentford is the top-flight match — Nuno Espirito Santo’s team will be looking to bounce back from their FA Cup semi-final defeat by Manchester City, win their game in hand and reclaim third spot in the Premier League. In the Europa League, Spurs host Bodo/Glimt and Manchester United travel to Athletic Club, where, let’s be honest, absolutely anything could happen. As for Chelsea, they’re away against the Swedish side Djurgarden in the Conference League semi-final first leg — a competition they would like to win and never play in again.
• Friday night sees Premier League football return in the shape of Manchester City versus Wolves. That’s last season’s Premier League champions against the most in-form team in world football right now — that’s not strictly true, but Wolves have won six top-flight games on the spin for the first time since 1970, which is pretty impressive.
• Finally, we’ll throw it forward to Saturday afternoon just to ensure that the bonkers relegation battle at the bottom of the Championship gets the spotlight that it deserves. Unlike the Premier League relegation places, which were decided in August, the Championship is going to the final day, when five clubs (Stoke City, Derby County, Preston North End, Luton Town and Hull City) are in danger of joining Plymouth Argyle (all but mathematically down) and Cardiff City in League One next season.

(Top photos: Virgil van Dijk and Adam Wharton; Liverpool FC/Fantasista/Getty Images)

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