With Or Without You?

 

Everybody who loves and watches football will know the face, skill and madness of Luis Suarez. In light of his ‘third’ biting incident at the world cup, what now for the ‘flawed’ genius? 

Will Liverpool try to cash-in on a player they have stood by? He did repay that faith last season with sublime displays, that culminated in him scoring 31 league goals for the season and won him high praise, with many suggesting he had put his troubles behind him. However, all that hard work was wiped away in the 30 second period in the match against Italy, when his nasty streak surfaced again. He will miss the first 9 matches of the season for Liverpool; will Liverpool stick by him again? Just how important a player was he last season? And where would Liverpool have been without him? Let’s have a look.

For this article, I will just be looking at the impact of Luis Suarez’s goals. He has also provided countless assists for other players, even when he was not scoring, not to mention his work rate and movement which takes players away and leaves space for other players like Sturridge, Gerrard and Sterling to score. Also if Suarez was not playing, other players could have stepped into the void and replace him.

However, for simplicity I am only going to look at the impact of his goals. Suarez scored 31 goals for the season. Firstly let’s look at the impact on the points and the position Liverpool won have finished in.

As we can see, Liverpool finished 2nd in the league with 84 points. If we take away the key points winning goals, Liverpool would have finished 16 points lighter in 7th position with 68 points. The only consolation was they still would have finished above Man Utd.

Now lets look at when Suarez scored his goals in the season.

Interestingly, as we can see, Suarez scored 22, of his 31 goals in the first half of the season and only score 9 goals in the last 17 matches of the season.

If we look at his gpg average throughout the season and compare it to the second half of the season, you can see that his form deserted him and he only average 0.54 gpg in the second half of the season, still not a bad record. Did he have is eye on the World cup in the second half of the season.

Finally let us have a look at his record against the top four teams this season.

You can see it is not a good record, with only 1 goal in 7 games against Man Utd, Chelsea, Man City and Arsenal

So I think you can see that Suarez will be missed, world class players are hard to find. When Bale left Spurs, they struggled, however, in that situation spurs bought 7-8 players at once and hoped they would all gel, which they didn’t. Liverpool, have some other good players, and have just competed the signing of Lallana and Rickie Lambert, both very good players, but not world class. If Suarez goes to Barcelona and Liverpool can get Sanchez as part of the deal that would not be bad business. However, only time will tell whether Liverpool will be as successful without him. I actually think Liverpool will struggle next season to finish in the top four. Not just because of Suarez, but because of the limited size of the squad and because, Man Utd will not be as bad and Chelsea, Man City have both strengthened.