Photo by Chloe Knott – Danehouse/Getty Images
No matter what they win this season, this is the one of the best Liverpool sides ever assembled.
Liverpool are coming off 97-point league season and Champions League triumph. They’re favourites along with Manchester City to take the Premier League and sit top of the table a month into the new campaign.
By any measure, they’re one of the best sides in Europe. Which is a long, long way from the side Jürgen Klopp took over when he arrived, and at times it can feel as though Liverpool fans still don’t quite believe how good a side this is.
But perhaps for them, a few words from Arsenal’s Dani Ceballos, who arrived in England from Real Madrid over the summer and has arguably been the Gunners’ best player so far this season, will help to drive it home.
“I’ve never seen anything like what I saw at Anfield,” Ceballos told The Guardian. “I haven’t seen a team that plays better, that presses like them, the way the fans carry them along. They take the air from you.
“You spend so much time defending and when you want to do something with the ball, when you want to breathe, they’re back on top of you. They’re very well-drilled. We’re working on some similar things—but Jürgen Klopp arrived at Liverpool in 2015.”
Well drilled, fitter than pretty much every side they come up against, and exceptionally talented from their world class attack to their Ballon d’Or favourite centre half to one of the top goalkeepers in world football.
That doesn’t mean they’ll win something big this season—the league or the Champions League again—given the competition they’re up against, but this is, at the very least, the best Liverpool side of the Premier League era.
“It’s only been four weeks so it’s hard to say what I really think yet,” Ceballos added, “but from what I’ve seen it’s the most competitive league in terms of quality and the physical side. It’s the league with the highest standard.”
