It's that time of year again when pundits make their predictions...and Liverpool outrage follows. Many of them seem to have a knack for overlooking the Reds, and none more so than Gary Neville: it's high time we just ignored him .
You would think, as a Champions League finalist in three of the last seven seasons and the most recent Premier League winner not named Manchester City , that Liverpool would feature high in the thoughts of anyone making their forecasts for the new campaign. It's not as though last season offered any major warning signs, with the Reds in a quadruple hunt until deep into the new year.
Admittedly, Arne Slot has replaced Jurgen Klopp , and that brings with it a certain amount of uncertainty. But Liverpool ended last season with a 14-point cushion over fourth, so any catastrophizing in terms of league position rests on the premise of a pretty dramatic decline.
Yet here we are. Not only has Neville favored Manchester United in his picks for the top four, he's suggested that Liverpool could even finish outside the top six .
Such is the strength of the division, it's not entirely beyond the realms of possibility. Chelsea, Newcastle, and, yes, Manchester United, will all expect to have much better campaigns, and they all have the budgets that means they should be able to make that improvement happen.
It's just that given his track record, Neville's opinion is worthless. Right or wrong, he has lost credibility when it comes to Liverpool. Famously, he claimed in the summer of 2019 that Manchester United would win the Premier League again before Liverpool claimed the elusive prize. A year later, Klopp's men were champions of England, while the wait at Old Trafford goes on to this day.
But did Liverpool earn Neville's respect with this success? Not for very long — by 2021, he was once again predicting that Manchester United would finish ahead , with the Reds just barely scraping into the top four.
What did Liverpool do? It took the title to the very last day, reaching the Champions League final for good measure. Manchester United finished sixth, 34 points off the pace.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Neville managed to predict in 2022 that Liverpool would "dip slightly" . But the negativity did not pay dividends the following year, when he once again made the mistake of tipping Manchester United to have the better campaign .
That brings us up to the present day, where we can conclude with a high level of confidence that Neville simply cannot look past his Manchester United ties. Whether its overrating his old side or putting down the old foe, objectivity is nowhere to be found.
Of course, here at Liverpool.com, we're proudly susceptible to the opposite bias. But we won't waste our energy fretting about what Neville has to say, when his predictions have been so demonstrably wide of the mark — they might be dressed up as punditry, but they are the comments of a fan who hates nothing more than seeing Liverpool succeed.
Most Popular
Comments / 0