Can Liverpool win the Premier League without keeping clean sheets?

Ten games into the Premier League season, and Liverpool look good. Against Crystal Palace on Sunday they attacked in unpredictable, thrilling waves, overwhelming their opponents. They scored four and could have had more. Roberto Firmino achieved the rare trick of taking his shirt off in celebration before his chip had crossed the line. That win took them joint top of the league ...

... or, if you prefer, it put them third and no higher, thanks to their inferior goal difference. Ten games in, and Liverpool look like they cannot defend.

Jürgen Klopp isn’t having any criticism, asserting that he loses respect for anybody that questions Liverpool’s defensive efforts. But the bald numbers tend to argue with him: Liverpool have kept just one clean sheet in the league this season — fewer than Swansea, level with Hull — and that was against an offensively dysfunctional Manchester United side. Against Palace they conceded twice: the first thanks to a simple, hilarious brain fade on the part of Dejan Lovren.

The second came after Christian Benteke beat Joel Matip to a long ball forward, Wilfried Zaha got his cross past Alberto Moreno, and James McArthur nipped ahead of Lovren to nod home. That was the 13th goal Liverpool have conceded this season. Manchester City and Arsenal, their companions on 20 points, have shipped nine and 10, respectively.

In theory, a side absolutely can win the Premier League if that team can’t defend. They just have to score more goals, which seems simple enough. But in practice, it hasn’t happened that often. Since the Premier League crawled its bloody way out of the corpse of the Football League and set off to devour the world, most of its champions have ended the season with a pretty decent defensive record.

That’s not always for the best. There have been 11 champions with worse defensive records than those finishing just behind them, perhaps most notably Manchester United in 1998-99. They conceded 37 goals, a whopping 20 more than second-placed Arsenal. But generally speaking, only twice has the eventual champion ended the season conceding at an overall rate of more than once a game.

Liverpool are on course to concede 49.

Then there are the clean sheets. The fewest clean sheets ever mustered by a champion of the Premier League was Manchester United in 1999-00, while they were faffing around with Marc Bosnich and Massimo Taibi in goal. The record goes to Chelsea in Jose Mourinho’s first season: Petr Cech, John Terry, Ricardo Carvalho, and Claude Makelele kept all comers at bay a ridiculous 25 times. But generally, title winners muster around 16 or 17.

Liverpool are on course to manage four.

Clean sheets aren’t necessarily a perfect measure of good defending. Sometimes a defense is good but an attack is just better. Sometimes a defense is rubbish but an attack is worse. And sometimes peculiar things happen involving referees or beach balls. But while not all clean sheets are the direct consequence of good defending, and not all goals conceded are the result of bad, it’s probably the case that good defending tends to produce more clean sheets than bad.

That said, it would be irrational to expect all those clean sheets to arrive in a regular pattern, every other game or so. Clean sheets arrive in clumps, following form, the vagaries of the fixture list, and the fact that a football season offers an opportunity to solve problems and fix weaknesses. Think of Manchester United’s 1995-96 run-in, when they conceded in just three of their last 13 games, or Chelsea in 2004-05, breaking the league over their knee as they conceded just two goals in the whole of December, January, and February. And they both came in one game, away at Arsenal.

Or consider Leicester last season. Claudio Ranieri’s Great Entertainers conceded 25 goals in their first 18 games, then Claudio Ranieri’s Defensive Titans just 11 in the final 20. The former didn’t keep a clean sheet until their 10th game of the season. The latter kept 12 after Christmas.

While Klopp’s side seem unlikely to undergo the kind of fundamental realignment that Leicester managed, we can probably expect them to improve defensively, as Joel Matip and Lorius Karius establish themselves and get to know their new colleagues. And we can probably expect them to need to: Lovren’s maladroit stylings can be laughed away when there’s goals flying in at the other end, but generally speaking, goalscoring certainly isn’t as easy as Liverpool currently make it look.

If they keep rattling four in every game, they’ll win at a stylish and giddy canter. If they slow up a touch, or if Philippe Coutinho’s knee explodes, or anything else peculiar or unfortunate happens, they’ll likely need a little more resilience at the other end to compensate. Or maybe this is all just a case of unfinished business.

In 2013-14, Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool managed 10 clean sheets all season. Three came in their first three games. Then they abandoned defending and charged all the way to the brink of the title, picking up the other seven almost by accident. Had they managed just one more against Chelsea, they’d likely have smashed all the records going for leakiest champions. We can’t imagine Klopp will mind too much if he ended up with that crown. There’s no wrong way to win a title.