The Liverpool Offside’s 2018-19 Premier League Predictions, Revisited

All the way back in August of 2018, we put our heads together to tell you how we thought the 2018-19 season would progress. With the Premier League and League Cup wrapped up—and nobody much expecting anything but a Manchester City victory in the FA Cup—we wanted to take a quick look back at how our predictions compared to reality.

Nine Liverpool Offside writers set out their predictions, and all picked Manchester City and Liverpool to finish top two. Five, the realists, picked City. Four picked Liverpool. Score one for the realists, by the narrowest of margins. Still, it’s interesting that, while acknowledging our Liverpool bias, the belief at TLO towers was that the Reds would run City very close.

After the top two, our predictions got a little messy. Which given how the slap-fight for the top four played out seems fitting. We all agreed City and Liverpool were best. After that, well, who really knows. Three of us—Steph, Grace, and Kevin—picked Spurs and Chelsea to round things out and six had Spurs in the top four. Five had Chelsea.

On the flip side, and in a lesson that sometimes it pays to go with your heart, Audun, Tito, and Mark all put Manchester United in their top four. But Steph, AJ, Grace, and Matt all correctly predicted they would come in sixth. Noel’s cheeky suggestion that Everton would beat them to that spot didn’t quite pan out, but there’s always next year.

In retrospect, it appears the wisdom of the collective worked pretty well. At least for predicting the top six—while Wolves, with two people picking them for the top eight, just missed out on the TLO table to West Ham, who were chosen by three.

In other season predictions, Steph, Noel, AJ, Audun, Grace, and Matt all picked Mohamed Salah to retain the Golden Boot—which he did, sharing it Sadio Mané and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Tito and Kevin, on the other hand, stumped for England Hero Harry Kane, which is unfortunate if explicable. Mark, though—who also had United in his top four—picked Romelu Lukaku. What the hell, Mark?

For the Cups, only one of our writers thought City would win the League Cup and only one thought they would win the FA Cup. One—the only one who had Liverpool making the final—picked Liverpool to put right last year’s disappointment in the Champions League. Let’s hope that, when it’s all said and done, they will have got that one right.

And finally, on the relegation side of the ledger, we picked Cardiff, Southampton, and Watford as the three most likely to go down with Huddersfield and Brighton just barely surviving. Given Cardiff, Southampton, Huddersfield, and Brighton finished bottom five that’s not bad—but we really whiffed on Watford, who finished 11th, and only one of us thought Fulham would be as bad as they were.