Arsenal's Anfield curse meets a Liverpool defence built on clean sheets
Opta's pre-match numbers frame Sunday's meeting at Anfield as a collision between Arsenal's worst away ground and a Liverpool side built on defensive solidity rather than the goals this fixture used to guarantee.
Arsenal have won 299 Premier League away games, a tally that would make them only the second club to reach 300 after Manchester United's 328, according to Opta's pre-match data for Sunday's meeting with Liverpool at Anfield.
None of that history travels well to Merseyside. Among grounds Arsenal have visited ten or more times, Anfield produces their lowest win rate anywhere: 18%, having won just six of 34 Premier League visits there, Opta's figures show.
A win rate like that measures outcomes, not performance quality, but repeated across 34 matches it stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a structural problem against this specific opponent.
Arsenal have not won away to Liverpool in the league since a 2-0 victory in 2012-13, a run of 13 games without a win (five draws, eight defeats), per Opta.
A fixture that used to guarantee goals
For almost a decade, this fixture was reliably open. Every one of the 19 Premier League meetings between the clubs from January 2016 to May 2025 produced at least two goals, a combined 78 across those games, an average of 4.1 per match, Opta's figures show.
Last season broke that pattern completely. Across both league meetings in 2025-26, only a single goal was scored, and Liverpool were the only side all season to stop Arsenal scoring altogether, according to Opta.
That collapse in scoring fits a wider defensive trend at Anfield. No Premier League side has recorded more clean sheets since the start of September than Liverpool, who have kept four in six games, Opta reports, just one shy of the five they managed across their opening 22 games of the year.
A clean sheet only measures whether the opposition scored, not how many good chances they had or how dangerous their build-up looked, which is where expected goals and passing-network data become useful supplements rather than headline numbers.
Expected goals assesses the quality of each shot a team concedes or creates, independent of whether it actually went in, while a passing network maps how often players combine and where, exposing which zones a team controls and which it cedes.
If Liverpool's recent clean sheets reflect a genuinely compact, low-block defensive structure rather than simply favourable finishing variance in front of them, those underlying numbers should confirm it; if the sheets owe more to fortune, the shot quality data would be expected to tell a less flattering story.
Arsenal arrive having gone into this game second in the table, and Liverpool have recently beaten Brentford, who started their meeting fourth, and Brighton, who started third, Opta notes, a sequence that points to a team capable of breaking down organised, higher-placed opposition rather than relying purely on transition moments against weaker sides.
The ghosts of 1989 still shape this fixture
Arsenal's current 13-game winless run away at Anfield is not unprecedented. They previously went 13 without an away win against Liverpool between 1975-76 and 1987-88, a drought ended by their famous 2-0 victory there on the final day of the 1988-89 season, which won them the title, per Opta.
That night produced one of English football's defining images, and it also produced one of the rare individual links between these two clubs. Michael Thomas scored the decisive goal for Arsenal that evening before later crossing to Liverpool in 1991, Planet Football notes, though his move predates the Premier League era and so falls outside the six players who have appeared for both clubs top-flight since 1992.
That crossover history is a reminder of how tightly bound these two clubs' fortunes have been at key moments, even as the shape of the fixture itself has shifted from a goal glut to a defensive standoff.
Fine margins define Liverpool's unbeaten league campaign
Liverpool have lost only once in the league this season, but the Guardian's live coverage frames that record as more fragile than it looks on paper.
They needed a penalty in the ninth minute of stoppage time to salvage a point at Newcastle on the opening weekend, benefited from Brentford having two players sent off in a separate match, and were nearly eliminated from the League Cup in midweek when Emmanuel Emegha missed a penalty that would have put Chelsea through instead, according to the Guardian.
None of those moments are tactical in themselves, but together they suggest Liverpool's underlying control of matches has not always matched their results, which makes the clean sheet data and Arsenal's long away-day struggles at Anfield the more telling measures heading into Sunday's meeting at 4.30pm.