After winning the Premier League title in the 2024/25 season, Liverpool joined Manchester United as the joint record holders for the most top-flight titles in English football. The Reds won their first-ever championship way back in 1900/01, which was only their ninth season since forming in 1892. Their 2024/25 win was their 20th, and Reds fans will be hoping for plenty more in the years to come.
Liverpool haven’t always excelled, however. And in this article, we’ll take a look back at the seasons in which the Anfield outfit have failed to live up to their sky-high standards. We’ll start with their poorest performances in the Premier League era (that is, from the 1992/93 season to the present). And then we’ll cast our gaze back to the dark and hazy days before the Premier League was born, when the top flight was simply dubbed “Division One”.
Liverpool’s Worst Premier League Finishes
Liverpool won titles for fun during the 1970s and 1980s, winning the top division 11 times between 1972/73 and 1989/90, and only finishing outside of the top two places once during that period. So when the Premier League supplanted Division One as the top division in the land, most people assumed Liverpool would continue winning titles aplenty. It didn’t quite work out like that, of course. In fact, Liverpool had to wait until the pandemic-affected 2019/20 season for their first Premier League crown. The rise and then dominance of Manchester United played a big part in this. As did, to a lesser extent, the success of Arsenal and Chelsea, and then (more recently) Manchester City. But still, only two of Liverpool’s 20 top-flight titles have come in the Premier League.
On the flip side, the Reds have never had a complete disaster of a season in the EPL. The lowest they’ve finished has been eighth, which has happened on three occasions: 2015/16, 2011/12, and 1993/94, although we’ll ignore that last one as the Premier League contained 22 teams back then instead of the 20 it has housed since the 1995/96 campaign. So let’s see what went wrong for the Reds in their two worst Premier League seasons.
2011/12 – King Kenny Can’t Rekindle Glory Days
| Position | P | W | D | L | GF | GA | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8th | 38 | 14 | 10 | 14 | 47 | 40 | 52 |
Kenny Dalglish won just about everything there is to win with Liverpool, both as a player and a manager (and a fair bit as a player-manager!). But his second stint as Liverpool boss began when he replaced Roy Hodgson in January 2011 to become caretaker boss. After steadying the Anfield ship, King Kenny was given the job on a permanent basis and led the Reds to their first major trophy in six years… if you count the League Cup as a major trophy, that is.
Dalglish had some fine players in his squad, not least the unpredictable but brilliant Luis Suarez, a fast-improving Raheem Sterling and captain fantastic Steven Gerrard. But the side lacked consistency and they stumbled to their eighth-place finish, a whopping 37 adrift of champions Manchester City. To rub salt in the wound, Merseyside rivals Everton finished above them in seventh! Dalglish led the Reds to the FA Cup final, but they lost to Chelsea, and the club legend was shown the door (although he was given a non-executive director position at the club a few months later and has since had a stand named after him).
2015/16 – Klopp’s Appointment Brings in New Era
| Position | P | W | D | L | GF | GA | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8th | 38 | 16 | 12 | 10 | 63 | 50 | 60 |
After a poor start to the season, Brendan Rodgers was sacked in early October to be replaced by the former Borussia Dortmund boss Jürgen Klopp. It proved a masterful appointment that would eventually bring the club their sought-after Premier League title, along with an FA Cup, two League Cups and the Champions League, among other silverware. But Klopp’s first season at the helm was far from perfect as his side finished eighth, with West Ham and Southampton ending higher!
It was a strange campaign for many top-flight clubs, with Leicester City making a mockery of the bookies’ odds to win their first-ever top-flight title. Many of the usual contenders failed to mount serious challenges as the Foxes stormed to the title, and Liverpool were never in the hunt, finishing 21 points off the pace. Luckily for Reds fans, the club decided not to make a rash decision and stuck with Klopp… a wise choice in hindsight.
Liverpool’s Worst Finishes in the Pre-Premier League Era
When we look back to before the Premier League changed English football (for better or worse, depending on your perspective), there are clearly more seasons to examine. The Reds spent several periods in the second tier, but here are the top-flight seasons that stand out for the wrong reasons.
1953/54 – 22nd Place and Relegated to Division Two
| Position | P | W | D | L | GF | GA | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22nd | 42 | 9 | 10 | 23 | 68 | 97 | 28 |
Liverpool had won the Division One title just a few years earlier (in 1946/47), but they had failed to get close in the subsequent seasons. And in 1953/54, things reached disastrous proportions as Don Welsh’s Liverpool finished rock bottom of the division, earning just 29 points from their 42 games (although that figure isn’t as appalling as it sounds given it was only two points for a win back then).
A run of five consecutive defeats from late August to mid-September did plenty of damage, and a run of 14 games without a win from 12th December 1953 to 20th March 1954 basically sealed their fate. A late-season rally of four wins from their last seven games wasn’t enough to save the Reds, and they spent the next eight seasons in the second tier. Since gaining promotion to the top division at the end of the 1961/62 campaign, Liverpool have never finished lower than eighth place, so on some level, perhaps that relegation was the making of them.
1935/36 – 19th Place but Safe from Relegation
| Position | P | W | D | L | GF | GA | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19th | 42 | 13 | 12 | 17 | 60 | 64 | 38 |
George Patterson was the man in the dugout for Liverpool between 1928 and 1936, which was a real lean spell for the club in terms of silverware. They won absolutely nothing during that period and were essentially hovering around mid-table in Division One without challenging, as the likes of near neighbours Everton (buoyed by the prolific scoring exploits of the legendary Dixie Dean) and Arsenal enjoyed success.
In the 1935/36 campaign, it was Sunderland who won the title, their sixth and – so far – last, while Liverpool were way off the pace and were lucky to avoid relegation as Sheffield Wednesday and Aston Villa finished below them (although only Villa were relegated).
1903/04 – 17th Place and Relegated to Division Two
| Position | P | W | D | L | GF | GA | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17th | 34 | 9 | 8 | 17 | 49 | 62 | 26 |
Having won their first top-flight title in 1900/01, this season was a real fall from grace for Liverpool. With only 18 sides in the top tier at that stage, the Reds mustered only nine wins from 34 games to end the campaign in 17th to get relegated alongside 18th-place West Bromwich Albion.
Early club legend Tom Watson was at the helm at the time, and in the days before trigger-happy chairmen, he was given the chance to get the side back to the top table. He managed that at the first time of asking, before leading the Reds to their second top-flight title the following season. Maybe patience is a virtue after all?