Premier League leaders Liverpool are doing something rather strange with their midfield, and it’s helping them deceive man-marking teams. Arne Slot uses a system similar to that of his predecessor, Jürgen Klopp, but the way he uses his players suits them better.

Liverpool have an awful lot of central midfielders who want to play in a box-to-box role. None of them are holding midfielders, and none of them are strictly attacking midfielders by trade. Curtis Jones and Alexis Mac Allister have played higher up in previous years, but both have real individual qualities in receiving the ball from the defence and dictating the tempo of games. Ryan Gravenberch is what mid-2000s football might have dubbed a ‘destroyer’, but that doesn’t make him a holding midfielder.

So what has Arne Slot done? He starts the build-up phase with a flat midfield — including an inverted Trent Alexander-Arnold. For the 3-box-3 shape Liverpool are trying to play, it seems rather counter-productive to eliminate all staggering from the midfield box and replace it with a line of four.

However, remembering that this is just their starting shape is the key. A lot of teams like to man-mark Liverpool these days because their ability to overload teams is often frightening. When attacking against a man-marking pressing team, Liverpool’s aim is simple: disrupt the opposition shape. They want to take opposing players into unfamiliar positions to create space elsewhere.

As most of Slot’s midfielders have similar skill sets on the ball, any of them can drop deep to receive a pass — which is confusing enough. As soon as this happens, other members of the midfield four will flee the area, leaving space for either the striker to receive a direct forward pass or for someone else to.

Dragging their markers with them wherever they go, Liverpool — in a matter of seconds — can create the kind of situation illustrated below. Suddenly we see their box, and the opposition can’t prepare a suitable man-marking structure because any one of Liverpool’s midfielders can initiate the move to begin with.

By the time the pass is made, and Liverpool have exploited the space, the defending team find themselves in a totally incoherent shape, vulnerable to Liverpool’s dangerous 1v1 quality out wide.