Just how good are FA Cup semi-finalists Manchester City and Liverpool?

I was born three days after the first games of the 1959-60 season. So this is the 63rd season of my lifetime. I can recall more than 50 English champions with varying clarity. Manchester City and Liverpool over the last few seasons, I feel, have been the best English teams I have seen.

On Sunday they drew 2-2 in the Premier League. It was a game of the highest quality. Tomorrow they will play in an FA Cup semi-final. They could meet again on the last day of the season in the Champions League final.

In the Premier League this season City lead Liverpool by one point with seven games to go. Over what is now almost four seasons – since the start of 2018-19 – they are separated only by that solitary point.

One of the two, almost certainly, will win the Premier League this season. Whoever comes out on top tomorrow will be favourites to win the FA Cup. And they are first and second in the betting for the Champions League.

I am not the only one who feels these two are on a different level.

Standards in sport tend to rise over time. Athletes become fitter and more skilful. Sports science improves, sports analysis develops.

The first in-depth statistics on English football were collected in the 1950s. Then in the top division about a half of all passes went astray. Now in the Premier League only one pass in five goes astray.

There are probably a lot of what we might call ordinary teams of today who could regularly beat the best teams of years gone by. But we cannot be sure. Football is not like running, throwing or jumping. Results are not measured in time, distance or height.

Roger Bannister was the first athlete to run a mile in under four minutes. He did that at Iffley Road, Oxford, on May 6, 1954. As a teenager I ran in a mile race on the same track. It took me a lot longer than four minutes. More than 1,600 other athletes, though, have now run a mile in under four minutes. Nearly all them have run faster than Bannister did. They are quicker than he was. Are they greater than he was?

Perhaps a fairer way to compare sports people from different eras is by considering how much better they were than others in their own era.

The number of points a football team gain in a season is one way of relating them to others who are supposed to be at the same level. The four highest totals in the top division of English football were achieved in recent seasons by City and Liverpool – 100 by City in 2017-18 when they were champions, 99 by Liverpool in 2019-20 when they were champions, 98 by City in 2018-19 when they were champions, and 97 by Liverpool in the same season when they were runners-up.

The next highest total was 95 by Chelsea in 2004-05. That was manager Jose Mourinho’s first Premier League title. That Chelsea team could be ruthlessly efficient. For neutrals they were not fun to watch. Pep Guardiola’s City and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool are.

City, Liverpool and Chelsea in those seasons played 38 games, as they will this season. There have been times in the top division of English football when teams played different numbers of games and points were awarded on a different basis. Let us pretend that points were always awarded on the basis they are now – three for a win, one for a draw, none for a defeat – and let us calculate a points per game figure for each team in every season. This is one way of accounting for those differences.

Four of the five highest figures are for the performances of City and Liverpool in the seasons just mentioned. They range from 2.55 up to 2.63 points per game. The highest figure of all, though, is 2.64 by Preston in 1888-89, the first season of the Football League when they became the first Invincibles and completed the first League and FA Cup double. Preston played 22 League games, won 18, drew four and lost none. They scored 74 goals and conceded 15.

In a book called Champions All! Tony Brown wrote: “Just as Premier League teams raid Europe and Africa these days for outstanding talent, English clubs went north of the border for players in the late 1880s. Preston were one of the first.” Eight of Preston’s regular 11 were Scottish.

Neither City nor Liverpool this season will finish with numbers as good as they posted in some previous seasons. Even if they win all of their remaining Premier League games City will reach ‘only’ 95 points and Liverpool ‘only’ 94, which would translate to 2.50 and 2.47 points per game. Let us look at them in another different way, though. At their absolute best City and Liverpool scored about 80 per cent of the goals in their Premier League games. This season both have scored 78 per cent.

Any way I look at them, on the page or on the pitch, my eyes tell me the same thing. Over several seasons City and Liverpool have been the best English teams I have seen.

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