A lot has been made of Rodgers comments about 5th being about par for us this season. I haven't seen the comments yet, but what I have seen is a number of RAWKites gnashing and wailing about "lack of ambition" and "Hodgsonification" etc. On the flip side, we have other posters who point out that there is a strong correlation between wages and league position, and that 5th - if we finish there - is about all we should be expecting and anything else is a bonus. However, there is a degree of subjectivity there in both arguments. Is there an objective way to look at our output to determine our table position, or is Rodgers talking a lot of poppycock? I would say that if we look at one true measure of performance, then we could say that he was not wrong in his assessment (however inadvisable it might have been to say it out loud).
There is one cast iron, no-money-back guarantee way of showing metrics over the course of a league programme. For better or worse, goals for and goals against tell a story that needs more depth, for sure, but which - on the surface - can say a lot about a team's performance in the league. There is a correlation between goals scored and points gained at the end of the season. Have a look at the tables for the last 10 years (or maybe even longer). You can see that the more goals you score, the more points you get (sounds obvious). What's more interesting is that often there is a near 1:1 correlation. It's not a strong correlation, by any means, but it does demonstrate that the best teams score the most goals, and the weakest teams score the least. There are occasional outliers to this, but mostly, it stands up to (minor) scrutiny. Similarly, 80% of the time, the league winners are also the top scorers, while the best defenders are sometimes as low as 4th. So goals make the game, generally, and the more you score, the more you win and the higher you place.
On top of that, scoring highly as a team usually means you have one good goalscorer who at least gets into double figures. Generally, a good standard for a goalscorer, over a 38-game league season, would be 15+ goals (a goal ever 2.5 games). So any time you have a player scoring 15+ goals, you should do well. If your defence is terrible though (and I mean relegation terrible, not how some people perceive Liverpool's defence under Rodgers), it won't matter. If your defence is in any way average or better, though, you should be at least mid-table or higher. But to finish higher, not only do you need a decent defensive record, but also a good scoring record. The more goals, the higher the finish, for all intents and purposes.
So it stands to reason that for a single team, the better their main goalscorer, the better the league performance (all other elements being accounted for as being reasonably efficient to very efficient). If a team has a goalscorer who has scored 15+ goals, they should finish relatively well, right? In Liverpool's case, that appears to be true for the most part.
If we look at the image below, we can see for the past 15 seasons (plus this season to date) how our league position and our top goalscorers total have some correlation:
If we apply the "Par" analogy, we can see that most of the seasons where we've had a 15+ goals per season striker, we have finished in the top four, save for three seasons, where we didn't (02-03, 09-10, 12-13). That's 3 out of 16 seasons. So in those seasons, we can say we finished under-par for our goalscorers output. That's 18.75% of the time, where we have underperformed against our goalscorers output. Similarly, we can also see that 4 seasons out of 16 (to date), we have finished outside of the top four when we have not had a 15+ goals per season league scorer. On the other hand, there are 6 seasons where we had a 15+ league goalscorer, and finished in the top four. So it can be said that for those 10 seasons in total, we "played to par" according to the number of goals our top goalscorer. So that means that we play to par 62.5% of the time - our top scorer scores 15+ goals, we finish in the top four. If our top scorer scores less than 15 goals, we don't finish in the top four. 62.5% of the time, this is the case.
For the times that we have had a league top scorer who has scored LESS than 15 goals, and we've STILL finished in the top four, we can see that this has only happened 18.75% of the time. That's a low number of times for that to occur. And yet it is the standard to which Rodgers is being held this season. He is expected to do better than we have done in the last 16 years, with a 20 year old goalscorer who is only on 7 goals with 6 games to go. To expect more from this team, with those numbers, is to say you expect Rodgers and the players to better than we have done in only 18-19% of the time in the last 16 seasons. That's a heavy burden to carry. If we look at the ages of the top goalscorers, with the exception of the naturally gifted and outstanding talent that was a young Michael Owen, the average age of our top goalscorer is 26 years old. We know, for sure, that Sterling is not a natural finisher. If he was, he would have a good few more goals by now (and we might very well be higher in the table for them). So we can't hold him to the goalscoring standard of Owen. So the question is - why are we expecting a young, 20-year old non-natural goalscorer, supplied by a 21-22 year old creator who is also not a natural scorer, to prop up our attack and score the number of goals needed to push us into the top four? And we do have to rely on him to spearhead the attack, because our marquee forward signing of the summer just isn't efficient, and the other alternatives are either old and slow or fast and hard working but also not a natural scorer (or a good one in open play, in any case). So why are we applying a tough standard to a manager, a player, and an attack that is actually playing to par, if not above par? We don't have (most likely) a 15+ goalscorer this season. So are we really expecting Rodgers to buck a 16 year trend and finish in the top four with a 20 year old attacker who will probably finish on about 10-12 goals (unless he hits a really hot streak), supplied by a 22 year old playmaker? If we look at where we are, goalscoring-wise, I think it's quite clear to see exactly why Rodgers said we are "about where we expect to be", given the lack of firepower up front. It is also reason enough to give him at least one more season, with proper goalscorers to see if he follows the trend and does what has happened nearly 70% of the time in the last 16 seasons - finish fourth or higher, with goalscorers capable of putting 15 goals or more into the back of the net. Until we have that, it's really not a simple thing to judge where we should be in the table, and it is to Rodgers and the team's credit that we are even in with a shout of top four this late-on, under the circumstances.