2024/25 mid-season review: FC Slovan Liberec

Tomas Danicek
7 min readJan 21, 2025

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source: fcslovanliberec.cz

It’s time to get used to Slovan Liberec never having a balanced narrative surround them ever again. For a long while, this had been a Baník Ostrava privilege; now that they have firmly established themselves as a Top 4 side, they are too boring for this sort of a thing, and so here we are. It has a lot to do with Ondřej Kania, but not in the way you think it does. Yes, he’s an owner that’s willing to go to the extreme himself, for better and worse, but whatever your take on his individual steps is, you gotta admit he — and by extension, his club — is far from boring. Thus, reporting on it in a balanced way would literally be a waste of time from media’s standpoint.

The outlook

The perex is my laboured way of saying: relax, it’s not been that bad. Yes, the Jablonec collapse was historically bad, more so it happened U Nisy. But guess what, the 3-3-4 start to the season was hardly that. Liberec had a 4-2-4 record after the opening 10 rounds of 2020/21; ultimately landing in the Top 6. They had less points (11) and the exact same goal difference of minus-1 to kick-off the first Covid-disrupted season; ending up as a borderline Top 4 outfit. Their 3-4-3 start to the 2012/13 campaign would turn into a Top 3 finish. And do you remember everyone screaming “fire Kozel” following his point-per-game opening of the last campaign (2-4-4)? Yeah, me neither. Yet for this Slovan… that was apparently it. They were doomed. Destined to fail. They had nothing going for them, other than maybe dropping from an average age of 25.8 years to 24.0 (youngest around) as a valid excuse.

All this isn’t to suggest Liberec haven’t underwhelmed. The model has rightly soured on them, dropping them four places and seeing them more likely to land inside the relegation group than the championship one. Fans have soured on their own team, too, at least by way of tempering their expectations fuelled by the scorching summer. As for myself, scroll a bit…

But the funny thing is, Slovan earned as many points inside those 10 rounds as they did in the following 9 — twelve. And you know what the bottom line is? That’s an OK pace for a club in transition, which Slovan no doubt is.

If they merely sustained it for the rest of the regular season, they’d finish on 38 points — good enough for 7th and not far off Top 6 last year. Like Kozel’s team was then. Either way, it doesn’t matter all that much. The mantra has always been “trust the process”, with the ambitious owner himself preaching patience by projecting this roster to peak in “two, perhaps three years”. With Jan Knapík, Lukáš Mašek and Vojtěch Stránský locked in for 2025/26, the second phase is already off to an inspired start.

The big question

Can the underlying numbers shine through and beat the bad vibes to the ground?

To be clear, by “bad vibes” I don’t mean the Slovan+ affair or anything like that. I mean the bad vibes that had already characterized Luboš Kozel’s tenure. The peculiar habit of looking like convinced world beaters one day — winning by at least three goals on five separate matchdays — only to let everyone forget about it the next day — with those five matchdays followed by three goalless losses (including The Derby ©) and two low-scoring draws with bottom three sides (including SK Dynamo České Budějovice). You probably won’t be surprised when I tell you Liberec have yet to win a back-to-back game this season, and that Kováč has only done it once since the start of 23/24. Lacklustre displays have followed him as much as Slovan.

This sort of a trouble is — seemingly overwhelmingly and undisputably — confirmed by both the eye test and the underlying numbers, as Slovan allowed Dynamo to enjoy only their second positive xG performance of the season, to soon get outshot (12:14) and largely outplayed by Pardubice.

But those are, once again, only the most stark cases — and seasons are famously not made of extremes. On balance, only 4 non-Pardubice outfits managed to outshoot Liberec. Per average win probability, Slovan were actually the 5th most consistent team. They fell at least 1 expected point short on seven occasions; getting compensated by only a pair of ‘lucky’ matchups. That’s the thing about the #narrative; those it-wasn’t-to-be or must-win afternoons become the overlooked standard, whereas the flashy outliers — and they’re outliers — get forever etched in our collective memory.

It’s called confirmation bias.

Now it’s up to Kováč et co. to let the underlying numbers that see a Top 5 candidate across the board do the talking, while the bad vibes slowly vaporize. More intensity off the ball would go a long way in achieving that.

raw data source: wyscout.com

The wild card

An actual top flight centre forward coming on board eventually… right?

Much of my pre-season excitement about Liberec had something to do with Luka Kulenović, a complete striker who spent most of 23/24 feeding off the strongest opposition and was now poised to destroy the lowly peasants, too. Heck, we even floated the idea of him snatching the top scorer crown in a pre-season Football Club podcast. Instead, he’s the top dog on a different team in a better league, with Slovan pouncing oh-too-willingly on a fair bid.

With no external replacement scouted/available, no internal solution waiting in the wings and Ľubomír Tupta floundering the entire autumn, Liberec effectively spent the entire fall striker-less. Sure, Kováč did get some incredibly valuable strikes from Lukáš Letenay, Benjamin Nyarko and Michael Rabušic — five of them, in fact — but the reality is… these are all borderline no. 3 options. None of them should be even close to a number 1.

Looking for a reason why Hlavatý-powered Slovan are unable to build through the middle— his noted specialty — for anything more than the 11th-ranked xGF? Look no further. Looking for a reason why Slovan are now cracking the opponent’s penalty area with the second lowest success rate, down by over 8 per cent from the previous campaign when they were second most efficient? Well, did you compare Kulenović’s hold-up play to whatever this was up top? Kulenović alone completed 33 passes or crosses in/to the box, whereas Tupta, Nyarko and Letenay have combined for 34 thus far. And those numbers are far from doing his off-the-ball movement full justice.

Whether Daniel Fila could come in and immediately elevate Slovan’s game is not up for a debate. Why Liberec have yet to sign him is a much more valid question. The longer the wait drags on, the less confident I will be in Kováč’s ability to turn this season around. The coach can only do so much.

source: irozhlas.cz

MVP race

Pole position: Michal Hlavatý — 728,4 pts — ranked 18th league-wide
Prominent chaser: Hugo Jan Bačkovský — 614,9 pts — ranked 24th

I was very resolute with specifically two of my pre-season Liberec player-related predictions, going 50-50. I was convinced Denis Halinský would prove to be the best loanee Slovan fans have ever witnessed, which… didn’t quite hit. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine a way how the Michal Hlavatý transfer could go sideways, which… worked out much better.

In a way, Hlavatý is the epitome of the same narrative I was describing above. Much like the whole team, he was dragged through the mud following his (admittedly) anonymous performance against Jablonec. He wasn’t there when the team needed him, they said. He’s not anywhere close to the required standard, it was then anectodally proven with regards to his national team credentials, they insisted. “Them”, of course, being largely the same people who didn’t have much to say when Hlavatý masterfully controlled the R3 matchup with Slavia, or when he was the best midfielder on the pitch against Plzeň a few rounds later. Those would be far more characteristic examples, because all told, Hlavatý — six-time TotW nominee and the league’s 6th most prolific creator in terms of chances that went begging (32) on top of being an 8-point player as is — was a runaway MVP.

Not least because his rivals are mostly happy to just… hang around. Hugo Jan Bačkovský is capable of the spectacular, but he’s lucky to be just minus-0.03 in terms of prevented goals following a wildly uneven autumn that saw him produce five non-save goal-preventing interventions along with three blatant errors leading to conceded goals (and two more minor ones). Marek Icha, sitting 4th on the team’s leaderboard, is a similarly divise figure among fans, while Denis Višinský is enjoying a lowkey breakout, but only 2/6 of his strikes came in close enough game states to be considered vital.

Bold prediction temperature check

Prediction: Liberec will celebrate exactly 17 victories, post-season included
Status:
The longest of longshots

Slovan Liberec are sitting on 6 victories right now. There are 11 rounds left on the regular season, which would give us exactly 17 wins. Must be a sign.

In all seriousness, unless Liberec go on a historic heater, this is not happening. But it’s not over until it’s officially over. And as I reminded you as part of my bold prediction write-up in summer, Kováč has already formed one Slovan team that concluded the season on a 11-1-1 run in 2013.

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Tomas Danicek
Tomas Danicek

Written by Tomas Danicek

One independent Czech writer’s views on Czech football. Simple as that really. Also to be found on X @czechfooty.

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