Loan Watch: Tyler Morton, is he doing enough to get a chance at Liverpool?

Written on 18/01/2024

Tyler Morton is having another fine season in the Championship after a second consecutive loan move from Liverpool last summer. The 21-year-old was one of Blackburn Rovers’ top players last season before becoming a key cog in the Hull City midfield this time around.

Regardless of what his future at Liverpool looks like, these loan spells with considerable game time will definitely help the England U21 international to make the cut in the top-flight sooner rather than later. After playing 3314 minutes for Blackburn last year, he is currently on 1696 for Hull with half of this season remaining.

Now, we know that Liverpool went through a bit of a midfield restructure in the summer window after the departure of Jordan Henderson, James Milner, Naby Keita, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Fabinho. The club recruited four players - Alexis Mac Allister (25), Ryan Gravenberch (21), Dominik Szoboszlai (23) and Wataru Endō (30) to fill the gaps and also lower the average age of that department. (average age of the midfield was 25.14 last season, 24 this year).

Academy products Harvey Elliott (20) and Curtis Jones (22) doing well is helping the team big time as well (Elliott signed when he was 16, so he can be considered as an academy product). Stefan Bajčetić (19) will be added to the mix soon.

Keeping all that in mind, while Morton at 21, with two years of Championship experience, is doing everything he can to become a viable option for Jürgen Klopp in the coming years, there is a lot of competition waiting for him. 

Let’s move away from the Liverpool squad planning and focus more on the player’s performances with the help of numbers and why a lot of people are excited by his prospect in the future.

Tyler Morton - 2023/24 Championship numbers dashboard

Below, we will take a look at two screen grabs of the Tableau dashboards looking at Morton’s Championship numbers amongst the midfielders in the division for the current season. 

On-the-ball and off-the-ball metrics are put in different dashboards for clarity of understanding. Since I cannot embed the dashboard in the draft file to allow you to play with it, I am putting the screen grabs with pre-set filters in terms of position and 90s played.

On-the-ball Metrics

(brown pointers show where Morton is each metric visual)

With 50+ passes per 90 along with the success rate of 85.4%, Morton is one of the best midfielders in the Championship at passing the ball. Although his ball progression numbers are a bit lower than average, the assist rate of 0.16 per 90 is more than decent for a deep-lying midfielder in a 4-2-3-1 system (Expected assist rate is 0.13, so he is not over-performing in this metric by much anyway). While not many progressive ones, his ball-carrying count is at a good level too (39.7 per 90).