This is what Super Sunday is for. Not two mid-table teams doing a bit of shouting — the leaders against the unbeaten, the best striker in the league against the league's most famous wall of noise, and the entire Premier League title race getting its first real reading sixteen days after the most important verdict in the league's history. Liverpool host Manchester City at Anfield on Sunday morning, and there is not a neutral inch of ground in the whole fixture.
City arrive top of the table with five wins from five — 13 goals scored, five conceded, the only perfect record left in the division. Liverpool are seventh with nine points from five, and the record (two wins, three draws) is the polite version of a problem we broke down earlier this week: unbeaten, yes, but drawing their opening two home league games and looking nowhere near convincing in attack. The gap is six points. If Liverpool lose at home, it's nine, and the league is a month old. That's not a crisis. But it's not nothing, either.
The coldest welcome in Anfield memory
Here's the thing about this fixture that has nothing to do with the football: on September 25, an independent Premier League commission found Manchester City guilty on 114 counts related to alleged financial-rule breaches covering 2009 to 2018, per Al Jazeera. The club is appealing, and denies wrongdoing. But the verdict exists. It's sixteen days old. And Enzo Maresca — appointed City's manager on June 29 after Pep Guardiola's departure — will lead his team into the one stadium in England where hostility toward City has been a full-time occupation for years.
Maresca isn't doing what panicked managers do. "I am very calm, the club has been quite calm," he said this week, via Al Jazeera. "We trust completely the club. We understand the noise, but the focus for us is what we control and we control the football side."
City's football, lately, has needed no defense. They lost the Community Shield 3-0 — badly — and have won seven straight games since. Last time out they beat Sunderland 5-3 in a thriller that was less of a result than a statement: we can score our way out of anything, even our own mistakes. Haaland is Haaland. The machine is humming. But Anfield, with this verdict and this crowd and this noise, is the one place where the machine has a history of seizing up. That February 2026 win — Haaland's late penalty to snatch a 2-1 win — was only City's second league victory at Anfield in more than two decades. The first came behind closed doors, during the pandemic, when the stadium was empty and the wall of noise was a wall of seats.
Liverpool's attack, minus the attack
The international break happened to Liverpool. Alexander Isak came back from Sweden with a thigh injury. Cody Gakpo came back from the Netherlands with an ankle injury. Iraola confirmed the double blow in Friday's press conference, as Reuters reported: "Alex Isak and Cody Gakpo will not play the game, they are not ready, they both have injuries in the international break."
Neither injury is believed to be long-term — Reuters reported that Iraola said the club is monitoring both day to day — but the timing is brutal. Isak has four goals in the first five league games, finally looking like the striker Liverpool thought they were getting. Gakpo is the connective tissue of the front three. Losing both against the best team in the league is the definition of a bad week.
So who leads the line? Probably 21-year-old Lewis Koumas, the Welsh forward who impressed Iraola with important minutes in the Carabao Cup win over Tottenham. "Koumas has our trust," Iraola told reporters, per Reuters. That's a manager telling you he's not scared, and it might even be true — but a first senior start against City at Anfield is a different animal from a cup tie. Bradley Barcola, five games into his Liverpool career, has played centrally before and is the other obvious option. Federico Chiesa is back training after his pre-season injury — "doing a good job," Iraola told Liverpool FC's official site — though he hasn't played any minutes yet.
The one piece of good news, according to Liverpool FC's official team news: Jeremy Jacquet, who also went down on international duty, is fit and expected to start next to Virgil van Dijk. That's enormous, because the alternative was throwing a reshuffled back line at the best striker in the world. The longer-term absences remain: Conor Bradley (knee, out since January), Giovanni Leoni (ACL) and Hugo Ekitike (Achilles) are all still sidelined.
City's machine — and the one missing part
City's team news reads like a flex by comparison. Erling Haaland came off for Norway with what everyone is calling fatigue — workload management, not a real knock — and Maresca has confirmed the striker is fit and ready. That's the headline: five goals in five games, co-leading the Golden Boot race with Chelsea's João Pedro, and no backup option up top if anything ever did go wrong. He is, by himself, the game plan.
The real absence is Phil Foden, who serves the third and final game of his suspension after the straight red card in the Manchester derby win over United on September 13. Antoine Semenyo — who withdrew from Ghana's squad with a swollen leg — trained with the team on Thursday and is expected to be available, which matters because he's been one of City's best outlets this season. Nico O'Reilly's England withdrawal is the lingering question mark; his condition isn't considered serious, but Sunday's squad is a maybe. Jeremy Doku is back to full fitness and knocking on the door. Maresca has options everywhere except up front: Rayan Cherki, Iliman Ndiaye, youngster Allan and Enzo Fernández, who has settled in seamlessly, are all pushing to start.
The shape of the fight is pretty clear. Liverpool under Iraola want to press — win the ball high, switch quickly to the wings, run early balls behind the line. City under Maresca want to do the thing City always do: draw the press on, play through it, and let the space open up behind. Both sides have looked suspect defending counter-attacks this season, which is why a lot of people think this is going to be a goalfest. Iraola called it "massive for everyone involved" and said the coming run of league and Champions League games will "really know where we are." City, meanwhile, are trying to do what they couldn't do for two decades: win back-to-back league games at Anfield.
How to watch
Liverpool vs Manchester City — Premier League, Matchweek 6. Sunday, October 11: 11:30 AM ET / 8:30 AM PT — live on NBC in the US, streaming on Peacock and NBC.com, per NBC Sports. Kickoff 4:30 PM BST at Anfield. Referee: Chris Kavanagh, VAR: Paul Howard. Telemundo has the Spanish-language broadcast.
For the wider title picture, our title race roundup has Arsenal level with City on 15 points and Brighton lurking on 13. For the day-to-day, see our soccer daily, which flagged this one as Super Sunday Eve. More from the league: Premier League hub and soccer home.