New football terminology is stupid

SkyBlueFlux said:
Nobody is saying teams can't be lucky, if you are then great, but you can't keep getting lucky. And that's not how the stat is used. xG is a long-term measure, all teams eventually trend to their xG over a high enough volume of games. With a long time-horizon luck becomes less and less of a factor because your sample size grows. That's just how statistics works. You can only get lucky for so long. Like with United - anybody with eyes can see they have a big problem with performances and are papering over the cracks with lucky goals and narrow wins. Their xG demonstrates this perfectly, no other stat has that descriptive power.

That's one of the more obvious cases though, I worked with a League 2 team who were top after 5 games and thought they were the dog's bollocks, they refused to change approach even though their xG said they hadn't justified their wins - they'd gotten the rub of the green with ref decisions. Because they stubbornly stuck to what got them those wins, they ended up avoiding relegation by only 2 points. The law of averages caught up with them. This is also how casinos ensure they have a house edge. xG is about ensuring your team has the house edge. City always always have the house edge, that's fundamental to how we play.



You can call it bollocks all you want, I've worked as a data analyst at multiple football clubs - some league and some non-league and I'm telling you they don't think it's bollocks. Your question "how can you have 0.78 of a goal?" is total ignorance of what it actually represents. 0.78 xG means that if you had that shot (or combination of shots) on goal 1,000 times then you would score on average about 780 times. We're not talking fucking quantum physics here.
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No it's not quantum physics. It's bollocks. This is football, not science. We love the game because it's random and unpredictable. Who could forsee the rags beating the dippers last weekend? I would bet that 90% of neutral fans would have backed Liverpool to win. And the score wasn't 4.26 - 3.98.
 
Donmcfc said:
No it's not quantum physics. It's bollocks. This is football, not science. We love the game because it's random and unpredictable. Who could forsee the rags beating the dippers last weekend? I would bet that 90% of neutral fans would have backed Liverpool to win. And the score wasn't 4.26 - 3.98.
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That's totally reductionist. In that case why bother with any stats at all? Why bother with tactics? Just stick 22 blokes on the pitch and tell them to go at it. Then you can enjoy your true randomness. People don't love the game because it's totally random, they love it because it's a perfect mixture of random chance and skill.

Nobody can or is trying to take the unpredictability out of the game - in fact, if that unpredictability didn't exist then there'd be no need for xG, it exists purely to measure the unpredictability.

Never seen people get so upset over the existence of a bloody number. Totally strange. Why are people not like this about possession %? Shots on target? Distance run? They're all just numbers.
 
SkyBlueFlux said:
Nobody is saying teams can't be lucky, if you are then great, but you can't keep getting lucky. And that's not how the stat is used. xG is a long-term measure, all teams eventually trend to their xG over a high enough volume of games. With a long time-horizon luck becomes less and less of a factor because your sample size grows. That's just how statistics works. You can only get lucky for so long. Like with United - anybody with eyes can see they have a big problem with performances and are papering over the cracks with lucky goals and narrow wins. Their xG demonstrates this perfectly, no other stat has that descriptive power.

That's one of the more obvious cases though, I worked with a League 2 team who were top after 5 games and thought they were the dog's bollocks, they refused to change approach even though their xG said they hadn't justified their wins - they'd gotten the rub of the green with ref decisions. Because they stubbornly stuck to what got them those wins, they ended up avoiding relegation by only 2 points. The law of averages caught up with them. This is also how casinos ensure they have a house edge. xG is about ensuring your team has the house edge. City always always have the house edge, that's fundamental to how we play.



You can call it bollocks all you want, I've worked as a data analyst at multiple football clubs - some league and some non-league and I'm telling you they don't think it's bollocks. Your question "how can you have 0.78 of a goal?" is total ignorance of what it actually represents. 0.78 xG means that if you had that shot (or combination of shots) on goal 1,000 times then you would score on average about 780 times. We're not talking fucking quantum physics here.
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You have just destroyed your own argument, it's utter and total nonsense.

Get the ball in the back of the net, do it and that's all that counts in the game, not what you could/should or maybe have done.
 
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