Expected goal is utter tosh, as a previous poster has stated, football is a simple game.A fan doesn’t need to look at the game scientifically.
A manager, or anyone employed to improve players does.
Expected goal is utter tosh, as a previous poster has stated, football is a simple game.A fan doesn’t need to look at the game scientifically.
A manager, or anyone employed to improve players does.
And many professional coaches/managers hide behind and use statistics to hide their deficiencies.A fan doesn’t need to look at the game scientifically.
A manager, or anyone employed to improve players does.
exactly. forwards, attackers etcThey were both forward positions, historically.
Transition is the one that bugs me and why is the pitch divided into thirds?A No10
A 8
The 6 role
Double pivot
Quarterback
Inverted whatever
I find them all annoying
what is a number ten or eight?
in the traditional 1-11 shirts either were used for secondary strikers or attacking midfielder theycare not a positon or even a set number anymore.
Same goes for 6, Steve Redmond wore 6 ffs
Double pivot and quarter back can just fuck off, it's 2 x DMs and a Playmaker.
Finally inverted, you mean players cut inside from the flanks, players alway have.
Pundits are twats and talk shite
I have used the term double pivot myself and feel thoroughly ashamed of myself ;-)
Sounds like the emperors new clothes. Surely every line up within any given team would need to have its own XG as it would certainly be different depending who was playing. Are those 1000 shots shots on target or just shots generally because shots off target surely can’t generate an XG can they? You can did pretty much anything with stats can’t you? If winning football matches was as simple as statistical analysis you’d think it would be an easier business and moneyball tactics would be all you needed.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.
Distance run, percentage possession and shots on target can all be measured with a high degree of accuracy. Expected goals predictions are nonsense. It's just one statistic too many.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.