New football terminology is stupid

Always found the crusade against xG really strange (but maybe I shouldn’t knowing the average football fan’s resistance to anything that sounds new). Nearly every team in the football league uses it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you asked Pep and he thought it was the second most important stat after actual goals. Why? Because it’s the best predictor of success, that’s literally what it was designed for. If you’re getting points but your xG is shite then it should be ringing alarm bells because it means you’re getting lucky and eventually your luck is going to run out (look at United this year who based on performances should be 12th).

Expected values have been around for literally hundreds of years and have been used in everything from sport to the stock market to computer science. It’s not new. It’s just that we’ve gotten better at measuring it in football thanks to computers.

If you are given the ability to see if your results are down to luck or actual performances, why would you not use it? Why give your opponents the competitive advantage? What’s people’s problem with it exactly?
 
SkyBlueFlux said:
Always found the crusade against xG really strange (but maybe I shouldn’t knowing the average football fan’s resistance to anything that sounds new). Nearly every team in the football league uses it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you asked Pep and he thought it was the second most important stat after actual goals. Why? Because it’s the best predictor of success, that’s literally what it was designed for. If you’re getting points but your xG is shite then it should be ringing alarm bells because it means you’re getting lucky and eventually your luck is going to run out (look at United this year who based on performances should be 12th).

Expected values have been around for literally hundreds of years and have been used in everything from sport to the stock market to computer science. It’s not new. It’s just that we’ve gotten better at measuring it in football thanks to computers.

If you are given the ability to see if your results are down to luck or actual performances, why would you not use it? Why give your opponents the competitive advantage? What’s people’s problem with it exactly?
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Well some times it’s better to be lucky than good. Also isn’t your xg after 5 games if you play the bottom 5 clubs and think them if the next five teams you play are the top five teams in the league. How the fuck is it a useful stat?
 
SkyBlueFlux said:
Always found the crusade against xG really strange (but maybe I shouldn’t knowing the average football fan’s resistance to anything that sounds new). Nearly every team in the football league uses it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you asked Pep and he thought it was the second most important stat after actual goals. Why? Because it’s the best predictor of success, that’s literally what it was designed for. If you’re getting points but your xG is shite then it should be ringing alarm bells because it means you’re getting lucky and eventually your luck is going to run out (look at United this year who based on performances should be 12th).

Expected values have been around for literally hundreds of years and have been used in everything from sport to the stock market to computer science. It’s not new. It’s just that we’ve gotten better at measuring it in football thanks to computers.

If you are given the ability to see if your results are down to luck or actual performances, why would you not use it? Why give your opponents the competitive advantage? What’s people’s problem with it exactly?
Click to expand...
Absolute utter bollocks. How can you have 0.78 of a fucking goal?
 
bondsman said:
Well some times it’s better to be lucky than good. Also isn’t your xg after 5 games if you play the bottom 5 clubs and think them if the next five teams you play are the top five teams in the league. How the fuck is it a useful stat?
Click to expand...

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.

Donmcfc said:
Absolute utter bollocks. How can you have 0.78 of a fucking goal?
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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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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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