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This xG nonsense

superhans1 said:
This is precisely why XG is so useful! One scoreline just comes down to who takes their chances on the day - and that's highly influenced by luck/randomness. If you want to know which is the better team (which is more likely to finish higher up the table) then out of all those stats the scoreline is the one that gives you the least information. In statistical terms it's mostly noise. XG on the other is mostly (not all, it's not perfect) signal - telling you which team is actually the strongest.
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Read that four times now and I don’t think I’ve ever read a post on here which says so much but doesn’t mean anything at all!

The Everton game above is a perfect example of how in-game stats can being deceiving and pretty meaningless. A lot of them shouldn’t be viewed with such high importance.
 

Sallycinamon said:
The Everton game above is a perfect example of how in-game stats can being deceiving and pretty meaningless. A lot of them shouldn’t be viewed with such high importance.
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I think you're thinking in terms of what stats matter for predicting or describing one match.

The point is that single matches are so influenced by randomness that - as you say - stats can be deceiving and meaningless.

The point of XG is that it's much better at predicting performance in the long run, because creating/conceding chances is less affected by luck than actual goals are.

Don't you find it interesting that Chelsea have slightly higher XG in the game and slightly more points than Everton in the league? That's not a coincidence. XG is better than goals at telling you which is the stronger team, and which will finish higher in the table.

Anyway, onto more important matters today!
 
superhans1 said:
I think you're thinking in terms of what stats matter for predicting or describing one match.

The point is that single matches are so influenced by randomness that - as you say - stats can be deceiving and meaningless.

The point of XG is that it's much better at predicting performance in the long run, because creating/conceding chances is less affected by luck than actual goals are.

Don't you find it interesting that Chelsea have slightly higher XG in the game and slightly more points than Everton in the league? That's not a coincidence. XG is better than goals at telling you which is the stronger team, and which will finish higher in the table.

Anyway, onto more important matters today!
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I don’t find xG interesting at all mate! Like I say, stats have taken over the game, and not for the better.
 
Quick question for any xG experts.

What sort of xG was Brobbey’s initial chance and subsequent finish on Sunday? And were the two chances counted as separate xG figures?
 
Sallycinamon said:
I don’t find xG interesting at all mate! Like I say, stats have taken over the game, and not for the better.
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Certain for the better when it comes to the players that we recruit.

Our reliance on the wonderful eyes of our scouts, managers and coaches left us in League One in a right old mess. And even then we had an Owner chasing a striker with stupid increases to offers because the guy supposedly guaranteed you goals in the league (turns out he was a wet flannel rather than being on fire for us).
 
WASTID said:
Certain for the better when it comes to the players that we recruit.

Our reliance on the wonderful eyes of our scouts, managers and coaches left us in League One in a right old mess. And even then we had an Owner chasing a striker with stupid increases to offers because the guy supposedly guaranteed you goals in the league (turns out he was a wet flannel rather than being on fire for us).
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Like I’ve said previously though, for every club who can point to xG as a benefit when recruiting, there’ll be a club who will say it’s been terrible for their recruiting. No doubt it’s down to how you interpret the data, pretty much the same as how a scout interprets someone’s ability.

Will the recruitment team not have used xG when looking at Will Grigg?
 
Useful_Idiot said:
It's really been done to death this now. If you don't like it that's fine, if you do that's also fine. At this point trying to convince each other is futile. I'd making a comparison to converting people from one faith to another but that's hot water at the moment.
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Difference is that faith isn't backed by science. When it comes to XG, you can actually test how well it predicts performance.

A better analogy for sceptics would be flat earthers who don't understand gravity.
 
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RossTheNinja said:
I'm trying to give it a chance but warra load of shite. It was basically the same shot he scored the other week.
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Are you not just fundamentally misunderstanding what xG is?

Think of it a different way.

Imagine a waste paper bin stood in the centre of a room. Every minute of every day, someone comes into the room, stands at a random point in the room and then throws a balled-up sheet of paper at the bin. Someone sits in the corner of the room and records every throw, where it was from and whether or not it went in.

1% of throws from 20 feet away went in, but 95% of throws from 1ft away went in.

Someone asks you what the average probability of getting the paper into the bin from 1ft away is. It's 0.95, right?

It's the same principle applied to football. Hundreds of thousands of attempts on goal have been logged to create a probability model of a shot taken from a certain place on the pitch, going in.

If over a season a striker's xG is 10.5 it means cumulatively, the probability of their chances added up to 10.5. If they've scored 2 goals, they're not very good. If they've scored 20, they're very good.
 
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