Expected goals. It's based on chances we had against players scoring from the same place over a period of time, don't know how long that period of time is. It's basically nonsense and means nothing!
Rough explainer (and a link to a much better explainer!) below. Basically a way of working out how good a chance was. So instead of saying (for example) "Martins should've scored that one on one with the keeper" we can say that "actually that situation and shot from that position only has a 22% chance of being scored (0.22 xG) which is compared to a database of hundreds of thousands of shots to find shots from that same location + situation to work out the conversion rate of a goal being scored. You're right in that it ultimately means nothing to the final score, but pretty much every professional football team will use it in their analysis, in their coaching and in their recruitment which ultimately is changing the game - on the left we have the average shot distance in the PL in 18/19 compared to the 22/23 season on the right, can see from the averages right at the bottom that there's been a decrease in the distance that players are taking their shots. This is a trend repeated in practically every league across the world which has been attributed to the rise of xG (which I guess makes sense - the closer to goal you shoot - the more likely you are to score!)
Hard to say whether it's made decision making better (as people/clubs will likely interpret data differently!), but it definitely adds an extra angle to things that should be considered. For instance there could be a young striker in a far flung league who's getting lots of game-time but hasn't scored many goals. If you're only using goals scored or goals per 90 scored to browse potential striker options before sending scouts out then it would be easy to skip over him for strikers who have been (so far) more effective in front of goal. But if that striker has registered lots of xG compared to the number of goals he's scored then suddenly that throws some interesting questions up - that might signal that he has great movement and positioning that's allowed him to take lots of good shots without scoring the goals to match. It could be that then we think we could improve his finishing via specialised coaching or we can take a deeper look at the clips to see why he's not scored as much as his xG would suggest to potentially get a player who others may have missed due to their reading of the stats. Things are evolving either further in that regard now - xG only registers if a shot is taken - imagine a cross played from the RB across the face of goal to the left winger running in at the back post, if he misses the ball by inches and the ball goes out for a goal kick then this doesn't show up in the stats. Lots of clubs now have "tracking data", where every player on the pitchs position (and the ball) is tracked every half a second by numerous cameras in the stadium, these provide HUGE datasets (one game is generally over a million rows in excel!) to pore through. I know Liverpool have created algorithms that find players from this data who might not take lots of chances but instead come close to taking chances. They can tweak certain things about the players game in training - it could be making their run a second earlier (or delaying it) - making a player much more effective which subsequently raises their value
Yes. I wonder if there is anybody else in the club who could do that attacking midfield chance-generator. Good that Ismael got him playing further from the defence. But any oppo coach with any brains would put an aggressive terrier-type on him in future matches. QPR just gave him the freedom of the park.
Elf is a petrol station, usually the source of transfer rumours, however Esso seem to have an inside track an therefore more preferable.
Yep. If that was anything to go by then for future episodes of the highlights show it could be wise to record it then watch back afterwards, so all the interviews, ads etc. can be skipped.
Thanks Knight, I asked the first time I read it, then continued reading and saw that someone else had asked and that the question had been answered.
Not when I was up there visiting an old photocopy business we were looking to buy 7 years ago! We obviously move in very different circles.
The place - definitely not posh*. The poster? You'll have to ask him yourself, but being from Falmouth (IIRC) I'd say probably not posh. *Mrs Ilkley is a governor at a school in a ward that's in the bottom 1% in the country for deprivation. Not funny, but true (a bit like the parlous state of WFC).
