United and xG (now that Ole is gone will things change?)
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
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Im not convinced he’s finished. I think it’s a case of a player needing a new environment. As much as I’ve rightfully crapped on him for the last year or so, I wouldn’t be against sending him on loan in January to find form. I still think there is a player in there. If he’s finished that means he peaked at about 23, which is crazy.
Agree. Back when he was good, I do not think that his finishing was the problem. Even then, the main problem was him getting the chances to score. Even on his best season, playing as a striker he scored only once or twice more than Rashford who played in left wing. Martial is a better finisher than Rashford (or at least used to be), but Rashford is better at being at the end of chances.
Or take Ronaldo. In general, he does not outperform significantly his xG, but he has a very high xG because he is very good at finding himself at the end of chances (incredible movement). So for a striker you need to check both how much he overperforms/underperforms his xG, and also what is his xG. You could significantly overperform it, but you are rarely to have good chances (poor movement, or playing in a team that does not create chances) you probably are not gonna score many goals.
I'm not sure what you mean by this? Isn't that exactly what data is for?
Short answer: they have never bothered to find out what it actually is (or does).
To be fair, though, it has been misused frequently by both fans and journalists in a manner which is 100% sure to piss off an old school football fan with no time for "stats" of any kind.
This doesn’t really make sense because xG is pretty much always in line with how fans viewed the game. You don’t need xG to tell you if you’ve had a lot of good chances or vice versa but it’s invaluable as data the more it stacks as it becomes more and more accurate.
I’m genuinely amazed how resistant some people seem to something that is pure data. It is real & it’s ever more accurate in predicting overarching trends.
xG over 5 games tells you nothing as the outliers have a significant weightage on what you're seeing.
In our case itself (referring to Understat data), we're overperforming our xG by 3.48 and overperforming our xGA by 1.24. The issue here is that out of that 3.48 number, Leeds game alone is contributing to an overperformance of 3.36, and on the xGA side, .76 of the xGA is coming from just that 1 penalty miss.
Hell, if we're to go by 5 game data, Chelsea are overperforming their xG and xGA by a bigger margin - so in reality, Chelsea have been luckier. I doubt anyone will say that - for they will be called "well organized" and "clinical"
Eh, to a part, but chance creation is as much (if not more) about the receivers as it is for the providers. We have elite creators in our side. We'll still create feck all if we play Martial up top. Using Rashford and Ronaldo or Cavani, they'll always get open as they have excellent movement. We didn't suddenly become an amazingly creative side over the summer compared to last season, yet Ronaldo has had a tap in every game, something we seemingly never had last season. He has the movement to get open and enable the others to give him an easy pass.
Nah. Ronaldo will always accumulate high xG and score goals because he has incredible movement. You can give Martial the best creators behind him (which we have among the best with Pogba and Bruno and now Sancho), yet Martial will never put up elite numbers there. Put Martial in a smaller team and he'd struggle just the same, and the chance creation would be blamed when it's more on the movement of the striker himself. A striker doesn't just become prolific because they all of a sudden have a good supporting cast. Most of the time it has a relatively minor effect on their xG numbers.
The irony of your username!
Always get a couple of people in discussions like this that are seemingly annoyed by stats and a little too eager to point out just how little they matter
I think you are misunderstanding what @Tarrou said. Supply of chances will of course be more meaningful than a striker’s abilities.
There's a difference between being a good goalscorer and being clinical clinical a good finisher. Martial like everyone goes through good and bad runs of finishing but by and large he is a reliable finisher as his xG stats year on year would tell you. He doesn't ever get high totals though as he's not a good goalscorer.
It's useful but not that important to be a striker who performs above his xG and puts away chances at a better rate than average. What I would much rather want is a player who just gets a lot of high quality chances, even if they underperform xG. Those are the players who will always score more goals over a long enough period of time and be reliable year on year, compared to Martial who will be useless for long stretches as he's not even getting chances.
Sir Alex said it all the time himself. You aren't worried about a striker who gets in chances but is missing them. You worry about the striker who doesn't get any chances.
100% this.
No, I just disagree. Having a striker with world class movement and average supply beats out having average movement and world class supply. At least for the position. Ronaldo wherever he goes will have chances fall his way because of his movement and positioning. Martial, with a world class supporting cast even, will not. Just like Ronaldo scored 36 goals in all competitions for a garbage Juve team last year. He even underperformed his xG last year, slightly, but he still had more than 6 xG greater than anyone else in the Serie A, and so scored 5 goals more than any other player. There will be nobody on the end of chances if you have a player with shit movement, as we experienced with Martial for so long. His highest single season xG total was 13 ffs, and never reached 8 outside of that one year. It's not on creativity, it's his movement.
Point taken
, but idiots are even more dangerous and irritating when using stats they don’t understandThis is bang on.
There's nothing wrong with Martial's finishing, as you've said, when he actually gets himself in good positions. The problem with him is that he's far too static to get in good positions often enough to be the 20-goal-a-season striker someone with his natural gifts should be. He wouldn't have scored any of the four goals Ronaldo's already managed because he would have been standing on the edge of the box for the first tap-in against Newcastle, would have wanted the pass to feet for the second goal, and wouldn't even have made the runs that prompted Fernandes's passes for the next two.
Rashford has the same problem, really. He's excellent at making that out-to-in run when he has space behind the other team's backline. But when they're sitting deep, he just wants to come short for the ball and try to take his man on every time. It's a treat to watch Cavani and now Ronaldo constantly on the move when we're on the ball in the other team's third.
Another forward famous for exceeding his xG consistently is Son, but it's not really an indicator that he's the best finisher in the world or anything like that. It just means that while he doesn't really pop into too many threatening positions on average, the majority of the 10 league goals he scores on average every season are from relatively difficult chances - and it also meant everyone who's paid attention to the underlying numbers knew he was never going to be able to sustain the goalscoring streak he was on early last season, and Spurs were going to drop in the table when his goals inevitably dried up. Which is exactly what happened.
And this isn't just a post intended to have a go at Martial - I've rated him as a player since his debut and he's obviously way better than he's been showing us lately. But the reason he doesn't get chances is more on him than his supporting cast.
When he's on form, he's very good at certain movements that do lead to chances - his favorite is to come short for the ball in that inside-left channel, try a quick one-two and spin in behind. He's also very good at making those short bursts between the right-back and center-back, and he loves to square his man up on the edge of the box and curl the ball around him.
But these are the same things he was good at as a 19-year-old, and he's had six seasons now to work on the other things. Simply hasn't done it.
That's why xPTS is useful to consider, alongside xG differential. By bounding your expected points in any given match from 0-3, it reduces the impact that outlier matches have on the estimate of overall performance.
By Understat's xPTS, United is third in the table....which is where they are in the table.
City's next two league games are away to Chelsea and a trip to Anfield. It's possible that they could be 9 points off the top. Wonder how they are looking in terms of xG after that.
Not a fan of xPts personally. Because it gives pretty high weightage on a game by game basis. Considering points are awarded as 0,1 or 3, what ends up being the conclusion in most cases is that the team at the bottom is underperforming their xPts and teams at top are overperforming their xPts - because to get 3 points as per that model, you pretty much need to limit the opposition to close to 0 shots
Prefer to look at xGD instead over a longer period.
Bang on. In a nutshell this is why Tuchel kept picking Werner last year.
To be fair there was a period where I would have said Martial was the best finisher at the club. We haven’t seen that guy for a while, but he did have a period where he was pretty clinical.
We scored 73 league goals total last season (whilst massively overpeforming xG). In comparison the last 5 champions of the PL have scored 83, 85, 95, 106 and 85 (average of 90). We also failed to score a single goal in 8 games.
So we didn't score anywhere near enough goals, despite the fact our conversation rate is very clinical overall. Anyone who watches our games will know we don't create enough chances by elite team standards, that's where all moaning about "we struggle against a low block" and "we lack patterns of play" comes from, and as much as some people just dismiss the complaining as invalid, the statistics confirm what we see with our eyes.
This season, it's a bit early to tell. I expect us to continue to overperform our xG because top teams often do, we were already clinical and we've added Ronaldo to the mix. However we need to create a lot more chances than last season because the level of competition is so high in City, Liverpool and Chelsea, just being clinical wasn't enough last season and it won't be this season.
To be fair he was a very good finisher up until the last 12 months.
His problem has always been getting the chances in the first place. His movement, anticipation and positioning is just nowhere near the likes of Ronaldo so he will go games where he doesn't look like scoring at all, not because he can't finish but he's not getting on the end of crosses, he's not getting on the end of through balls, he's not well positioned for any loose balls or tap ins.
It's still early to deduce anything just yet and with the squad we have currently there's potential to improve our chance creation. But it all comes down to a defeciency in our build up play/transitions imo which is then reflected on the statistics. Unlike City and Liverpool we're unable to sustain pressure and a lot of our moves break down prematurely because there isn't a pass option available without resorting to passing it sideways/backwards or passing it long which most of the time is easily dealt with by the opposition and thus ensues a period in the game where there appears a stalemate with the game passing us by. But it's still early days and i'm hoping to see a improvement in our build up and transitions which are far from fluid imo.
But if it does come down to changing Manager, then I believe we should go for someone on the basis of ideology rather than CV/resume. Someome who understands the demands of the modern game and has a defined way of playing the game in a proactive/expansive manner which we haven't seen since the days of Fergie imo. I personally hope we don't go for either Conte or Zidane and would rather see us go for a head coach who has a set template on how he wants to approach games in a manner which would excite us. Ten Hag for me looks like a interesting option who has a defined way of playing the game which is more exciting than either Conte or Zidane imo and he's also adept at developing youth and helping a team punch above their weight without spending a fortune.
But if it does come down to changing Manager, then I believe we should go for someone on the basis of ideology rather than CV/resume. Someome who understands the demands of the modern game and has a defined way of playing the game in a proactive/expansive manner which we haven't seen since the days of Fergie imo. I personally hope we don't go for either Conte or Zidane and would rather see us go for a head coach who has a set template on how he wants to approach games in a manner which would excite us. Ten Hag for me looks like a interesting option who has a defined way of playing the game which is more exciting than either Conte or Zidane imo and he's also adept at developing youth and helping a team punch above their weight without spending a fortune.
Ole has been banging on about needing a player who scores the simple goals (the "tap-ins" if you will). And then we see against West Ham in the cup that Greenwood, Van De Beek, Lingard consistently got into very good positions in the box and made good cut backs / crosses only to see nobody going for them. In the xG, it will not register and the issue was not performance of the overall team per se but the lack of the natural goalscorer.
Having Cavani last season helped but he didn't play sufficient minutes and this season, and I feel having Ronaldo should help massively with this.
Our results till now in this season is down to most of the team still playing themselves into form such as Shaw, Maguire, Fred, Mctominay, AWB, and Sancho. There is also a provocative tactical analysis on the Busby Babe arguing that we are implementing a new system and what we are seeing is a result of growth pains in adjusting to the new system. Personally I don't find it convincing but its still interesting.
Having Cavani last season helped but he didn't play sufficient minutes and this season, and I feel having Ronaldo should help massively with this.
Our results till now in this season is down to most of the team still playing themselves into form such as Shaw, Maguire, Fred, Mctominay, AWB, and Sancho. There is also a provocative tactical analysis on the Busby Babe arguing that we are implementing a new system and what we are seeing is a result of growth pains in adjusting to the new system. Personally I don't find it convincing but its still interesting.
Hey guys,
Chelsea fan here, I do hope you guys go after Antonio Conte and appreciate Ole as a player, not as a coach. This is what happened at the Bridge with Lampard. Good Luck.
Chelsea fan here, I do hope you guys go after Antonio Conte and appreciate Ole as a player, not as a coach. This is what happened at the Bridge with Lampard. Good Luck.
We scored those last year despite being light up top and during a pandemic season. Added in that we knew we were out of the title race a few months before the end of the season and had second secure not long after, having scored 10 odd behind previous champions isn’t that bad. Look at the restart when we couldnt stop scoring (when we had to) and the start of this season, again when we have to.
Our XG will now shoot up not because we suddenly became more creative but because we can rotate between Ronaldo and Cavani and not 1 goal in 24 Martial and have actual movement down the middle.
That's a lot of excuses for why we didn't create enough chances rather than just conceding the lack of chances is a reflection of the consistent lack of quality in our performances (which has been a constant theme since Ferguson retired, and has continued under Ole). I don't buy we could have scored loads more but "we didn't feel like it because we didn't need to". By all metrics we were very fortunate to score as many as we did. I would much rather judge our quality over a season period than a 3 or 4 game purple patch.
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From today 0.75. will be from the pen so roughly the same as Aston Villa from open play even though the shot total was 28-7 in our favour.
Similar xG to Chelsea vs Villa
Clutching at straws
Clutching at straws
This pictorially shows the size of the chances we created in the game. Only the one big chance which was the penalty. None created from open play.
https://www.infogol.net/en/matches/...ague/man-utd-vs-aston-villa-2021-09-25/932739
https://www.infogol.net/en/matches/...ague/man-utd-vs-aston-villa-2021-09-25/932739
The problem was 13 of our shots were blocked and only 1 of Villa’s. Only 0.29 of our xG from shots actually ended up on target. I think the basic xG numbers flattered us today. We were too eager to shoot from poor positions with multiple defenders between ball and goal.
Not to pile on the misery but I just had at the xG stats to see what kind of improvement we saw between the 19/20 season and last year to get a sense of how much improvement we might expect this year.....
19/20: 59.4xG, 37.4xGA, +22xGD
20/21: 60.2xG, 42.2xGA, + 18xGD.
And Mourinho's very flattering 2nd place season, for comparison:
17/18: 60.7xG, 41.7xGA, +19xGD.
Not what I wanted to see really.
19/20: 59.4xG, 37.4xGA, +22xGD
20/21: 60.2xG, 42.2xGA, + 18xGD.
And Mourinho's very flattering 2nd place season, for comparison:
17/18: 60.7xG, 41.7xGA, +19xGD.
Not what I wanted to see really.
This is a tad misleading to be fair. There are 2.5 things with it:
1) Even though we have a relatively high xG and a higher one than our opponent, it is based on low percentage chances.
Just have a look:
https://understat.com/match/16431
Our 1.93 is based on 28 "random shots from anywhere" plus 0.76 from the pen. Villa, who a realtively close to our xG had three big chances, bigger than anything we had bar the penalty.
In comparison, look at Liverpool and City.
https://understat.com/match/16432
Liverpool had good chances they didn't converted while they scored from good chances as well.
https://understat.com/match/16426
City had 3 alright chances and scored from a low scoring chance. Against Chelsea to say the least. Chelsea on the other hand was pretty poor today in terms of xG.
2) xG-value isn't great to be used in isolation because an xG of 1.93 looks like a decent offensive performance. Only if you look at the details, you see, that most of it where dross. So additionally to the sum that is xG, it should be noted to look at a) number of shots taken into consideration and b) avg of xG per shot.
0.5) The understat xG values are always a bit higher and it is more worth the time to analyse the data from fbref. AFAIK they use a more elaborate model to calculate their xG (from what I understood, Understat only takes the position of the shooter into consideration, while fbref model uses the position of shooter, the height of the ball and the positioning of defenders.) But as long as we compare data from the same source these differences should be too problematic.
Interesting, but I guess, the trend isn't too "linear". I mean in 19/20 lot of our opponents didn't take us as serious as they should. Which resulted in us being able to play that counter attacking football pretty often and to good effect. Last year, nobody made this mistake so the fact, that we stabilized our output can be seen as an achievement in my eyes because many teams tried to deny us space to attack. It also shows in the xGA, doesn't it. While playing deeper to counter helped us defensively and offensively in 19/20, being needed to play more proactively hurt us defensively while we were able to keep up the numbers offensively.
What about the Greenwood chance he could have squared to Bruno?
Why is that misleading? The whole point of xG is quantify the quality of attempts at goal so 10 attempts with xG at 0.03 each are as likely to produce a goal as 1 with 0.3 which is why they are given those values to begin with.
Maybe "misleading" isn't the most accurate word to describe it but showing that we have a higher xG than Villa makes it look like we a) were productive (quantity and quality) in attack and b) were unlucky not to win. All that isn't a good representation of the game I saw, apart from maybe being productive in quantity but you get that from the number of shots which is just as worthless because only 4 of 28 shots were on goal.