The point of a trophy is to win it not to be 'the best' so we don't need to solve this conundrum.
Champions League — quarter-finals and semi-finals draw
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
The whole point of sport is to be the best. I can't believe people are struggling with this concept.
Please do come up with how we should come up with who is the best team, instead of a league table or cup competition, which don't give you an indication of who is the best team, despite the entire point of it being to decide who is the best team.
What is your alternative?
Right I'm being trolled now. It's the only explanation at this point.
xG probably
No, the league is fine as it is. You should just phrase it "the team that finishes top has been better than the other 19 teams for the duration of this particular season/competition", rather than "this is the best of these 20 teams".
So let's say Liverpool win the league and City wins the CL.
According to your logic, Liverpool is better than City. But City is the best team in a competition which features all the best teams of Europe, so how does that correlate?
The point of sport is not to be the best, it's to win things. It's literally that.
There is no realistic way to know without a shadow of a doubt who is "the best" so we simply accept a certain degree of randomness / arbitrariness. It's not that complicated.
The issue isn't whether a team is 'the best', it's your claim that 'luck' does not play a part after 38 games. That is simply wrong.
We have all just chosen to accept that this 'luck' is acceptable given the constraints of the sport.
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...have a good day mate.
You're looking at one particular competition to draw conclusions as to which team is better than the other. It's mind boggling that you don't see the fallacy of your reasoning yourself.
Indeed have a good day
It's mind boggling that I don't think the team that finishes top of a league table is the best team in the league.You're looking at one particular competition to draw conclusions as to which team is better than the other. It's mind boggling that you don't see the fallacy of your reasoning yourself.
Indeed have a good day
Feck me. It's absolutely astounding. But oh well, we'll agree to disagree Robin.
I don't think you understand the sport if you don't get this. It's one of the unique aspects of football that the better team doesn't always win. It makes matches unpredictable but it also means that luck plays a much bigger role. And it can still distort results over 38 games. So yeah, the league winner isn't automatically the best team. In most cases, yes, but not always.
If league position is 100% the only way a team is better, then Barcelona were by far the best team in Spain in the 2010s, not Real Madrid. Madrid only won 1 league out of 7 seasons. Meanwhile they won 4 CLs in the same period. So the answer isn't always that simple.
I thought the young centre back looked class back there Cubarsi looked excellent.Who are the Barcelona regens that are coming through looking like world beaters. Ridiculous
Hat trick in the WC final, won the golden boot every year since he was 17 in France pretty much. PSG is a club that will never win the CL. Once he links up with Bellingham and Vini. He will win individual honours.
Well yeah you're exactly right. Barcelona of the mid 2010s were better than Real Madrid because they won a lot more league titles. Real Madrid were a great team in the CL knockout stage but overall as a team Barca were better as reflected in the league as well as head to head record.
If Real Madrid want to claim being the best in that period they should have won both CL and league trophy instead of having to sacrifice the league title. They only did the double once in 2016/17. Winning both means there's no debate. Barca still won a treble that period.
The same goes for Milan of the 2000s. Only one Serie A title despite the CL record. Juventus and Inter were better teams.
Juve and United are seen as the best teams overall in their country because they have the most leagues even though Milan and Liverpool have more European cups.
Real Madrid overall in Spain are the best team historically as they have the most league titles. For now Barcelona are still the better team in the league because they won last year and this year Real Madrid don't look convincing. This Real Madrid team couldn't beat PSG or Atletico head to head.
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But this goes right against the reasoning of the original poster because he'd say Real Madrid are better than Barcelona because they'll win the league.
That never happened.
The problem is using this kind of 'subjective' argument. What is 'convincing'? Barcelona won the league off the back of many 'unconvincing' 1-0 draws, had an atrocious European campaign that ended very early (a 'sacrifice', one might say), and finished the season with a 0-4 spanking from RM at the Camp Nou.
You can look at objective stuff as well, such as xPTS in which Barca outperforms Madrid both this and last season.
Anyway, this type of reasoning is a bit difficult when it comes to Madrid because they're probably the most prolific game raisers in the world. It's not enough to just play better than them because if there is one team you would trust to score worldies and grind out wins by being focused in decisive moments, it is them. That's the type of stuff that's not reflected in statistics or highlight videos but something intangible. That's also why they are so good in the UCL, in my opinion. I don't know how they do it, maybe it is the culture at the club or the fact that players just ooze self-esteem when playing for the biggest club in the world but they, but this is a very real quality which is not reflected in most statistics.
If Joey Barton doesn’t get sent off, United win the league. Small margins.
Looks like Saka has been doing this penalty move vs Neuer for a while. He did the same vs Villareal
Is it? I think most would prefer to win trophies. Silverware is what counts at the end.
Chelsea 2012 got completely outplayed by Barcelona in the SF and then by Munich in the final. Still the won the CL that year.
Were they the best team therefore? Definitely not, they were the most successful team though.
Some teams are better at beating lesser teams over multiple matches while other teams are better at cup competitions and better against better opponents. Simply reducing best teams to better in the league is way to simplistic.
Their voodoo in the CL isn't reflected in standard statistics available to us laymen, but their quality that enables them to turn around situations in the blink of an eye is quantifiable and can be represented through statistics if the effort is there
I don't think xPts is particularly predictive or useful. It is often wildly wrong at the top of the table.
Amazing what a first leg win over a side who escaped the CL group stage by the skin of their teeth and got battered 4-1 by Newcastle can do to a club's image.
Barcelona were better than Madrid in the first half of the 2010's. Madrid was more successful in the second half.
Madrid are a better team than Barcelona right now and have been for a while. If we look at the last five seasons, they won 3 ligas / 1 CL (one double), while Barcelona won 1 liga / 0 CL (two group stage eliminations in a row). It's not close, really.
Barcelona have done well in the league in the last decade, but the CL is the most watched club competition in the world and they have lost a lot of luster with humiliations from heavy defeats, remontadas and back to back group stage exits.
I think the fact that we've seen many league leaders severely outperforming xPTS is (Liverpool, Madrid, Leverkusen e.g.) suggests that there is more to winning a league than just chance creation but overall, it is a very good indicator of performances and has a good predictive value when it comes to judging how sustainable the performance of a team is. Afterall, teams that outperform their xPTS tend to drop in the table over the course of the season and vice versa.
He had his chances in 2020. He flopped. Nothing is guaranteed at Real Madrid but won't look as impressive winning with them than PSG who has never won it. As I said he had his chance.
I reckon Real Madrid take their first win at the 115 Charges Stadium. The football gods must make it so.
Didn't they win 1-0 over there before? Benzema scored
Considering that xPts is based on xG and xGA it is a value that is highly susceptible to being influenced by small statistical effects. It's no surprise that this is wildly wrong a lot of times.
What do you mean by "wildly wrong"?
For example Leverkusen overperform their xPts by 20% at the moment. That's a lot after 28 matches. Mainz are underperforming theirs by 40%!
Why are xG and XGA susceptible to being influenced by small statistical effects? They only are in case of freak shots that occur so rarely that the model doesn't have enough relevant data to produce significant output.
I meant xPts. If you overperform both your xG and xGA slightly, you can easily win games instead of the expected draws. The variance essentially multiplies when moving from xG/xGA to xPts.
But is it? Many people say luck evens out over the course of a season but I think a season is actually too short for that. To illustrate my point: In the 23/24 season, Leverkusen had 510 shots and 67 goals which translates to a conversion rate of 13,14%. I don't want to dive too deep into statistics but if you want to verify an uplift of 20% with statistical significance, you need a sample size of 2100. So after 28 games, Leverkusen hasn't even produced one quarter of the required events. Which means, a 20% over- or even underperformance can be down to randomness. It gets even more extreme when looking at Mainz. They have 383 shots and 25 goals translating to a conversion rate of 6.5%. They'd need 5000 shots in order to rule out statistical noise at this rate.
So you'd actually would need to consider a period of two or even three seasons to make scientifically clean conclusions if you look at a single team. Which is pointless because most teams change drastically over such a period. xPTS is a very good statistic to measure the "chance overload" a team produces but an over- or underperformance should always be analyzed carefully.
Being off by many points.
The average maximum xPts in La Liga the last 6 seasons is 77. The average maximum points is 87. That's a 10 point difference between what actually happens at the top of the table and what the model thinks will happen. Because of this inability to replicate the real points distribution, the model ends up being quite poor at predicting the point tallies of league winners (and therefore their wins). At least in La Liga. Winners are not 'overperforming their stats' they are just not being modeled properly.
I would like Barca to win it this year. Have a young team, reminds me of us with bringing through talent.
I think that is rather down to misinterpretation of the numbers. xPTS says that you're likely to get those many points based on the probabilities of your shots of you and your opponents converting into goals. However, a season is not long enough to rule out statistical noise which explains the differences to a large extent. That aside, there are also many factors that the model doesn't even consider. E. g., when you average 70% possession and the striker had 10 touches under immediate pressure all game, I guess he's less likely to convert the same chance compared to him having had 50 touches. And then there's of course player quality which isn't considered.