I don't think there is much likelihood of Leicester winning the league. It's just the press making headlines. The realistic goal for Leicester is Europe.
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Leicester City 19/20
- Thread starter charlenefan
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Oh yeah, absolutely. At the start of the season top six was the expectation for you and a bright start shouldn't change that.
It's a tired discussion but there is a lot of value to analysing xG and xGA, I didn't like it when United were massively outperforming ours last season and put my head in the sand when it came up but we did eventually regress to the mean as most teams do, when Leicester have been so substantially been outperforming it then it shouldn't be ignored. I do believe it'll even out eventually but that doesn't mean Leicester haven't put together a well-balanced and cohesive unit that are performing well and likely to continue doing so. Rogers is a very good manager, despite him managing Liverpool I oddly have a soft spot for him, I can see him getting another shot at a mega-club one day (or he might just make Leicester a mega-club, you never know).
Ya sadly it goes to down to club stature and name. If your clubs name was arsenal , city, United etc you would be in the title race. Since your name is Leicester it’s ignored because the general consensus is that you will fall off eventually.
I mean even in 15/16 it was February and no one thought you lot were contenders.
some thought we'd fail when we were handed the trophy, English football media do not like change, the big name pundits and writers don't want to have to do the work to learn about a club like us the same way they have the "big 6", they claim neutrality but act like fanboys most of the time
If they had ambitions, the could refuse. Bullshit? Where have they finished before winning the league and since. Have those teams finished above them even since they won it? Times have changed? When did that happen cause the teams in the top 5 have 99% of the time been the same. You continue to base your view in November, I'm gonna wait until May.
Well I’ll tell you it was by far the most impressive title win I have ever witnessed. It felt like a fairy tale and I remember specifically after the loss at anfield and the Emirates (I believe it was back to back) I thought you guys would begin to slide down the standings but you guys just kept going and won it. In today’s money infested football it was amazing to see something so unexpected.
Or we already had someone lined-up to take Harry's place? 80M is a very tempting offer, but there was no way you'd gotten him if we didn't feel that we could cope without. Especially this late in the transfer window. Now I'm not into the "winning the league" hype. I believe it's entering the dream territory, as our squad lacks depth and it would suppose Liverpool and Man City completely imploding.
We're sitting 2nd, having played 5 of the top 6 and getting 7 points out of 15, which isn't too shabby considering that we played Chelsea, Liverpool and MU away. Top 6 is a realistic objective, top 4 is a bit of a stretch but doable if we keep our players fit and maintain this level of performance. The rest is bullshit from the media who'll be going for our jugular as soon as we have a dip in form.
The latest StatsBomb podcast talks at length about Leicester and their underlying metrics.
What happened to Iheanacho? Him and Rashford had their breakthrough the same year but there is no longer a comparison to be made there. I can't remember if he was unlucky with injuries, or has he just stagnated? Boy reminds me a bit of Macheda
The bookies have Leicester 4 times more likely than either Spurs or Arsenal.
You could make good money if you really think it is unrealistic for Leicester to finish top 4
I would agree. Leicester's hot streak in front of goal is not sustainable as we have discussed in this thread. But even so, they are a very good side. If they are behind any other team outside of the top 3, then not by much. With their massive points advantage, they are rightfully odds-on for a top four finish.
People keep saying that about our chances but it’s not like we are scoring worldwide every week, the type of goals being scored can easily be maintained for the rest of the season why is why the XG obsession doesn’t wash
It's not about scoring worldies. It's the number of goals scored vs the quality of chances.
Leicester aren't creating a huge amount of chances and are behind Liverpool, City and Chelsea in that regard but are matching them for goals scored.
It would be absolutely unprecedented for them to keep it up at the current rate. That's not too say they can't continue to play well but they'll need to increase the number of chances being created to keep up the level of goals they're scoring.
If they don't increase the number of chances they are creating and continue to give up the same amount of chances to the opposition, the likelihood is that they will start drawing a lot more games in future.
And I’m telling are goals are nothing special, we are creating simple chances in the middle of the penalty box
At the end of the day xg and xga are just alternate realities. The only realities that counts is how many pts on the table your team has.
At best a good xg can give you some consolation that you're probably should be better than what the table suggests.
So i dont really think there's any merits in discussing xg and xga. Only losers brought up xg and xga, real winner simply brought up the table. Xg and xga are just "but" and "however" for the not so good.
If you're 4th you're 4th. Doesnt matter what your xg and xga. If you're 16th you can claim to have the best xg in the league but you're still 16th.
Do i think you can win the league? Hell no.
Do i think your current run is a fluke? Nope. Abit lucky perhaps but it's almost half the season you must be doing something right
How far ahead do i think you'd finish? Probably somewhere betweren 4th and 6th, but with arsenal and chelsea in limbo nothing is a given..you might finished 3rd if you're lucky
It's not about an alternative reality, look at it as a predictor.
The other 3 sides in the top 4 are performing much closer to the xG & xGA averages than Leicester and as such they would be a better bet to continue their form.
Top 4 xG & xGA projected over a 38 games season from performance so far
1. Liverpool xG +11.50 xGA -5.51
2. Leicester xG +27.61* xGA -16.31
3. Chelsea xG + +3.17 xGA +8.74
4. Man City xG -8.17 xGA +1.52
*42.24 adjusted to 27.61 after taking Southampton result out.
If you look back at Europe's top 5 leagues over the past 5 seasons the biggest over-performance of xG was Monaco with 30.96 (this is the best by a comfortable margin too, the other highest totals are 22-23 as far as I can see) when they won the title in 16/17. The biggest over-performance of xGA was United in 17/18 when their xGA was 15.54 less than expected
This means that for Leicester to continue this form they'd have put in the 2nd best over-performance of xG in the top 5 league in Europe over the past 5 years and the best over-performance of xGA across the top leagues in the same period.
All the xG model is telling you is that going forward this is exceptionally unlikely and a correction is much more likely offensively and/or defensively, which will impact their points accumulation negatively in comparison to the rate seen already this season.
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And you are converting them at an unsustainable rate, that's just a fact. We are only 12 games into the season so these freak results can happen over a short sample but they will revert back to a mean. xG is not an alternate reality, it has been proven a much better indicator of future performance than actual goals. There is a reason why clubs are investing lots of money into this data.
https://fbref.com/en/comps/9/Premier-League-Stats
I have found this recently. They have teamed up with Statsbomb and are the only site that uses their data (which is not publically available). Statsbomb is sort of the holy grail when it comes to expected goals as they don't rely on Opta but record every single action that happens on the pitch individually. That includes freeze frames that capture the exact position of every player on the field when a shot is taken.
Here's a video explaining it:
Can you express an overall disconnect from the mean i.e. xG +xGA?
E.g.
Top 4 xG & xGA projected over a 38 games season from performance so far
1. Liverpool xG +11.50 xGA -5.51
2. Leicester xG +27.61* xGA -16.31
3. Chelsea xG + +3.17 xGA +8.74
4. Man City xG -8.17 xGA +1.52
1. Liverpool 11.50 + 5.51 = 17.01 over-performance
2. Leicester 27.61 + 16.31 = 43.92 over-performance
3. Chelsea 3.17 - 8.74 = -5.57 under-performance
4. Man City -8.17 - -1.52 = -9.69 under-performance
if they were goals where I regularly thought "how did he score that" I would agree but they are SIMPLE CHANCES there is no reason to think that Jamie Vardy will suddenly start missing these chances as they are coming pretty much in clear space in the centre of the box often closer than the penalty spot.
Stop getting so wrapped up in stats and use your eyes and watch them, just because some geek gives something an arbitrary statistical value doesn't make it correct
What does simple chance mean? It's just random words, but there is an expectation (i.e. a number) behind them.
Let me ask you, how often do you think Vardy is going to put that exact same chance away? The same pass, the same positioning of everyone involved. Out of 100. Don't look up any stats, what is our intuition?
every single time, because he's Jamie Vardy, one of the best strikers around, had that chance fell to Ben Chilwell maybe 20 times because he's a left back and I don't expect him to be as good a finisher, and this is the fault with XG, its scores that chance the same way no matter who it falls to
Well, this is just not true. First of all you are vastly overestimating the difference in finishing ability. Jamie Vardy has scored 80 goals in the last five seasons for Leicester. His xG over the same time is 74.5 (24 goals, 22.5 xG in the title winning season). So he has barely outperformed his metrics and based on that he does not even seem to be an exceptional finisher. He is an exceptional player though because he gets in these goalscoring positions a lot which is what xG accurately measures.
Secondly, no shot has an expectation of 1. Unless you are literally standing on the goalline with no defenders around, and even then it is probably only 99.x%. The actual goal he scored has been given an xG value of 0.45 which makes it a huge chance which are pretty hard to come by. Even then, it is nowhere near 100%. But he didn't score 0.45 goals, he scored a full goal. So in that sense he overachieved (yes, that means that everytime you score from a shot you - by definition - overachieve). Put Chilwell in that same position and he will have a similar expectation. It is absolutely true that not all players are equally gifted when it comes to finishing but both Chilwell's and Vardy's true expectations will be hovering around that assigned number. Put Messi in that spot and he also won't be scoring that more than 50%, maybe 55% of the time.
Speaking of Messi, who I think we can agree is an exceptional finisher if not the best, has 176 goals in the same five seasons which he scored from ~145 xG. So even he only managed to outperform xG by roughly 20%. Vardy's numbers this season are more than 100% higher! As I said, the sample is small and this is nothing unusual. In fact it happens every season with various teams (remember Palace losing their first seven matches two years ago, that obviously wasn't a true representation of their performances either). But we do know it is not sustainable. Again, it has been mathematically proven that xG predicts future performances better than actual goals or actual points.
Another one who is on an amazing run is Robert Lewandowski who has scored in every single league and CL match this season. But looking at his stats from the last five seasons he actually scored slightly fewer goals than his expected goals would have merited. So he is technically not even an above-average finisher. But that doesn't mean he isn't one of the best forwards to play the game.
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ok what ever you keep living off the Excel spreadsheet I'll watch the games and have the actual football experts agree with me with regards Leicester this season, I cannot be bothered to keep arguing with another XG Zombie
But at what granularity is xG calculated?
And you can't argue that Chilwell and Vardy would score the same (give or take a few) amount of times in that situation. Would, say, Phil Jones' xG be the same? Well, it would I guess, but should it be? Surely not.
if xG was left to what it should have been, just another analytical tool in a coaches armoury to prepare and set up his team it would be fine, but people like Michael Cox jumped on it as a reason why Burnley would fall away when they came 7th, they didn't, he was using it on Leicester at the start of the season but has stopped as he realises he would look like an idiot, it is just a stat, could be an interesting one but too many people think it is vitally important when it simply isn't, its just something that was invented by a statistician looking to make a few quid
xG isn't the be all and end all but we've learnt the hard way that it's a good indicator of future performance (Mourinho's 2nd place and Solskjaer's winning run showed significant overperformance).
Leicester will be very difficult to catch with their points on the board and lack of injuries to key players.
Leicester will be very difficult to catch with their points on the board and lack of injuries to key players.
Michael Cox is quite overstated in his views. I found it surprising he's part of that dream team set up for The Athletic.
they went after pretty much everyone as they needed a large writing staff, they took Rob Tanner from the Leicester Mercury, I didn't rate him much there but he is so much better with more freedom to write proper stories instead of click bait
It's not unrealistic, but it will require us to perform like this the whole season and Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea and yourselves to stay in your current form. If I'm not wrong, we have at the moment the best defense and the second best attack in the league. We are a good team, what you see on the pitch didn't start when Rodgers took over but is the result of years of hard work, mistakes and masterstrokes included, from the board to the scouting system. However the current level of performances is insane and I'd be highly surprised if our form doesn't dip at some point. Stranger things happen though...
Burnley did fall away, they reverted close to the mean the season after, got 14 less points and finished 15th. They were only outperforming xGA by a significant amount that season too whereas Leicester are outperforming both xG & xGA by a massive amount currently.
That's impossible for me to answer because we have no significant data on Phil Jones attempting shots. Which also means the likes of him are not very well represented in the dataset because central defenders don't get into these positions very often. Intuitively I'd say that he will score that same chance much less often because well, it's Phil Jones. But the xG model has shown that finishing ability is not nearly as important as people think. We don't have to look any further than Lewandowski who I have already mentioned and is recognised by everyone as one of the best in the world. Yet he has scored slightly less than expected in the last five years (though this season's run is turning this around). The stat is incredibly accurate. The notion that Vardy puts that chance away 100% of the time, and Chilwell only 20% is outlandish and not based in reality. Penalties only have an xG of 0.76 for starters.
The guy who runs xgstats has manually watched and recorded every single shot taken in the Premier League, Championship, League One and Two this season (that's close to 20000 shots!) and assigned it an expectation. His aggregated sum of all shots is 1568 xG. Actual goals scored: 1562. That's quite amazing.
This was put on the BBC website. You guys made it sound like we massively far ahead of the second placed team but we only slightly higher conversion rate than Man City and Liverpool. So nothing out of the ordinary.
This title is even beyond Man City, never mind ourselves. Remind yourself Liverpool have won every single game except one "draw". Then think how many games they need to lose for someone like us to catch up, and we would need to go on an amazing run as well.
The press are hyping up something that is almost a forgone conclusion at this stage, Liverpool would need a massive collapse to not win it.
That’s not xG it’s shots conversion as far as I can see. It’s a different thing.This was put on the BBC website. You guys made it sound like we massively far ahead of the second placed team but we only slightly higher conversion rate than Man City and Liverpool. So nothing out of the ordinary.
I agree its different, but the BBC chart shows the xG system is quite flawed if it thinks we should have a lot less goals. The two biggest factors in the likely hood of scoring are the number of shots you get and the quality of the shots. The top 3 EPL teams in that chart have very good coaches and attacking players so the good conversion rate is expected, the fact our conversion rate is not much different means our shots wont be too much different either, given we have all scored a similar amount of goals.
It doesn’t show that it’s flawed. xG is an advanced metric and adds much more context than you get in a more linear stat like the one you posted. It measure quality of chances from the historical likelihood of scoring from such chances.
xG this weekend said that you performance against Brighton was your most dominant of the season except for Southampton, for example. If you keep performing like that then you’ll be much more likely to maintain your position.
It was still wrong though. Its more complex but doesn't make it accurate.
You know what is interesting, we were terrible in the Brighton game. The MOTD highlights were nothing like the reality, we were like someone trying to get a 0-0 for most of the second half, when we scored, the goal came out of nowhere. Probably one of our worst two performance's of the season yet we had a healthy xG. What lost Brighton the game is they were useless in the final third, no shots on target, but they had a ton of chances to create something.
I think that you are missing what the model does, it only can help suggest what is more likely to happen going forward, it can’t tell you what will actually happen. The fact is that some teams will significantly outperform their xG or xGA over the course of a season. Often you will see a correction in the next season if it doesn’t happen during one, however. See the last time Chelsea won the title or when United finished second for examples of this.
Looking at the stats for the game at the weekend and they had 7 shots (a very low number) and you had 19. This model excludes the penalty but still tell a similar story.
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