Are you implying managers don't say things fans want to hear?The fan fiction is absolutely insane. How in earth you can come up with this is astounding.
You really think Amorim has say there snd thought “YEAH! If they ask me this, I’m going to say that, the fans will LOVE IT!”
This is amazing.
Failed miserably yet there’s like around 5 weeks left of the window…. Riiiiight
Ruben Amorim | 2025-26
- Thread starter Cheimoon
- Start date
We should get a result against Fulham, I’d be astounded if we lose to them again.
True, we looked worse for me in 23/24.
The biggest over performance of xPts in the last 5 years by any club https://understat.com/league/EPL/2023
Potentially. But that was his decision and the club backed him. Even ETH had to make a compromise and took Sancho on the tour and played him.
At the end of the day his main responsibility is to coach the team. He has to work with what he has until the club can buy more players. That's the reality of literally every coach out there.
How we looked is largely irrelevant. It is relevant only in the context of how others also looked.
‘xPts’ just sounds like yet another invention by football nerds. Who determines how many points a team is supposed to get from a match?
Yep, and we looked worse than the rest. The stats backed up my eye test. The sheer amount if shots we conceded was ridiculous.
If you think points at the end of the season perfectly ranks the best teams fair enough. I disagree.
I dont understand why people post about xPts as it is a pointless stat that means nothing, the season we finished 8th our squad was wrecked by injuries and we had to play a lot of games with no real defence so it would have been impossible for anyone to accuratly predict our xPts.
I mean that's like saying the sky is blue. All fans do this without exception. It is why clickbait is not only so popular these days but basically the only way to survive.
Pointing that as part of the problem is just strange to me.
I don't even agree that our online fans are mostly negative either. Go to reddit or any social platform and don't fixate on the negativity. You will see that the overall sentiment is mostly positive. The reddevils subreddit defended Ten Hag vehemently until the very end. You’d get downvoted into oblivion for suggesting he should be sacked. They are very much pro Amorim now as well. Redcafe is probably the place where people are the most critical overall.
I just don't see the negativity of the fanbase as being a relevant thing. Especially when you can't really blame them considering the cirucumstances.
Very good move by Ruben to mention the World cup. Sends a clear message - if nobody gonna buy you, you better work your arse off, you ain't getting to no world cup fecking around on the bench and in training.
Literally on the next day we get a PR release by Antony saying "he's now open to Saudi move".
Well played, Ruben.
Al-Whatever, your turn.
Literally on the next day we get a PR release by Antony saying "he's now open to Saudi move".
Well played, Ruben.
Al-Whatever, your turn.
xPts has some merit although it is more of a retrospective narrative tool. There is just way too many limitations in it. xG is a lot more relevant.
But the conclusion seems strange to me. People are saying it was the biggest overperformance of all teams and yet at the same time we all acknowledge that Ten Hag used suicide tactics and had tons of injuries. So either he was a magician to extract that much out of the squad, winning a cup in the process. OR, the players are not bottom table quality as it is being suggested.
Ruben is the right manager to send the firm signal to the underperforming players, however he is the wrong manager to maximise the potential of this team due to his insistence on playing 3-4-3 which this squad was not built for.
Is a severely underperforming manager the right one to signal anything to underperforming players? More a 'do as I say, not as I do' approach
Fixed
Yeah I suppose you’re right. But I feel like certain fanbases are a little more optimistic in general than ours. Obviously we’ve had a bad period, but it feels like there’s enough to complain about without letting the media play us for reactions. We’ve definitely lost that us vs them mentality that once helped us stay united (excuse the pun) and I feel like it compounds the issues further for our players. It’s not a good environment to be successful and our fans need to realise this. Instead of perpetuating the negativity, why not flip it on its head and try to celebrate the positives and, you never know, it might just help us out a bit on the pitch/in the transfer market too.
He/we... tomato/tomato. Makes no difference.
Hojlund/Zirkzee
The fanbases that are more optimistic are generally the ones that have no expectations and never had. The most demanding and easily negative fanbases are all supporting big and successful clubs. In general United and Liverpool are two exceptions when it comes to their fanbases both are way more forgiving and patient than the other historically successful clubs.
Careful with that toxic positivity!
Seems to me you can either pick up a stick and beat the manager with it whenever possible, or you can try to see what he is trying to do and support it. I prefer the latter. We will all know the outcome in time.
Being constantly negative though isn’t helping anything. It feels like a constant dark cloud over the club. And even in times of struggle, the scousers for example get behind their team and don’t let the media play them like fiddles. But too many of our lot just get played like puppets. Honestly, what is the point in getting all worked up like a little toddler over some bullshit story in the media?
Really it’s a good job we have an element of the fanbase that is so forgiving as it balances out the absolute moaning cnuts we also have.
I don't agree. Generally speaking this fanbase isn't constantly negative and in the context of how incompetent a large amount of people have been in and around the club the level of negativity is justified and fairly mild. If we look at the part of the fanbase that has the most impact on the mood which are regular matchgoers, they are among the most supportive and generous fans around, especially the travelling fans, those have been consistently great.
I would personally argue that the limited amount of negativity has been one of the reasons behind the lack of urgency from executives and owners who know that they will never be dragged over the coals by this fanbase. It's one of the most comfortable job in elite sport, United fans don't even have the gumption to vote with their wallets.
Now to some extent I understand why some may think that the level of negativity is high, I suspect that it's due to how much more negative people are compared to the SAF days but people need to keep in mind that pre 2013 United was in its own bubble of positivity.
He just got very lucky to finish that high. Not much more to it. Certainly no indication he's a magician. We all watched the games.
He was lucky to finish that high because of the ridiculous number of injuries we had, without all those injuries we would probably have finished higher.
He's still going on about ten hag
Asking "who" decides is a complete misrepresentation of course, like it would be one guy just plucking a number out of thin air based on vibes.
It's a calculation based on expected goals, and expected goals against, which is calculated based on how many shots you have and where those shots are being taken from, position of defenders etc.
The problem with the people who disregard stats, is I can guarantee they've finished watching a game of football before now, and they've said "damn we got unlucky to day, we had all the best chances and somehow lost", or "damn we got lucky to day, the opposition were all over us and we somehow got the win".
Is Xg a perfect? No, but any football fan can tell you the team with the most chances and the best chances don't always win, it's called variance. xG, xPTS vs actual results is just an approximation of that, that over a large enough sample will likely bare out some reality.
We were regularly conceding 20+ shots per game under ETH and barely created chances. We don't even need stats to tell us 8th was very flattering, we watched the games and we were genuinely dreadful.
The issue with xPts stuff is that it's very selective. The Liverpool team that won the league with 99 points, finished 2nd with 98 points, and won the European Cup, wildly overperformed their xPts. But nobody thinks Klopp was just lucky and that the Liverpool squad was just OK.
United had a ludicrously high xGA in 23/24 due to ETH's tactical approach, but did not concede the corresponding amount of goals, that's why they overperformed xPts so much. That problem was not present in 24/25, the xGA went down a lot, it was still too high though.
None of this is true. Football has spawned a huge internet business for nerds in recent times but the game is not mathematics, and will always be art over science. If a team is constantly unlucky, they are not good enough. When we have played teams like Spurs historically, and they have played better but everyone expects us to win the game, which we do - what is the stat for that? Were Spurs ‘expected to win’ because of their mathematics? Or were United expected to win because of who they are?
When there are title races and teams pull out a ‘performance of Champions’ by digging in and winning late, how many times do they need to do that before it is not luck? And why did everyone deep down know that the other team probably wasn’t going to win? Why has there been a saying ‘not to write United off’ in games for decades? Or why do people predict Real Madrid to win in the CL despite how they have played? I’ve watched countless City games during their dominance where they have looked like they could drop points, but deep down, everyone expects them to win. To sit at a computer and say a team didn’t deserve to be champions because they went on a winning run where they ground out results is nonsensical, for example.
Xg is a load of nonsense, which should have been clear from the beginning when the conversation was constantly about how someone ‘outperformed’ or ‘underperformed’ their xG. And even if we are going to play this xG game - what was the xG of these ‘20 shots a game’ we faced all season? We finished 8th over 38 games because that’s what we deserved. We could have even finished higher, we didn’t exactly make a late surge to finish 8th. It was more the other way around, we were fighting for a CL spot a few weeks earlier. To say that we actually deserved to finish 15th because a calculator said so is ludicrous.
Watch football matches, and decide for yourself.
None of that explains why xG is nonsense, though. All it really shows is that we, as humans, tend to look for patterns and are often swayed by results. The data clearly indicates there's a scientific basis behind xG, and the 'eye test' may not be the most reliable method. That said, xPts is probably too limited to be of much practical use.
It's funny you call stats "internet business for nerds", as if football clubs aren't analysing data and have analytics departments. Maybe you should tell professional football clubs to sack their analytics and data staff as they're a waste of money?
Firstly, I never used the word "deserved".
If your argument is the team who scores the most goals in any given game are deserved winners, irrespective of who had the most chances or better chances - fair enough, that's a completely reasonable position to hold.
The points you're ignoring is, the more chances you create over a season, and the less chances you allow the opposition to have, the more likely you are to finish higher in the table. So teams and fans have a very vested interest in how many chances your team is creating and how many they're conceding, because it's going to have a huge impact on where your team finishes in the table.
The 2 pieces to being a successful football team
1. Consistently create more chances and better chances than your opposition
2. Consistently be more clinical in finishing the goalscoring chances than your opposition
If you do not consider the first point to be important, this is why you finish 8th one season, 15th the next - because your performances are consistently shite - one season you'll finish higher because you're more clinical than the opposition, the next season you'll finish lower because the variance when it comes finishing is not in your favour this time.
If you want to be consistently finishing top 4 as a minimum, season after season, you cannot have xG and xGA figures of a lower half team. That's just common sense.
Secondly, I do watch our football matches, and I thought we performed mostly at the standard of a lower half team, given the amount of chances the opposition had, and the amount of chances we had. That was what anyone's eyes would have told them if they watched our games. The xG statistics just happen to reflect what our eyes were telling us.
If he gets in a striker his chances of success will naturally go up, even if he's not the guy to turn us around. Everytime I log on to check the news though, it feels like Mbuemo all over again. Feck all happening, most likely until we sell somebody. Which also seems like a long ass stretch for this club.
A mistake that people often make is that any given xG is only strictly correct for the average player in the data pool. The point of xG is to evaluate the quality of the chance more than the probability, so in principle you can't use it to state that x or y should have happen in p particular event. As an illustration there are low quality chances that are relatively high for Palmer, similarly there are high quality chances that have a lower conversion rate against Alisson. The interesting use of xG, xA, xPTs is to tell you whether you are theoretically on the right track collectively but it should never be used to predict anything or rewrite history.
As an example in 23/24 we weren't lucky, while we were collectively poor it's important to highlight that it is our superior individuals that allowed us to finish 8th, not luck.
As an example in 23/24 we weren't lucky, while we were collectively poor it's important to highlight that it is our superior individuals that allowed us to finish 8th, not luck.
The part you nerds don’t understand is that you finish where you deserve to finish. If the stats say otherwise, there is something wrong with the stats.
The second part is that you can finish higher, not just lower, based on probabilities.
The thing is xPts can’t account for different game states. Extrapolating a points total based on whether team a or b had more xG doesn’t factor in what happens if an xG chance is taken instead of missed. If you go 1-0 down do you raise your game? Maybe it spurs you on to work harder, win a penalty and suddenly it’s 1-1 and your xG is now way higher.
That's only true for someone that has no idea about what they are talking about.
So you believe points are the perfect representation of how good teams are over a season. I disagree but each to their own.
Actual points are a much more reliable indicator that a completely nonsencical xPts stat
That'll be why any bookmaker in the land predicts us to finish above Forest next season.
You're out of your depth here.
There is no perfect representation but points are part of the equation and the closest to reality, the other stat is goal difference.
One of the issues with xPts, xG or xA, is that it relies on the notion of average player, that's the reference for the data. If you have above average players your actual team xG or XPts is going to outperform the average one and the opposite is true for below average players.
We will see.
Ugarte and Bruno as a pair (if that is the plan) is 2 players lacking positional discipline. Ugarte is a ball chaser, can be good at it, but he will often over commit high up the pitch and lacks the running power to get back. Put Bruno alongside him and that is an exploitable pair defensively, Mount as a 10 might be the option, but would have to giving a lot of help in deeper areas.
So we had above average players in 23/24 but in 24/25 we didn't? Ok.
His comments regarding Kobbie are good ones, if Bruno starts and plays always it doesn't leave a place for him imo though