The Athletic: Only in an alternate reality should Real Madrid be Champions League winners

[didz]

The whole narrative of Liverpool utterly dominating the game hinges entirely on the fact that people just focus mindlessly on xG and other blind stats like that.

If a player has a free run at the keeper but doesn't manage to get a shot off in the end because the ball is just exactly nicked from him in the last nanosecond, it doesn't count as a "chance" in the statistics. It doesn't register in the xG figure. Meanwhile, a toothless shot from 50 yards out that would never go in will count as a chance in the eyes of xG. Which one was actually the bigger threat? Just because Real Madrid don't mindlessly hoof the ball goalwards every time they have the opportunity doesn't mean they aren't creating chances. Meanwhile, that's what Liverpool do, and that means the stats make it seem as though they dominate games much more than they really do.

Possession was exactly 50/50. Liverpool were only actually close to scoring a couple of times, but they kept taking wild, aimless shots at goal. Any team can do that. It's not a sign of being the better team; if anything, it can mean the opposite: they were unable to create proper chances so they just hoofed the ball in the direction of the goal anytime they could, hoping for the best. Meanwhile, Real Madrid had a number of highly threatening runs on goal that simply didn't happen to end with shots because they were intercepted at the last moment. If you let stats dictate your interpretation of a match, instead of whatever actually happens on the pitch, I guess I can see why you would think Liverpool were toying with Real Madrid.

Watching the game, at no point did I feel like Madrid were hanging on for dear life. They were just absorbing the pressure and playing on the counter while they focused on overcoming Liverpool's bullheaded, inhaler-fuelled aggression. It was more reminiscent of Mike Tyson's iconic swaying from side to side while his opponent flails wildly at him, missing. At the end of the day, Madrid scored two goals, one of which was ruled out on a silly technicality. Liverpool didn't score at all, and it's not as if Courtois had to make a dozen world-class saves. It's hardly the first time Madrid have a lower xG than their opponent but win by being more clinical. They've been doing that throughout the entire tournament. It's literally their style of play.

Sums up my view pretty nicely.

They had an xG of 2.19 from 24 shots - that's an xG per shot of 0.09. They would have had to do something pretty special to score and fair enough, Mane almost did. But it's almost like nobody told Liverpool that Courtois was pretty good!

Meanwhile Real Madrid were always looking for the extra pass, and ultimately won the game due to Trent going full AWB at the back post. The sort of panicked, uncoordinated defending for the offside(?) goal was not something you saw from Madrid anywhere on the pitch. Blood&thunder versus calm heads usually goes to the latter in finals.

xG is all well and good, but if your sample size is exactly one game, you need to go a little deeper and apply context.

 

[Zehner]

Liverpool had 6 times the amount of shots and thrice the xG if I'm not mistaken. Just sayin'

 

[Josep Dowling]

Liverpool had 6 times the amount of shots and thrice the xG if I'm not mistaken. Just sayin'

Read the posts before yours. Having a load of shots doesn’t mean controlling the game. Courtois made one good save in the first half with Mané hitting the post, and one in the second half saving the shot from Salah. The rest of the game Real soaked up the pressure which led to Liverpool endlessly shooting. You can control games defensively. Mourinho made an art of it.

Real had two goals, one ridiculously disallowed. Second half they had more than one counter attack where they should have scored from but they didn’t get a shot away. Those chances were far more dangerous than what Liverpool created.

 

[mu4c_20le]

Liverpool had 6 times the amount of shots and thrice the xG if I'm not mistaken. Just sayin'

I thought German football was efficient?

 

[ilrm]

As much as we all love to laugh at the Madrid circus, when they keep getting lucky, year after year, its probably something more than luck. A bit like we always got lucky under SAF. The biggest clubs instill a belief in the players that means unexpected things can happen.

Exactly - under SAF Ronaldo was constantly reminded of the previous holders of the No.7 shirt and what it meant to inherit this honor. A huge part of Ronaldo's motivation and then subsequently his "brand", was to become a significant thread within United's tapestry of history.

 

[thegregster]

It's just a bizzare cult at this stage.

Aldridge thinks all the Real fans are plastic.

I seen a journalist tweet that the "establishment" won the final. As if Liverpool were some sort of outsiders and were some sort of underdog.

For weeks before the final Real were written off as total outsiders despite knocking out the holders,PSG and the best team in the PL.

 

[Zehner]

I thought German football was efficient?

As most of your assumptions about German football, this is wrong

 

[Zehner]

Read the posts before yours. Having a load of shots doesn’t mean controlling the game. Courtois made one good save in the first half with Mané hitting the post, and one in the second half saving the shot from Salah. The rest of the game Real soaked up the pressure which led to Liverpool endlessly shooting. You can control games defensively. Mourinho made an art of it.

Real had two goals, one ridiculously disallowed. Second half they had more than one counter attack where they should have scored from but they didn’t get a shot away. Those chances were far more dangerous than what Liverpool created.

I watched the game only with one eye since I was on a birthday so I can't really judge. I was very surprised afterwards that it was so onesided statistically as well, my impression was it was a pretty open match.

But xG is a pretty good metric. Not perfect obviously but usually a very good indicator. But I also think it's a bit ignorant to say Real didn't deserve it. Especially since they're so good at grinding out results in such games.

 

[FujiVice]

What is it?

Athletic journalist. Just had his whole account banned for that tweet. He said "one of the people who was tear gassed was chronic alcoholic John Aldridge."

 

[DomesticTadpole]

Athletic journalist. Just had his whole account banned for that tweet. He said "one of the people who was tear gassed was chronic alcoholic John Aldridge."

That's not great.

 

[acolyte]

The Athletic is a pretty embarrassing publication. Not sure why it has a reputation for anything else.

Nonsense. Even the best publications let an embarrassing article through from time to time. The Athletic is leagues ahead of the vast majority of sports journalism. It's pure contrarianism to say otherwise.

 

[MalaysianRed7]

Read the article yesterday morning, and thought it was one of the cringiest to ever come out from any news publication. Awful journalism.

 

[Iker Quesadillas]

I watched the game only with one eye since I was on a birthday so I can't really judge. I was very surprised afterwards that it was so onesided statistically as well, my impression was it was a pretty open match.

But xG is a pretty good metric. Not perfect obviously but usually a very good indicator. But I also think it's a bit ignorant to say Real didn't deserve it. Especially since they're so good at grinding out results in such games.

xG is a metric meant to predict long-term goal scoring, but more limited in describing overall performance, especially in a single game, for a bunch of reasons.

In the case of this game one obvious reason is that it doesn't count offside goals. Benzema's disallowed goal was a big opportunity, include that and RM performance is better and they had better chances until the Vini goal.

The other thing is game state. Whe teams are down in goals they tend to take more shots and their xG goes up. It makes sense that Liverpool's xG increased by quite a bit after the goal (see here), since they were more desperate.

I also don't know that xG methodology can hold for a single game in these circumstances. I think by building the model with all this data from a gazillion games you are assuming no correlation between the events in a single game, but I dunno if that is true. In a game like this one, where a team has lots of low quality chances, I don't know if it's actually true that they'll convert those chances at the expected rate.

 

[Iker Quesadillas]

Something relevant to xG, low scoring chances, and general performance, is that there's some decent evidence that Liverpool allow other teams to take low quality shots.

 

[Longshanks]

Always the victims. Some things never change, its like Liverpool have never won a final were the other team made more chances.

Obviously in this alternate reality houlliers Liverpool didn't exist and 'the miracle of Istanbul' also didn't happen. Liverpool have never had the rub of the green or played to set up on the counter.

Bleating on about alternative realities and XG stats when the opposition had a perfectly good goal ruled out and you still couldn't win.

Honestly you would think Real scored an absoulte fluke and Liverpool missed sitters and courtouis made a string of incredible saves.

What actually happened was Liverpool made lots of half chances and took shots from poor posistions because real were defending well, courtouis had a good game but didn't do anything outrageous. Real made a scored the 2 best chances of the game with one of them being incorrectly ruled out (IMO).

You would of been surprised if Real didn't score there two good chances, but there was no Liverpool chances where you were genuinely surprised it didn't go in, they made 2 good chances but neither of them were as good as the Madrid chances.

Alternative reality? the only alternative reality is the one where Liverpool absolutely dominated Madrid, because they didn't if they had the probably would of won.

 

[The Brown Bull]

It’s always been more of a cult than a football club.I had a long road trip last Saturday and it was a full on Liverpool love in on every channel .
It appears most hacks are Liverpool fans as well.
Newstalk had the “ great” Mark Lawrenson in studio and they hung on his every word like the sad sycophants they are.He told several yarns about his days at the club which had them enthralled.He also told one about how some Pool supporting friends of his hired a private jet to get them to Intanbul. 3-0 down at half time after some debate they decided to leave.On the bus back to the airport it got to 3-2 and they turned around and got back in time to see the penalties.
Later on in this cringe fest Lawro stated Liverpool fans never ever leave the stadium early!
vomit.

 

[crossy1686]

Liverpool had 6 times the amount of shots and thrice the xG if I'm not mistaken. Just sayin'

Doesn't mean shit if you don't actually score.

 

[Zehner]

Doesn't mean shit if you don't actually score.

Of course it does

 

[Bestietom]

I remember losing an FA cup final to Arsenal after having 6 times the shots on goal that they had.
Arsenal lifted the cup and received the winners medals.

 

[crossy1686]

Of course it does

It really doesn't. People get too wrapped up on the "correct" way to play football, there's no trophy for "better xG than the other team", you have to score goals and that's the bottom line. Chelsea did it in a CL final against Bayern, Arsenal did it against United in an FA cup final, Portsmouth stopped United from winning a second treble in an FA cup semi final. There's loads of examples out there of teams that set up to frustrate and hit on the counter, it's a completely legitimate tactic that is still super effective. In 10 years time no one is going to even remember how Madrid won, but their name will still be on the trophy.

 

[Zehner]

It really doesn't. People get too wrapped up on the "correct" way to play football, there's no trophy for "better xG than the other team", you have to score goals and that's the bottom line. Chelsea did it in a CL final against Bayern, Arsenal did it against United in an FA cup final, Portsmouth stopped United from winning a second treble in an FA cup semi final. There's loads of examples out there of teams that set up to frustrate and hit on the counter, it's a completely legitimate tactic that is still super effective. In 10 years time no one is going to even remember how Madrid won, but their name will still be on the trophy.

It obviously does. If it would mean shit, we wouldn't be having a discussion about how one should interpret xG at this very moment. Moreover, people remember how a game has been won. See Guardiola's CL wins vs. Di Matteo's CL win e. g. According to your logic, there would be no "the better team lost" games.

Not saying Madrid didn't deserve it by the way. But regardless, your line of argument doesn't make sense.

 

[Daydreamer]

xG is a useful metric for spotting trends across time. For example, Brighton had pretty high xG last season, despite a modest league finish. That would suggest that if they started converting those chances they would perform well this season - which they did.

xG is less useful with small sample sizes (like a single match) for the reasons dansk and didz eloquently stated. In this case, Liverpool only actually had four shots on target. A lot of the xG differential came from their volume of shots, which doesn’t necessarily correlate to any sort of dominance.

 

[The Brown Bull]

It obviously does. If it would mean shit, we wouldn't be having a discussion about how one should interpret xG at this very moment. Moreover, people remember how a game has been won. See Guardiola's CL wins vs. Di Matteo's CL win e. g. According to your logic, there would be no "the better team lost" games.

Not saying Madrid didn't deserve it by the way. But regardless, your line of argument doesn't make sense.

Of course it makes sense! Everybody who follows football knows that there only one stat that matters.The goals scored stat!

 

[The Corinthian]

It obviously does. If it would mean shit, we wouldn't be having a discussion about how one should interpret xG at this very moment. Moreover, people remember how a game has been won. See Guardiola's CL wins vs. Di Matteo's CL win e. g. According to your logic, there would be no "the better team lost" games.

Not saying Madrid didn't deserve it by the way. But regardless, your line of argument doesn't make sense.

Only in an alternate reality does it matter. In the real world where most of us live, the name on the trophy matters.

 

[Iker Quesadillas]

Does creating more chances make a team 'better' though?
I can see it more in the semifinals against City, where not only did City create chances, but they actually scored 5 of them.

 

[jem]

The Athletic is a pretty embarrassing publication. Not sure why it has a reputation for anything else.

Yeah I'm starting to lose patience with it. The United coverage is particularly annoying.

 

[jem]

It does get rather exasperating. Every year, the Guardian runs a piece where fans give their verdict on the season (best player, biggest disappointment, etc.) And every single fecking year the LFC fan says that there are no disappointments/flops. I'm not exaggerating. Seriously what's the point of publishing something so blinkered? As an example, here's the one from last year, a year in which LFC barely qualified for the Champion's League: https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...21-fans-verdicts-part-two-liverpool-to-wolves

 

[mctrials23]

I would say that on the balance of it, Liverpool deserved to win it but it wasn't a dominating performance. Liverpool also looked leggy and slugging IMO.

If you want to talk about RM being jammy and not deserving it, talk about the PSG and City games. They could have been smashed by both of those teams over the two legs and rode their luck at both ends massively.

 

[jem]

I would say that on the balance of it, Liverpool deserved to win it but it wasn't a dominating performance. Liverpool also looked leggy and slugging IMO.

If you want to talk about RM being jammy and not deserving it, talk about the PSG and City games. They could have been smashed by both of those teams over the two legs and rode their luck at both ends massively.

I'd also argue that one of, if not the biggest, wins in LFC's history was the AC Milan CL Final in 2005, and they were absolutely dominated by Milan in the first half; I'd say they rode their Stevie G-inspired luck to get back into that one. And for all that, it was a glorious win for them, and rightly so. But you can't have it both ways.

 

[Chipper]

Does creating more chances make a team 'better' though?
I can see it more in the semifinals against City, where not only did City create chances, but they actually scored 5 of them.

No but yes but no but yes.

When it comes down to it the team that scores more wins, doesn't matter about anything else and you could easily argue that whoever scored more was better.

What's the best way to give yourself a good chance of scoring more than your opponents though? Creating more chances* than they do, either by creating lots for yourselves, restricting your opponents to very little or doing both at the same time.

*Well it's not necessarily more chances, creating just 2 excellent chances with open goals to tap into is obviously better than 4 or 5 half chances, and that's part of what xG can show us. Cumulative smaller chances can add up too to the point where you might begin to think a team would have been more likely to score than not.

Even taking into account xG, finishing and goalkeepers are still part of the game. You can create all you want but if your players shoot badly on the day then they failed at a big part of their task and at least when it comes to that element can be said to have played poorly. Then as is often said, goalkeepers are actually allowed to save shots and play well, and they're part of the team effort too. You'd rather not have to rely on them but saving shots is a very big part of what they're paid to do.

 

[crossy1686]

It obviously does. If it would mean shit, we wouldn't be having a discussion about how one should interpret xG at this very moment. Moreover, people remember how a game has been won. See Guardiola's CL wins vs. Di Matteo's CL win e. g. According to your logic, there would be no "the better team lost" games.

Not saying Madrid didn't deserve it by the way. But regardless, your line of argument doesn't make sense.

Who cares how a game was won? This kind of footballing snobbery is a weird new phenomenon. You don’t get to have a moral victory for being the “better team” if you lost the game. At the end of the day, if you squander multiple chances on goal and the other team take theirs, it’s got nothing to do with stats, xG, being hard done by etc, the other team did more to win the game, they had the better tactics and your players did the job they were supposed to do.

Winners win, losers talk about being the “better team” on the day.

 

[The Irish Connection]

I was quietly confident that if Madrid managed to weather the first 20 minutes of Liverpool intensity they’d win. They always looked dangerous and passed it brilliantly through the scouse press.

 

[Zehner]

Who cares how a game was won? This kind of footballing snobbery is a weird new phenomenon. You don’t get to have a moral victory for being the “better team” if you lost the game. At the end of the day, if you squander multiple chances on goal and the other team take theirs, it’s got nothing to do with stats, xG, being hard done by etc, the other team did more to win the game, they had the better tactics and your players did the job they were supposed to do.

Winners win, losers talk about being the “better team” on the day.

I care

And it has nothing to do with "football snobbery". Football is a sport which involves huge amounts of luck. Result oriented thinking is totally stupid in regards to football. Everything is about maximizing your chances. As the better team, it is about control and minimizing the factor of luck. It's no coincidence that the teams that play the most "attractive" way tend to win most of the trophies. Because "attractive" really just means, they have the best chances of winning. You don't build success on luck. That's what xG is trying to measure (and it is doing a relatively decent job at it, despite its various shortcomings).

 

[Zehner]

Of course it makes sense! Everybody who follows football knows that there only one stat that matters.The goals scored stat!

That's pub logic

 

[The Corinthian]

That's pub logic

It’s also factual.

 

[Iker Quesadillas]

The xG talk is a bit pointless because it's making the assumption that if chances had gone in, the game would have played similarly.

If there's one thing that Real Madrid have shown in this CL campaign is that when they are down in the scoreline and need to produce goals, they can. They were down by two against PSG, down by two against City, and down by one againt Chelsea, and always produced 2-3 goals to turn it around, in brief spurts. They did that by putting on more attacking, energetic players and turning the game into chaos. That was the plan B, or the 2nd part of the strategy, whatever you want to call it.

This final was the only game in which RM's plan A worked perfectly. They were never down in the scoreline and didn't concede a single goal. Hence Camavinga and Rodrygo didn't really play, and the subs were like-for-like.

 

[crossy1686]

I care

And it has nothing to do with "football snobbery". Football is a sport which involves huge amounts of luck. Result oriented thinking is totally stupid in regards to football. Everything is about maximizing your chances. As the better team, it is about control and minimizing the factor of luck. It's no coincidence that the teams that play the most "attractive" way tend to win most of the trophies. Because "attractive" really just means, they have the best chances of winning. You don't build success on luck. That's what xG is trying to measure (and it is doing a relatively decent job at it, despite its various shortcomings).

You create you’re own luck by overloading the box, getting bodies forward and taking risks. People want to see goals, and second to that, chances on goal, how you go about doing that is down to the manager and team. Ultimately there’s two ways to play football, with and without the ball. There’s no shame in knowing you’re better without the ball and taking advantage of that.

You know when a team should have won because they will have squandered big chances on goal, not because they had 6 half chances from outside the box and xG says 1.2. And if that’s the case they still deserve to lose based on the poor efforts on goal.

xG is like astrology for men. People like to comfort themselves when they lose by looking at it so they can take to social media and claim some footballing high ground.

 

[Annihilate Now!]

Listened to The Totally Football Show yesterday for the first time in ages, and even they were spouting this "Liverpool deserved to win" nonsense.

I'd say roughly 4 of the 5 best chances of the game fell to Madrid - yet Liverpool "deserved" it ... its ridiculous.

 

[Zehner]

You create you’re own luck by overloading the box, getting bodies forward and taking risks. People want to see goals, and second to that, chances on goal, how you go about doing that is down to the manager and team. Ultimately there’s two ways to play football, with and without the ball. There’s no shame in knowing you’re better without the ball and taking advantage of that.

You know when a team should have won because they will have squandered big chances on goal, not because they had 6 half chances from outside the box and xG says 1.2. And if that’s the case they still deserve to lose based on the poor efforts on goal.

xG is like astrology for men. People like to comfort themselves when they lose by looking at it so they can take to social media and claim some footballing high ground.

Sorry, but your line of argument doesn't fit the conclusion. Everything you argue actually speaks in favor of xG, not against it.

And actually, what you do is much closer to astrology. Coincidence is coincidence and pretending it's not or that you have any control over it is everything but logical.

 

[Iker Quesadillas]

Zehner what is your actual argument. All you've done here is repeat that Liverpool had higher xG than Real Madrid in ten different ways.