How does football work? | | New Republic

There are characters in my book, Michael Carey, helped spread the expected goals. He’s been working for his SB Nation for a while and has been blogging and tweeting about xG for a long time. He came from baseball. He’s Red He’s a big Sox fan and was on the message board at the time. [baseball analytics blog] Fire Joe Morgan was in his prime, arguing with people about statistics. After watching the World Cup, I began to wonder if the same things that were applied to baseball could be applied to soccer. In baseball, the first task of all is getting runs. You can see that the run has been recorded. So you work back out of it. We want to find something that creates a run. All the work of early baseball analysis starts here. As we all know, looking at batting average doesn’t give you the full picture because it doesn’t include walks, which are a big part of how you actually get to base.

Soccer is no different. Start with your goals. See if your goals can predict future goals, but they don’t. Not at all. But you look to the shots. Shots prove to be more predictive than the goals themselves. you run into some problems. Keighley found a Tottenham player who took a ton of shots from outside the box. They go against the idea that better teams have to shoot more. That team didn’t give up a lot of shots either, but the shots they did were often pretty chances. enter. That’s what you want to know: Which team created better scoring chances in the game. Managers have been talking about it for 100 years. That’s how Caley came about it. And a few other people did as well. I think all these people got to it in a different way. If you have an analytical mindset, you will approach it in the same way. It means breaking down the goal into its constituent parts and finally understanding it.

It is important that the expected goal is not the reality. You are not always the expected goal. This does not mean that a team like Leeds will automatically be his 12th best team. They’re just better at predicting quality than any other team. I look at football season that way, as if a baseball season spans his 38 games. We know the playoffs are very random and it’s fun. Take the Champions League final as an example: 24 [from Liverpool] shot to 5 [from Real Madrid]Depending on the model, the expected goals ranged generally between 2 and 0.6 in favor of Liverpool. Obviously, Liverpool didn’t win. Real Madrid took chances and the keeper made an unexpected play. So, the game ended as it was. The reason for everything else is a very small thing that happened: Luka Modric he made one great pass. That’s what the game is about. But that goes against the story many people want to read. There is no reason to be angry and I cannot say that Liverpool are a team in danger.