Register

Already have an account? Login

Ix Techau Evil Mastermind 14,278 pts

The Expected Goals (ExpG/xG) method and a prediction league table

Posted by Ix Techau over 8 years ago · 7 replies

We've started dabbling in the xG method to calculate predictions for the Premier League. This is a relatively new statistical analysis that essentially takes shot statistics across all teams and players and calculates the chance of them scoring. xG is an opinionated interpretation, so the more people involved the better it will become.

If you're interested in being part of our xG team, please participate in this thread. If you haven't heard of xG, it is basically the next-generation holy grail of football analytics. You can read more about it here, or here, or here.

We have a new experimental league table, but keep in mind that we are still tweaking and fiddling all the numbers, so it's most likely way off at this stage.

Stats nerds, assemble.

7 Comments

Omglol 3,323 pts
Posted over 8 years ago by Omglol

The idea in the near future is to break it down by round, so you can go down into detail or time spans.

Thats what i was looking for. I love this neat things you are adding.

Was wondering if you will add the other league tables. And, some kind of average league performance, and top teams compare to the league average, with "expected performance".

Not sure if i'm able to express what i want, or make sense. Take for example La liga, after first 5 teams there is huge drop in performance from the rest of the teams compare to EPL where 10-12 teams hold up better. So Barcelona goal or expected goal in such league is worth less. Now i don have time to average everything, and la liga has 2 games less then EPL so that may be the factor of my wrong assumption.

Ix Techau Evil Mastermind 14,278 pts
Posted over 8 years ago by Ix Techau

Not sure if i'm able to express what i want, or make sense. Take for example La liga, after first 5 teams there is huge drop in performance from the rest of the teams compare to EPL where 10-12 teams hold up better. So Barcelona goal or expected goal in such league is worth less. Now i don have time to average everything, and la liga has 2 games less then EPL so that may be the factor of my wrong assumption.

Gotcha. Both xGs and teams should be differently weighted based on who the previous goals have been scored or conceded against. If a team concedes a lot of goals that are from "weak" shot zones, we could draw the conclusion that it's not a great defensive team.

Other leagues have to wait for this, but could definitely experiment with this type of ranking on the Premier League table, and then take weak/strong xGs into account for the prediction league.

You are not logged in!

Join Arsenal Report today to improve your experience using the site with thread subscriptions + custom profile with cover image and favourite XI + the ability to post comments, polls and AMA questions.