Norwich have Kim Hellberg on their radar

[cmajack]

It’s bollox. I always think of shots on target.
Player hits a thunderbolt and the ball is going in until the keeper makes a world class save.
Five minutes later player stubs his toe taking a shot and the ball trickles up to the keeper which he stops with his little finger.
Both go into the shots on target category.
It’s utter nonsense.

Love to have seen what Bill Shankly and Brian Clough would have made of this Xg bullshit.

 

[Skippyjack]

The dinosaurs are out tonight. It only takes a quick Google search to show you how xG stats are created and while I don't think they are as important as some do, they are a better yardstick of chances created than shots on target (as Daz ironically pointed out above).

As ever with statistics, xG is only as useful if the people analysing them know what they're doing. Brentford and Brighton are rightly praised for their stellar recruitment and you're deluding yourself if you think they don't extensively use analytics/statistics to make those signings.

Brighton and Brentford use a players position selection process, nothing to do with xG really.. but you obviously don't know what you're on about.. xG is f*cking stupid, it's solely based around someone's opinion on whether a chance is any good, you don't ask a sample of 100 people to come to the supposed correct conclusion within one minute.. the evidence is biased, because it's only one person's interpretation of events unfolding in front of their eyes in their opinion.. it's an arrogant way to look at a football match

 

[Andrew - North Hill]

It's really not hard to understand xG, you don't have to be a "nerd".

How many times have you come away from the Vetch/Liberty saying "how the **** did we win that, they battered us" or "how the **** did we not win that, we battered them". xG or xGA is basically a way of making sense of that.

It's a way of trying to measure how lucky or unlucky you were in a match, or even a season. If you are consistently overperforming on either count, you've got a problem on your hands (see Cardiff).

Again, I'm sympathetic to the argument that for one off games ultimately it doesn't mean all that much. But that still doesn't render it completely useless as a metric.