Thanks again Andy.
So it’s not some sort of coaching tool then that makes our manager even more aware that teams below are more likely than not to overtake us?
Is Calum Hayes more in the manager’s ear because of this thing?
I’m too old for this by the looks of it.
It’s certainly a tool to assess performance. Long term, if your xG scores are good your actual results will be good too. So I’d hope there is someone at Walsall looking at improving our xG.
The owners of Brighton (Tony Bloom) and Brentford (Matthew Benham) have used xG to win lots of money gambling. I also read Benham recruited smith from Walsall because our xG stats were so good under Smith.
As touched on above with the notts county goal, the skill is assessing the xG of a particular chance. If your model can calculate the probability better than another model, you have a better way of assessing which team is better, which is very useful when trying to forecast who will win the next match.
I would have thought Calum Hayes would be feeding this back, yes. Whether he has his own model, I don’t know.
Andy, thank you for holding the fort while I was sleeping in the great southern land, and you are 100 per cent correct about Tony Bloom and Matthew Benham, both of whom have professional bookmaking/gambling/trading backgrounds like me, albeit at a considerably higher level.
Brentford is the most administratively interesting club in England’s top four divisions and it is not even close. Why? Because Brentford’s philosophy, which Benham has implemented at other clubs overseas, the most famous of which is Danish team Midtylland, is the optimal way to run a side with finite financial resources. Benham has employed sabermetrics - watch Moneyball for a Hollywood backgrounder into a subject that revolutionised American sports administration - and other hard-headed, sensible strategies to get Brentford within touching distance of the Premier League without breaking the bank.
Brentford, Midtylland, Benham, sabermetrics, xG - all of this is relevant to the discussion taking place across multiple threads about the future direction of Walsall and, unfortunately, the obvious lack of any management nous currently. I wished the various trolls who deliberately misrepresent the posts of their fellow UpTheSaddlers members - either that or they are incredibly stupid - would make themselves knowledgeable about the likes of Brentford and Midtylland before spouting their inaccuracies.
Football is a low-scoring game - English professional football matches average about 2.5 goals - and, consequently, results of games are subject to high degrees of variance. The same goes for other sports in which there are relatively few scores, with another good example being ice hockey.
A goal in football is a significant event, one that is much more significant than, say, a touchdown in American football, a goal in Australian football or a try in rugby league. And often the results of football matches do not correlate with the run of play in them. It is one of football’s great beauties that territorial dominance, etc. does not necessarily translate into scoreboard supremacy, but it makes it one of the most difficult sports in which to accurately assess the merits of teams. This is where xG comes in.
Take a look at Experimental 3-6-1’s infographic pertaining to the recent Premier League game between Brighton and Crystal Palace. The Eagles beat the Seagulls 2-1, but you will struggle to find a fair-minded Crystal Palace supporter who thinks their side had the better of the play against one of their fiercest rivals. xG attempts to eliminate the biases present in football fans and present an objective dataset, one that in this instance argues Brighton deserved to win by two goals, not lose by one.
More interesting posts/threads like this please
It wasn’t totally tongue in cheek but I am still highly sceptical about it.
As has been said, the beauty of football is its unpredictableness - so Liverpool can go 68 games unbeaten at home then lose 3 on the trot, teams can win games without actually having a shot on target, have 20+ shots but still get nil because the opposition keeper has a blinder, or score 10 goals from 10 shots (and before anyone says it, no I’m not on about when Liam Roberts is in goal!)
The xG figures might be useful (although not infallible) for gamblers, and maybe for the new breed of scientific coaches to gauge how well their methods are going, but I don’t think they are that much use to the typical fan sat in the stand watching a game they are invested in through emotional attachment rather than mathematical reasoning. As with attendances, revenue, size or quality of squad, media savviness of the manager, etc, if we just go on the numbers then we might as well not bother actually playing games but just decide it all on paper up front.
Means wim cack mate
Some lower league pundits used our dodgy xG stats to suggest we were in a false position following our barnstorming start to the 2018-19 season.
Sadly, they turned out to be right.
Here is Experimental 3-6-1’s infographic for the Exeter game. I slept through the match because it kicked off at 3:00 Perth time, but I did see the teams before I went to bed and, consequently, endured several nightmares. My condolences to those who watched the game.
And here is Experimental 3-6-1’s League Two table based on its xG/xP data. On merit, Walsall should have been 11-9-6 under Darrell Clarke and the Saddlers should be 0-2-3 under Brian Dutton.
Apologies for the quality of the screenshot; go to https://xgstats.com/what-is-xg/ for the online version.
Those scientific coaches are the ones who are being successful in spite of their financial disadvantages, which means they are exactly the type of people whom clubs such as Walsall need in senior positions in order to prosper in the 21st century. Sorry, Andy, but attitudes such as yours with regards to xG and other metrics - both on the terraces and in the boardroom - are what have held back the Saddlers for decades and will continue to do so unless there is a philosophical shift before it is too late and Walsall ends up in oblivion. It never ceases to amaze me how boards appoint proven failures and/or uninspiring novices to manage football teams; they would not do the same in their non-football businesses because, if they did, they would not have the financial clout to secure a seat on the club’s board.
The Saddlers desperately need forward-thinking individuals at the head of their football and executive departments because there are no progressive people in the organisation currently. Leigh Pomlett has lost me and I have no words - at least not nice ones - for Stefan Gamble, Daniel Mole and their underlings. Bloody hell, I listen to the opposition commentaries on iFollow most of the time because the Walsall ones are as bad as the football, whether they feature BBC Radio WM’s Tom Marlow calling every non-Saddlers player some derivative of 26-year-old Carlisle-born former Barrow, Bolton and Burton man or the club’s own employees talking garbage that insults my intelligence.
And how we, Walsall’s long-suffering fans, could do with a good journalist or two covering the club because the current ones and those of the recent past are stealing a living every bit as much as Danny Guthrie was. Please do not give me any rubbish about the likes of Liam Keen and, before him, Joseph Masi having to toe the line or risk having their access cut off. What access? When was the last time any Express & Star reporter broke a real story regarding the Saddlers? And how many times have you seen Keen tweet asking for help because he did not see what happened during a game? It is a weekly occurrence, much like Marlow making the same introductory gag about appearances and goals. The only thing Darrell Clarke got right during his Walsall tenure was treating Keen with contempt.
That’s an excellent link, and the Craig Burley interview is brilliant
I’m with Craig Burley on this ( always trust an old saddler).
More phoney baloney from Opta, they must be running out of stuff to flog.
No it doesn’t. It’s like having a mate sitting next to you the whole game, and any time the opposition has the ball in your half he starts going “I think they are gonna score, I think they are gonna score, I think they are gonna score” then when it goes out for a goal kick going “I don’t think they are gonna score, I don’t think they are gonna score, I don’t think they are gonna score”
But of course we have to watch football like the matrix these days. If there isn’t a number for it it didn’t happen 
It’s not inaccurate, it’s just nothing you couldn’t judge with your own eyes.
What a pointless measurement.
Why? Why do you think that?
The only measurement that counts is number of goals scored.The difference between that and expected goals ratings is failure to score.
Yes, but by understanding xG, you can improve ‘the only measurement that counts’
And you don’t seem to get that your xG can be lower than actual goals, so it’s not just failure to score.
Because I do 
Well, that’s your right. But it’s not pointless
