![[The Athletic] How Premier League teams' expected goals have changed](https://alien.top/pictrs/image/9fd6d991-aa7e-4169-837b-7ca83f928266.webp){kind=link}
Chelsea and Everton the “most improved” while both having a generally awful start to the season is a fun indication of how useful xG is.
I’ve always been so apprehensive at how quickly the public adopted it as the end-all-be-all stat. It’s flawed and subjective (the fact different sites have different models). It’s similar to how basketball fans use the TS% to settle debates nowadays.
Chelsea and Everton the “most improved” while both having a generally awful start to the season is a fun indication of how useful xG is.
Except Everton have been pretty good and are easily the most underrated team in the leauge. I’d argue they were pretty unlucky and were shit aginst Luton which apparently is the only relevant game of the season for judging them on. If anything, their quality on the pitch compared with their xG is a lot more similar than when compared to how many points they’ve gained.
xG is worthless for you because you couldn’t finish of a virgin who’d been edging for 8 hours.
>Active in /r/Genshin_Impact
>Insults others serial prowess
Excuse me while I go die laughing
Chelsea finished 12th last season and are 10th now
Everton finished 17th last season and are 14th now without the deducted points
The teams have both improved
I think this should be viewed at the end of the season.
Because every time I’ve watched either Everton or Chelsea they’ve looked much better than they did last season, and typically performances come before results.
But if you were to ask me the two most improved clubs in terms of performance this season I would say Chelsea and Everton, closely followed by us.
Everton and Chelsea with the best development, Manchester United with the worst
That some people cant read such a simple graph scares me. It even shows above the graph which part of the club tadpoles that is last season and which part is this one
aren’t x and y-axis misnamed?
Problem solving and critical thinking aren’t as common as they should be
Source: this article
Can’t read it because paywall but do they say why they excluded penalties? I understand it for players but surely for teams conceding/earning a penalty would be relevant to the overall point of this graphic.
So up and to the left is ideal?
No up and to the right is best, the x axis is xG conceded per game, and it’s descending
Up and to the right is ideal? That means you conceded less xG and created more xG.
So Everton are the most improved side in the league? Makes sense given their performances.
It’s either Everton or Chelsea. Quite hard to really say who from this graph
Everton most improved, Liverpool best attack, Arsenal best defence, Man City prob best overall, Man Utd biggest decline, Sheffield United worst team in league & interestingly for all the Spurs hype their defence has declined by a similar amount that theor attack has improved by & they look like they should be midtable
After the initial outrage over the 10pt deduction dies down, Toffees would be secretly happy that it came at the best time for them.
Last season, they’re relegated. Earlier this season when they were on a bad run and suddenly the doom and gloom around the club could’ve spiralled. Later this season and they wouldn’t have the games left to react.
But now, in a good run, with enough games to go and the siege mentality setting in with very low risk of actual relegation = best outcome of a bad situation.
It could also have spelled disaster for them in most other seasons when competition at the bottom of the table is tougher. This season, 30 points will most likely be enough to stay up because there’s 3-4 teams which aren’t PL-ready and completely outmatched.
I wouldn’t say very low risk tbh. Form can change. They’re probably going to be safe though.
Compared to every season for the last 3 or 4 years, where relegation would be a nailed on certainty, it’s pretty low risk.
Everton would have to royally screw up to get relegated this season.
They’ll be out of the relegation zone by the end of the weekend.
Poor old Everton! All that improvement going to waste. Obviously it should see them avoid the cut easily enough so that points punishment is a complete waste of time.
It’s definitely fucked us massively, but if we survive then I wouldn’t say the improvement was entirely a waste, because if we continued playing like we did last season and got a 10 point deduction, we were definitely going down even with the weaker relegation opponents
A ten point deduction would have relegated Wolves last year and they finished 13th. Chelsea (12th) would have survived on tie breakers. The relegation battle was a lot tighter last year than it SHOULD be this year-it obviously is relevant that there’s a lot of season left to be played and if any of the newly promoted sides get a good run of form and we have fitness issues, then it will get dicey for us.
Aye, if we get lucky with injuries and/or get coverage in January, despite I imagine being strapped for cash, and we can maintain our PPG we’ll probably be safe. That’d end us on 34 points which might well be enough. And that’s including all the games at the start of the season we lost without half our first team.
Gary O’Neil out! All that alleged ‘improvement’ and Wolves are still as shit as Man United.
United’s vibe is basically ‘what if we tried to press like Tottenham but weren’t very good at it?’ — they force a lot of high turnovers but allow chances at about the same rate as Wolves and Nottingham Forest.
This line cracked me up LMAO
Defensively we’re basically the exact same as Spurs. Except we’ve had about 30 injuries.
Spurs lost 2 games back to back when they did not have their starting backline. Imagine the same for United, but for the entire season till now.
Our attack has taken a massive hit 😭
Would rather have this than the other way around. We’ll click eventually
We also haven’t had a single game with a preferred starting XI. How much have we seen a midfield of Partey, Odegaard, and Rice? A single half against City? Imagine how much ball progression alone would improve with the full team
Not to mention Timber who we had for all of one glorious half 🥲
Even if Havertz is the new preferred left 8, we still haven’t had a starting lineup that contains rice Havertz Ødegaard Martinelli Jesus saka (hopefully we see it today)
I mean the same can be said for every side. City have been missing the best midfielder in the league in De Bruyne, we’ve been missing probably our best midfielder in Thiago, Chelsea have been missing Nkunku, etc.
Sean Dyche improving Everton in both directions, impressive stuff.
Dyche is good, probably the best active English manager.
The most surprising thing upon his introduction last season, even though results didn’t go brilliantly, was that our xG shot up massively in the second half of the season. xG conceded also went up a bit I think though. So even more impressive that after he improved xG a lot in the second half of the season, this season is a massive improvement again.
Is it even an unpopular opinion to think he keeps them up even with -10 points? They look significantly better than the 3 teams closest to them.
No I think general consensus is we’re 4th most likely to go down still with a bit of a gap between us and the 3 promoted sides. The bookies have us 2/1 to go down and those 3 all odds on. But you never know, if we pick up some injuries and any one of them hit a bit of form doubts could creep back in.
Brentford, Luton and Burnley be like: Imma stay here
Well, they werent in the PL last season so not like they could move in any direction as they have nothing to compare to
Not brentford. It’s Sheffield United.
Fair play to Everton, knew they would perform better in Dyches first full season. Just a shame about the points deduction but they will sill stay up imo.
Really annoying they put fake axis lines in the middle of the graph
I’ve decided that they’re likely the averages and therefore not fake axis lines. Still probably should’ve been labeled but it’s also probably more obvious to someone who isn’t suffering from insomnia
One of the main aspects of a good graph is that the audience should be able to easily understand the data within 30 seconds. This graph is not such a graph.
If it takes you more than 30 seconds to read the title, axes and look at the lines then idk what to tell you.
Could it be simpler? Sure. Is it so confusing that it should take someone who has heard about xG longer than a minute to understand? i dont think so.
Really?
The badges are large enough to be legible without being so large their crowd each other too much.
The line is obviously connecting 2 points, one being the badge, and the change in width tells you immediately that’s it’s a progression from the thin point to the thick one. They’re also coloured well so you can immediately tell who is who.
There are lines on the background to help group without even using the axes.
You can also tell because the newly promoted sides are just the badge, so the badge has to represent this year.
Also, it says it at the top of the graph.
There is even a graphic at the top explaining this.
Such a cool way of visually putting things