For contemporary sports geeks, data is the parallel of authentic German beer. Not easy to procure, you’ve got to try it for the buzz around it and once you do, it’s too late to deny it, ever.

Out of the many available to us, in modern football, Expected Goals or xG as most humans call it, has been an interesting metric to look at the game. Stats Bomb describes xG as “the measure of the quality of a shot based on several variables such as assist type, shot angle and distance from goal, whether it was a headed shot and whether it was defined as a big chance.”

The higher the xG count, with 1 being the maximum and 0 the minimum, the higher is the chance of scoring. Adding up a player or team’s xG can give us an indication of how many goals the player or the team should have scored on average, given the shots they have taken.

Expected Goals may be one of the big talking stats in modern football coverage, but the idea behind it has been existent for a while now. We’ve always had that one friend who shouts, “How the hell did he miss that opportunity?” Unless of course, you are the one who does that, as I do. xG just uses thousands of minutes of football videos to assign a number to the ‘opportunity’.

It really shouldn’t be that hard to understand now why hardcore football fans, who have gotten themselves exposed to the data radiations, wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity of boasting xG data.

Ideally, like any other metric, Expected Goals should help in narrating the story of what happened in the game. The team with more xG should have more goals to their name. Unless you are talking about Brighton, their fans have a toxic relationship with xG. Of course, there are exceptions to this but EURO 2020 in its first week has given us plenty of case studies, highlighting them as the nature of tournament football rather than just anomalies.

So far, in this edition of the European Championships (after the England vs Scotland game), a total of five games have had winners with a lower xG count.

The big dollar case was the Germany vs France game. France, who won the game (1-0), and had two goals disallowed (offside), ended with an xG count of just 0.29 compared to the 1.26 of their opposition. This isn’t hard to understand. The last two world champions were separated in Munich by an own goal put in by Mats Hummels in the 20th minute, which amounts to an xG count of zero. So do goals that are ruled offside.

Early in the tournament, one wouldn’t have believed the final scoreline of the Scotland-Czech Republic game had they been told the xG numbers first. Scotland playing at home registered a count of 2.31 but failed to find the back of the net. Czech Republic scored two goals but their total chances amounted to an xG of only 0.49. It was because of the unreal probability of Patrik Schick’s two goals. For the first, the 25-year old attained a significant altitude for a header that ended at the lower corner on the farther end of the goal. The second was just a magical strike from 49.7 yards out with a significant bend and curl injected into it.

The more recent instance of xG data contrasting to the final score was the Denmark-Belgium game played in Copenhagen. A game where talking anything numbers will be bland given what the occasion meant to an entire nation and sporting community. Likewise, judging the hosts on the 0-1 defeat to Finland despite having a higher xG count in the game, won’t be human. However, if we do talk football, pictures of Denmark pressing against the number one side in the world, especially in the first half can be preserved in the library of the all-time great first-half performances.

Both the teams had five shots on target, but playing at home, Denmark (2.35) created more scoreable opportunities whereas Belgium (0.98) scored from two outstanding counter-attacking moves which would more often not end up as goals. Even by the data nerds, the performance by the Danish side after losing their first game, against one of the better teams in the world and without their chief playmaker in Christian Eriksen can be attributed to sheer human emotions.

There are individual reasons for every team creating fewer or more chances and yet, beating the above-mentioned metric with their goal count. The larger idea though is about the nature of international football tournaments. ‘The best team wins’ is the tale of the utopian league football world. In tournaments such as Euros, where only 8 out of the 24 teams are knocked out after the group stages, being the most consistent doesn’t guarantee the title. While facing a tougher opposition, most teams see the game through, with either no attacking play at all or throwing very few numbers forward now and then. It boils down to which team doesn’t lose often in group stages and doesn’t lose at all in the knockouts. Portugal’s 2016 Euro Cup campaign is a fitting example. The defending champions didn’t win a single group game and qualified for the knockouts with three points in three games. France picked seven points from group stages.

To avoid losing is easier than going all out for a win and to think of a 1-0 and a 3-0 win as the same result, makes the job easier for many teams. A team like France in 2020, no matter how much firepower they have, can keep stock of their energy once they score a goal, which seemed like it was the case against Germany in their first game. France barely pressed in Munich the way they could’ve, also leaving pockets of space available on either of the flanks when the wide midfielders and attackers consolidated behind to back the defenders.

Try and imagine the same team playing league football. Dare I say, France would’ve given the best club sides you’ve watched, a run for their money and architect those big margin wins.

But when it comes to a tournament such as Euro 2020, you can be not the most consistent, attractive, and entertaining teams and yet, be the winners. In simple words, “your xG doesn’t define who you become.”

0LIT
0
0NAY
0
0