I don’t have any issue with xG it’s just another thing that seems somewhat ill suited to a game like football. All the sports that use statistical analysis effectively in this manner are very simple games comparatively.
Im sure teams are ploughing money into this as any small improvement it might offer is worth millions. When a duff transfer could cost you £50m what’s a few million on analysis.
I just can’t see how they can factor in everything you would need to along with the skill of the player involved and how well the keeper performs. Fernandes hitting a shot vs Wan Bissaka hitting a shot is a very different prospect.
It’s why VAR works so well for some sports and not so well for football.
I agree it's not as easy to do with football than it is something like baseball but they are doing it. xg really is just the headline thing that we see and talk about but they go much further back in moves and look at each and every pass in the build-up to attacks. Clubs can tell you just how involved midfielders or even defenders are to the build-up of goals.
It's really not such an alien thing either. What does xg teach you - how good a finisher somebody is. Clubs had scouts doing that by eye for years. This just quantifies that opinion and enables clubs to scout 1000s of players without even watching them play. Likewise it enables clubs to quantify the involvement that a player like a Thiago has - he's not somebody that will score or assist much but they have xgbuildup that spells out just how important he is to a sides attacking play.
Obviously they'll scout them in person at some point but the data allows them to pick out players that are overperforming so they can focus their scouting. And of course you don't need stats to see that Thiago is a god but when trying to identify the next Thiago, playing in Peru u-17 football, this data will flag potential players up that clubs wouldn't typically be able to scout.
It's not just useful for transfers but also tactics too. If you're able to see that a certain attacking routine is more effective against a particular opponent, having as much of that sort of information available to you is priceless. Again, clubs will have looked at these things with the naked eye for years but this data just goes that step further and makes it easier for clubs to notice these patterns.
It's not a coincidence that the clubs that have been first onboard with this stuff have overperformed compared to their budget. As I said before, it's not just Liverpool that went big on it early. Leicester, Brentford, the Redbull teams, the Dainish team Liverpool played in the CL, AZ Alkmaar are a few others that have really benefited by being smarter than other sides in the transfer market.
