Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang

Yep xG isn’t needed for us to be able to see how stupid it is to persist with Auba on the left. Especially not when we have viable wide options now, which we didn’t necessarily have last season.

5 Likes

Amen, it’s a massive load of bollocks

4 Likes

I was listening to a fantasy football podcast and they suggested that anyone with Son in their team should take him out as he is way exceeding his XG and therefore his performance level will go down.

As if football works like that. “Oh I scored a hat trick last week, so I will do fuck all for a couple of weeks”

6 Likes

After many years I have added a title under my username. #fuckxG

10 Likes

Part of Klopp’s success is that he has fully bought into the stats and data side of the game, not dismissed it out of hand.

Onto the Auba side of the argument. The numbers there actually match up with the situation in reality and what we see with our eyes in games.

We create fuck all for Auba. Any goals are either luck or him creating low percentage shots for himself that become golazos.

So I don’t understand why we are criticising stats here that actually show nicely how we aren’t getting the most out of our best player.

1 Like

Whoa whoa whoa. I think xG is a load of shit. Stats as a whole clearly have a place.

People, pundits, sky fucking sports point at xG alone and tell us it means something. It doesn’t. Not on it’s own. Fuck xG.

3 Likes

We are 4 fucking games in. Are we really going to worry at this point that Aubameyang only scored once? For real? @Electrifying.

1 Like

Difficult to say. He doesn’t quite look like a player past his best just yet.

Last season was his first time of outperforming his expected goals by this much though. He’s either pretty much exactly matched the goals scored with the expected goals or underperformed slightly.

1 Like

Can we move on too heat maps now.

I can do you a custom title. :eyes:

1 Like

Brother read what I wrote.

Imo Auba had his best game for us against Sheffield. And he didn’t score once.

My worry is the same as my worry has been for 2 years.

We are not getting the most out of our best player because we insist on playing him out wide.

For much worse players. I just posted something that showed that even more starkly.

3 Likes

I truly can’t be worried that he has scored 22 goals per season in stead of 25/26 (let’s take that as normal tally for a top striker for the sake of the argument). Because I really doubt that was the reason for the 8th place finish last season (looking at you Unai).

Yeah people are getting all twisted about a sample size that is tragically small when we have played fairly meh, despite getting ok points-wise.

Reality is, great strikers tend to out-perform their xG as well… and xG is highly dependent on their teammates, so it isn’t super shocking that our sh*t football is leading to… wait for it…

Crappy xG.

1 Like

How does xg explain Villa 7 Liverpool 2. How does it explain Greece winning the euros. Hows it explain Wigan winning the cup.
Watford beating Liverpool. Norwich beating city. Honestly its not highlighting much.
No different than me saying the top scoring team in the League will be very close too winning the title.
Team concedes the most be in the bottom three.

I think writers, amateurs and professionals, basically want to copy their American counterparts. Or it comes from Americans. In producing content in regards to this sport too. But in order too write blogs etc you need to have something to write about. We can all see that Arsenal has been shite in creating chances, but how do you write that down in a blog? That’s were things like xG come in.

1 Like

They are all “anomalies”. All of them. Ever.

Can anyone find me a game where the xG matched the aG? :slight_smile:

1 Like

I found it funny how the New York Times wrote a piece about how Klopp embraced analytics and they illustrated that by an anecdote that one of those guys came to him and talked about how a game they lost against Mainz should have been a victory for Dortmund. In regards too chances created etc. No shit. In football people have been talking for ages about deserved/undeserved victories/losses. It’s weird how all that has become a thing.

4 Likes

Lol, yes. Like seriously, we are Arsenal fans…who knows more about games we “should have won” if you go by the numbers?

Except we all know that’s not how the game works or has ever worked.

1 Like

This has a lot too do with moneyball. A culture grew up and around that became a haven for this thing.

I work in statistics and I honestly thing xg can be so fucking misleading. Just another arm of punditry trying to make the game predictable which it clearly isn’t.

At a basic level it is intuitive and rather interesting to look at, but not as clear cut as some would pretend

8 Likes