for me, it’s pretty confusing in quite a few instances, but, just to give an example: if the striker shoots and the keeper saves it, but the striker taps in the rebound, how is xG counted? is it counted twice or just once? or, what if neither shot goes in?
Hmm I say they do, just not what most people think, for example xG shows that Son is an excellent finisher consistently over many years.
He’s scored 111 premier league goals in 280 matches. I don’t need to see his xG over several years to know he’s a prolific goalscorer.
111 sounds nice but what if he had 1000 chances ? Then he would be a good goal scorer but not a clinical finisher.
Okay, but goalscoring is not just about finishing, it’s about getting yourself into dangerous positions to shoot from. xG is not the be all and end all, but it tells you how effective a player is when it comes to finishing chances from given positions. Say you had 2 sons, both with 111 goals in 280 matches, but one had an xG of 130 and the other of 90, you would clearly be putting your money on the latter as that demonstrates they are more clinical.
But would we not be able to determine this simply by watching Son play on a regular basis?
To an extent yes, like for sure I knew son was good, but I didn’t realise how clinical a finisher he was without the stats. I kinda just assumed he missed as much as everyone else, but you just forget about them, cause how many shots that miss do you remember over a long period?
Why not both? Stats like xG are just another tool to help judge the quality of a player
True, not saying it can’t be used. But the above comment was saying using xG tells us how good a finisher Son is, and I was saying we don’t need xG to tell us that - we can just watch him play.
My general concern about stats, is, as some people above have said, is that people use it as a means to end all means to judge the effectiveness of a player, or how good a player is. But a lot of the time, we can use the eye test to effectively gauge how good a player is. Not saying stats can’t be used, but rather that not in the way it’s commonly being used now.