#football-analytics

#football-analytics

Given the Danes are among Europe's most prolific coffee drinkers, chances are nearly every staff member will visit the one breakout area at FC Midtjylland's training complex several times daily. While there, not only will they receive their caffeine hit but also a reminder of the club's most important table, which sits directly above the machine dispensing espresso after espresso. It is not, though, the Superliga standings (which they have topped four times since 2015) but a graph showing Midtjylland's dead ball goal difference.

Expected goals (xG) is a metric used to determine how likely a player is to score a chance and to calculate how many goals a team is expected to score in a match. The metric was invented in 2012 by Opta's Sam Green and has become commonplace across football analytics. In xG, every shot a player has is given a score between zero and one.

And at this point, we have to acknowledge that Pep Guardiola is one of the principal reasons this kind of possession pornography exists in the first place: a serendipitous consequence of reinventing the game at exactly the moment we could start measuring the ways in which he was reinventing it, and exactly the moment we could beam it around the world in meme-sized fragments.