As debate not so much raged but gently percolated over the merits of “expected goals” as a useful metric for analysing football last week, it was difficult to shake off the feeling that the battle for survival and relevance between old-school pundits and the growing army of stats buffs had reached a somewhat pivotal phase.
The sound may have been drowned out by the white noise generated by quarrelling over other, far more important global concerns, but the latest volley was fired by Jeff Stelling. The Sky Sports presenter went viral after footage of him denouncing expected goals in the strongest possible terms spread to a wider audience after being posted on social media. While other, even more boring articles than this one have been written about the value and definition of the statistic in question, for the purposes of brevity all that uninitiated readers need know is that the metric would be far less contentious if it was called something less geeky and more luddite-friendly such as “chances missed”.
Related: Never mind Jeff Stelling’s derision, expected goals – xG – is here to stay | Paul MacInnes
Distance from goal
Continue reading...