Usually we prefer it on the day in question but as it's a historic occasion I'll allow it.

If there's ever a time when it's "too late" to lolKlopp or lolPlop then that will finally be the time to move on from here.

This is premature. 4 pts in 11 games is far from unachievable, even though you've not been good recently.

Plop slightly longer than evens for a top four finish. I sort of wonder if Spurs might sneak in and Leicester might blow it.

Top 4 of City/Leicester/West Ham/Everton one time!

Highly unlikely but if 2 of Leicester/WH/Everton can make it would be brilliant

edit: or Villa! Long shot but they do have 2 games in hand on some teams, you never know with how weird this season has been (bar City being City)

won't someone think of the coefficient

That would involve Leicester winning a game after February

eh i'm Scottish, couldn't give a **** about England's coefficient

villa games is spurs + everton isnt it? not happening. And we cant win 2 games in a row against the **** teams. we wont get EL. Probably finish bottom half if lose to wolves and now that grealish is injured.

if we had someone who is better than barkley than it maybe could have happened

in order to do that mou would have to rotate and pretty much the entire squad would have to stay fit. very unlikely.

It's taken most of the season, but Mourinho seems to have worked out what most fans knew in September regarding our best 11. We will probably need some rotation, but seeing as the squad is so bloated we have 2-3 players for each position, that hopefully won't be too much of an issue.

Pretty amazing we have 0 players on the treatment table at this stage of the season, so provided Kane doesn't go down we probably have as good a chance as anyone of the teams looking to sneak into the top 4.

Leicester seem like they'll be similar to last year, injury ravaged and tired towards the end and they are seen as chokers

i still can't believe they are dogs vs brighton, part of me wants to back the truck up, another part of me says vegas and market surely know better than i do

In the view of the markets and xg adherents, Brighton are a historic outlier this season. Underlying numbers look really solid. 538 has them as 8th best in their model, fb ref has them 4th best.

Clearly an eye test tells you they've got a lot of forwards who are not good at putting ball in net, but they're clearly really unlucky too.

Arsenal 1.73 looks deathly short too

gl today joe, reading through comments scraped from the Saints' message boards you seem more pessimistic than we are

yeah i get that

unfamiliar with their soccer stuff but iirc the 538 model loses money each year when it paper trades and it's a running joke in the betting forum back when people posted there, not saying i can do better or anything

i think i mentioned this last year, but xg calculations are extremely subjective and have some massive holes in them, it's closest equivalent to US analytics would be defensive ratings in baseball, which everyone agrees are meaningless but nice to have as guidance

they don't account for the quality of a player, so a free kick taken by myself or by david beckham in his prime will will have the same xg so long as we kick it in the same general region

futhermore, by default, most off foot shots are dramatically reduced, to the point where it could have been .6 xg on the normal foot but .1 on the other, yet we know many players are excellent from both feet - this is a big reason why salah always outperforms his xg by significant margins

there's also a lot of "let's make the math work" done after the fact to normalize the data, this is why if you add up the individual player xG contributions, it does not equal the team xG

it's good stuff, i'm a big fan of it, it's a step in the right direction, but sadly the really good and actionable data is gathered by hd cameras who measure where everyone is on the field and that's all proprietary and none of the teams are letting that go public out of fear they may be ahead of the curve

i'd much rather just look at posession, corners and shots taken and find that more useful

i'm by no means an expert, just while doing my own modeling, i've found xg to not be all that useful if i was already accounting for the more traditional data, it was more a way smooth out the edges than anything else

Ta. And to you.

To be honest, they're always a bit melodramatic and usually innumerate. Us going down is still a really long shot (particularly if we pick up 3 points today, sorry!) It's clear that this run is much more about how shallow we are in pretty much every position and our inability to deal with an injury crisis. If we stay up, there probably won't be another season like this one.

However, the front office is making it clear that we have absolutely no money and apart from Ings, we don't have much in the way of saleable assets either, so it's difficult to see where we improve.

I have some bones of contention with this, but I think it's mostly correct. Basically, you can sum it up with the adage of "bad data in = bad data out." We shouldn't treat it like a panacea. Although I would argue it's probably the best, and most predictive, statistic we have right now. If you want to read a bit more about this, then Caley goes into detail here as well as citing other research which has looked into it.

I think the main part I disagree with is "Beckham taking a freekick has the same XG as me." This isn't a limitation, it's part of the design. The problem with football statistics is that the traditional ones are all descriptive, which means you can't generalise their results. The point about expected goals is that it creates a baseline to compare players against. Where I share your annoyance is that people simply assume overperformance = good luck and underperformance = bad luck. That's clearly not the case. Some players (Son is a good example) have consistently out-performed xg over their career and the most likely explanation is that they're really ****ing good at finishing. Expected goals simply tells you if players are performing better than average, not whether this is down to luck or skill - although you can look at long term data to make some tentative inferences for that.

Edit: Don't most models allow for which foot the player strikes with too?

thanks, will read the stuff, i find it incredibly difficult to get good data for soccer or read good papers as 99% of xg model papers i've read are about using that data as an input rather than scrutinizing it as an output

re salah - i see how i wrote that confusingly, ie but he does score a bit with the other foot - that's obviously not the only reason why, but putting in about 5 off foot goals a year is going to give a healthy goal - xgoal differential

1.83 LeddersBET knows

How is Calum Chambers still an Arsenal player?

Yeah he's another on the long list of players we have turned down perfectly reasonably offers for and then never play.

Superbly run football club by all accounts

I genuinely thought he was at a Championship club by now.

He does have a habit of scoring against us when he plays.

So does Auba

LOOOL

hopefully xhaka stays at arse forever

Thanks Xhaka