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Barcelona missed two points on their visit to Mendizorrotza and in the process they managed four LaLiga Santander games without winning, unleashing their first crisis of the season.
It is said that they missed the points, because the numbers tell us. Barcelona had many chances, although it is worth taking a look at the figures.
The visitors made 25 shots to the four of Alavés, nine on goal against three, in addition to dominating the ball with 80 percent possession. One could apologize for thinking that Barcelona should have beaten the Vitoria-Gasteiz team, but these days technology and statistics allow us to be more precise in our analysis.
There is a metric that is growing in popularity, its use is already very widespread in the Champions League and the Premier League, even here at Marca, known as expected goals or xG.
The expected goals is a metric that, using a statistical model, tells us the probability that a shot ends in a goal, according to the type of shot, the time before it, the distance from the arc, the angle, the part of the body used, the type of pass received and so on. The measure is given as a value between 0 and 1 and the total xG of a team in a match tells us how many goals it should have scored.
Theory of the road, let’s see how it developed in the match between Alavés and Barcelona. We’ve seen the disparity in the shots, but where did the shots come from? Were there opposition players on the road? Was there a good angle of shot?
The graph shows us all the shots in the game, with a circle representing a shot and a star representing a goal. The bigger the symbol, the higher the probability of scoring.
We see that most of the circles in Barcelona are very small. After Antoine Griezmann’s goal, who had a xG of 0.36, his best chance came from Ansu Fati from a similar position in the 12th minute with an xG of 0.32.
The total odds of these shots give Barcelona an expected goal total of 2.08. That is, despite having so many efforts in goal, the visiting team should only have scored twice.
This tells us something about the importance of the quality of the shots over the number of shots and knowing when to shoot. Alavés, meanwhile, only made three shots on goal, but had a 1.11 xG, so he should have scored a goal, and he did it thanks to Luis Rioja.
If we look at the evolution of the expected goals throughout the game, we can see that between Alavés’ first goal and Griezmann’s draw, the local team was leading in xG, due to the quality of the chances they produced.
Taking all this into account, we can say that yes, Barcelona should and deserved to have won Saturday’s game, but just barely. However, the potential goal fest that the basic stats suggest was simply never on the cards.
There are many other variables to consider, of course, and xG, like any other, is not a perfect metric, but it is constantly evolving and improving, so we must take it more and more seriously when evaluating attack performance. of a team or player.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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