Great finishing or great positioning?

Yesterday I posted a twitter poll. It was one of those "never going to happen" polls with an unrealistic question, but it gave some interesting outcomes.


I added another caveat to make it even more life-like.


Clearly, a lot of answerers will have built in their own interpretations around the length of time on the pitch, and the playing position, of each option.

What I was really trying to tease out was whether people think outperforming xG is better than generating lots of xG but performing well below it.

When Statsbomb posted the xG of Che Adams a few days ago it showed he was on 20 goals from 10xG which seemed a massive overperformance and probably unsustainable.

But would I probably still scout him over a player on 20 goals from 20xG? Probably as I'd like to see if a truly elite finisher had been found.

The most popular answer was to scout the player on 7 goals from 14 xG. This was a bit surprising to me. I expect most have taken on board the fact it is better to shoot from good places a lot than it is to not get the chances.

Scouting could show us whether the high levels of xG were due to being a terrible finisher in a great team, missing chance after chance, or an elite player capable of creating a high volume of good quality chances for themselves.

Which leaves us with the question; is it is better to be an elite finisher of chances created by others or an elite creator of good chances for yourself, but not particularly skilled at finishing them?

To which the answer is as always, it depends, I'd need more data.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wyscout review and poking around the French third tier

Image
I signed up for Wyscout on Friday and was given full access for 48 hours. Inbetween the busy bits of family life over a weekend in the run up to Christmas I thought I'd do a quick review of it and reveal some of the players I liked the look of. For those who have never used Wyscout it actually looks a lot like Football Manager (or at least Football Manager about 10 years ago) The home page allows you to select a league to scout. The package I was trialing allowed me full access to 5 leagues (I chose the big 5) and partial access to all the others. To be honest I really couldn't see that much difference between full/partial access for player scouting purposes. I decided to use the trial time to see if I could use their stats and video clips to find some promising players in obscure leagues. So I looked in the French 3rd division, my thoughts being that France is producing so much talent that their third level must have some potential top quality players in it - with a t...
Read more

Scouting report Dan Ndoye - Lausanne Sport

Image
I've decided to try out a new approach to scouting. Instead of looking at how well the player is playing which almost always shows up positively in the data I am going to look at the attributes the player has. I'm going to look at a combination of data and video and record the results here.  The categories I've chosen for assessing the player aren't ones I've given a huge amount of thought to, it is an initial list of the things I think are important to predict the long term career progression of young players. Player - Dan Ndoye Club - Lausanne Sport Age - 18 Position - plays across the front 3, most often as an inverted winger. Technical Foot Good ball striking ability with either foot. Comfortable using either to shoot with and generates good power. Probably gets a slightly better shape on crosses from the left but has played wide on either side of the attack and tends to cut in and shoot more than cross. Touch Close control with either foot ...
Read more

Data Analytics conference - Daniel Krueger report

Image
Seattle Sounders Inaugural Analytics Conference (6/22 – 6/23 2019) Summary by: @DanielKrueger96 Organizers: @analysefooty @SSFCSpSci #SSFCAnalytics Day 1 Opening Remarks Garth Lagerway, President of Soccer – Seattle Sounders FC Building an analytics department from scratch Starting with current roster: sports science emphasis (RPE, sleep, athlete surveys, performance testing Player recruitment Inherently less data on players outside of your own club because other clubs don’t release sports sci data Building automation Finding objectivity to allow for data driven decisions Introduced Ravi Ramineni – Director of Analytics, Seattle Sounders FC General takeaways: There seems to be a common theme with sports front offices. Team presidents and GMs rarely have a data background. The role of an in-house analyst is fairly new, so this makes sense. Though front office management may not have an understanding of the technical side of the analyst’s day to do task, it is important...
Read more