xG.
Two letters signifying a statistic that is becoming more and more familiar to football fans every year.
It is based on English expected goals (expected goals) and tells us how the match should end if we remove the luck factor.
You know it: your team pushes the whole game, has ten big chances but doesn’t convert any, ends up conceding a goal on a corner kick and losing 0-1. In this, football is beautiful and cruel at the same time.
However, the result in this case does not correspond to the image of the game or the quality of the performances. The xG metric, which assesses how many goals “should be scored” based on the quality of the chances, tells more about it.
Regardless of whether you missed the goal four times by an inch, the goalkeeper made a miraculous save or the attackers threw the impossible.
The result can simply lie about the course of the game.
You might have thought after Luxembourg’s 0-9 and 0-6 losses to Portugal that it just proved that Luxembourg continues to be a football dwarf.
And after Slovakia’s 2:3 loss in Portugal, that it wasn’t so bad after all – we were in the game for a point until the last moment.
However, xG shows shocking numbers: even Luxembourg did not lag behind in both of the aforementioned losses, as Slovakia did on Friday.
Before we go into more detail, let’s point out that losing 2-3 is admittedly much better than losing 0-9 and football is still played on goals and not xG.
How to read football is a new column in which we look at football through data. The texts in this section are created in collaboration with analyst Marek Kabát, who works for the data company StatsBomb.
In this text we will explain:
in which Luxembourg was less behind when losing 0:9 than Slovakia when losing 2:3; that Martin Dúbravka has so far been the biggest support of all European goalkeepers in the qualification; that the arrival of László Bénes was key to a better performance in the 2nd half; that no one from our team is able to assert himself in the space around the penalty area by dribbling one against one – only the injured Lukáš Haraslín has this ability at the European level; how the Portuguese took Stanislav Lobotka out of the game and forced us to play Denis Vavro.
Let’s make a small detour to last year’s World Championships. You might still remember the match between Argentina and Saudi Arabia.
Argentina dominated the entire match, but lost 1:2. At the time, there was talk about the enormous luck of Saudi Arabia, because according to the quality of the chances, Argentina should have scored 2.23 goals, while Saudi Arabia only scored 0.14 goals.
We mention this example because xG 2.23 is a high number at the top level.
The Luxembourgers really did not like the Portuguese – xG also testifies to this. While the Portuguese had 3.57 goals, the Luxembourgers had 0.27 goals.
The match ended 9-0 due to a rare combination of factors: the Portuguese were extremely effective and the Luxembourg goalkeeper was poorly caught.
Now hold on – here comes the information about what xG the Portuguese had against us:
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