sophocles, on 04 March 2021 - 03:47 PM, said:
Well I, for one, can't see any use for it. Perhaps you could explain.
I find it really useful for fantasy prem for one! Shows which players are receiving a high volume of good quality chances even if they're not putting them away. You can tell then if they're a player who you know should generally finish chances at a rate equal to or above the average then they should revert towards the mean and begin performing better soon (which they usually do).
Alternatively, for players like Son who consistently outperform their xG you know that even when Tottenham aren't creating many chances he'll still score fairly frequently because he's very clinical. The other side to this is that at the start of the season he was outscoring his xG to a ridiculous and unsustainable degree, to the point where it was obvious he would decline a little from the xG figures in a way that simply looking at shots vs shots converted wouldn't tell you. He was converting a really high number of shots from range which would usually only have a low chance of being converted.
Looking at the expected table based on xG and xGA has Brighton third (!?!) I believe. Which shows that Graham Potter is doing a much better job than it may seem looking at the table in assembling a squad which plays creative attacking football and minimises chances against, but that they haven't been getting the rub of the green. It also says that his players can't hit a barn door from 5 yards though...
I'm not saying any of this is stuff people couldn't find out from just watching games. But it allows statistical analysis and an actual quantifiable metric to prove them and allow comparison. That's just a very small sample of the ways it can be used, I'm no football expert by any means but I've found it really useful personally.