Some very basic analysis of how Smith has improved us.

I was bored yesterday so I had a quick look at the XG and goals stats to see how much Smith had improved us. I should preface this by saying that I loved Daniel and also the sample sizes are obviously different. Also, arguably Farke had some tougher games, so this needs to be done again in a couple of months to be more robust. XG is also a slightly spurious concept, but I think it does tell us something. So will all those caveats ….

This season Farke’s average XGFor was 0.81 and XGAgainst was 1.97. Thus far Smith has 1.11 XG For and 1.15 Against, so he has improved both chance creation and stopping the opposition create chances.

Farke’s average Goals For was 0.45 and Against was 2.36. Again, Smith has improved us on both sides, with Goals For now 0.75 and Against 1.25.

One interesting thing is that the gap between XGfor and Goals For is almost identical 0.35 and 0.36 respectively. This is the underperformance in terms of taking chances, and suggests that Smith has not yet improved this (which we can probably see with our eyes). This may suggest there is an underlying problem with the quality of our players. On the flip side, Smith has narrowed the gap between XGAgainst and Goals against to .10, whereas Farke’s teams were conceding .39 more goals than the XG suggested (e.g. soft touch).

Finally, Smith has already matched Farke’s total of games where we out XG the opponent (2 each). But neither managed to win any of those games.

So, in summary:

Defending better
Creating (a few) more chances
Scoring (a few) more
Letting less in
But still not improved our chance taking.

But we knew all that anyway with our eyes, and I’m sure the last point is the main topic for SAS.

Posted By: Knitted Jesus, Dec 10, 08:07:12