Data suggests that a player’s huge overperformance against expected goals catches up with them eventually, so are Son’s Europe-leading finishing stats destined to end or is he an extraordinary outlier?
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It’s a dreadful article. The author tries to understand statistics but doesn’t fully grasp it.
As he states, Son has outperformed his xG for 5 years.
It’s not coming back to the mean. Son outperforms others mostly due to his amazing 2 footed efficiency and also likely due to some of the flaws of this stat. This season may regress close to his others (which is still well above mean) but there’s enough data to clearly say Son is an outlier.
the Ashley Barnes comparison to CR7 is just terrible. Both are right at the mean of finishers using xG and the author scoffs that clearly CR7 should be better. No shit, that’s why one has 34 goals and one 117. This stat only explains shooting ability, and quantity of goals makes a huge difference in explaining total all around scoring ability.
The part where he says football analytics experts say finishing ability is not a skill and doesn’t differ between top professional players is also laughable. He may have gotten that from Woolwichs analyst.
xG is just a statistic that has a lot of flaws. You get penalized for great positioning if you miss the shot ( or it’s blocked) whereas a player who can’t even create the chance doesn’t get penalized.
Tap ins are likely undervalued in this stat due to positioning being a huge variable here. The xG of a tap in might be something like .96 so scoring it won’t improve much vs the mean. However, top positional CFs will get far more of these than the average player. They will just see a quantity in goals scored increase but won’t get too much further from the mean.
Distance shots have a lower xG which allow for much much more deviation from the mean. Players who primarily take distance shots and excel are going to see significantly better xGoals than the average player. Great distance shooters may be well above average until you factor in shots closer to the goal. Being less efficient at these will hurt performance vs xG as the xG will be higher ( a miss will be more impactful).
Son is a great distance shooter who doesn’t take a lot of shots from inside the six yard box. He also is a top finisher with both feet (this is huge). Furthermore, he doesn’t get a lot of shots blocked.
He should basically have his own xG value if you want to accurately reflect the significance of one of his scoring chances.