Heung-Min Son (손흥민)

  • The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...

    Get involved!

Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports

Sort by date Sort by reaction score
SpursAllTheWay said:
www.google.com

How long can Son Heung-min keep out-running his own xG?

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?
www.google.com www.google.com
Click to expand...
Another mediocre interpretation of xG. No wonder so many people have no respect for it. But-- hang on, never mind.
bonaspur23 said:
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.
Click to expand...
Yeah, you did most of the stuff I wanted to do already. Good post. The most important point is that xG is the composite average professional player rather than the baseline for every player. xG for Kane and Son is different to xG for.. well, almost all other players.

It's true that the extent of Son's overperformance at times this season has been unrealistic and I did expect some regression, but nothing like this weird collapse in the crappy media prognostications. Son collapsing back to average is ridiculously unlikely at this point: it would be like saying that Kane is due to become an average finisher any day now (essentially "seven season wonder" but unironically).

xG isn't really good for analysing single games and short-term trends tbh. When analysing individual players, you need a sample of a solid season or so to beat out error margins significantly. That's why I'm not paying too much attention to the minutiae of Son's scores. He'll experience regressions, like he is right now, but they won't stop him being one of the best finishers in world football.

As for the thread at large: this is not a rough patch, you just have unrealistic expectations after years of being spoiled by Son and Kane.
 
Sonny has always had dry spells, and I have no doubt he will bounce back. He was unlucky today, hitting the post. However, I have a little niggling feeling that he may have the contract issue on his mind, so we need to get it sorted asap. I don't want another Eriksen situation hanging over us.
 
Mrs Perryman said:
Sonny has always had dry spells, and I have no doubt he will bounce back. He was unlucky today, hitting the post. However, I have a little niggling feeling that he may have the contract issue on his mind, so we need to get it sorted asap. I don't want another Eriksen situation hanging over us.
Click to expand...
His dad is a proper hardass, I wonder if he's driving a hard bargain against Levy. I know that in Korea Son is practically a god, I wouldn't be surprised if they see Son as deserving wages in the 300k+ region.
 
It's not actually a new documentary. It was actually released in May 2019 in Korea.. but looks like Amazon decided to buy the rights to the documentary and then add in a narrator and get it on Prime..

Not actually watched it yet though, but seen some clips when it was released a couple of years back.
 
Mrs Perryman said:
Sonny has always had dry spells, and I have no doubt he will bounce back. He was unlucky today, hitting the post. However, I have a little niggling feeling that he may have the contract issue on his mind, so we need to get it sorted asap. I don't want another Eriksen situation hanging over us.
Click to expand...
Don’t think it’s the contract situation, he’s tied up until 2023 anyway...

It’s just the usual dry spell I think, and it’s not like he has played badly like his other dry spells, he was a little unlucky here and there.

Like Harry I am not worried about Son at all, he will be back. We’ve seen it over and over again for the last few years.
 
SpursAllTheWay said:
It's not actually a new documentary. It was actually released in May 2019 in Korea.. but looks like Amazon decided to buy the rights to the documentary and then add in a narrator and get it on Prime..

Not actually watched it yet though, but seen some clips when it was released a couple of years back.
Click to expand...
Makes sense. Good as he is, it's hard to see the value proposition in funding an English documentary on any individual Spurs player, even Kane or Bale. If you were going to make one here, you'd probably make it on a Liverpool or United star (unfortunately). The Koreans would absolutely make such a thing and make good money out of it though. Sounds interesting.

If anyone's seen it, can you tell me if the narrator says something like "and at Spurs, Son's biggest supporting player is Harry Kane"? :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom