In 2017, BBC’s Match of the Day introduced a new statistic in their post-match summaries of Premier League matches. Expected goals, or xG, is designed to tell us how many goals a team should have scored based on the quality of the chances they created in a game. It is loved by amateur and professional statisticians alike who want to use data to analyse performance.
The BBC regularly uses xG in its Premier League coverage, but this metric was absent from both BBC and ITV coverage at the recent men’s World Cup. A brief look into what xG is and the history of using data to predict football matches may give us some insight into why they decided not to use it.
The concept of expected goals originally came from ice hockey but is easily appliable to football. xG is calculated by looking at every shot that a team took in a match and assigning it a probability of being scored.
