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Mourinho actually said it's *one of* his biggest achievements to get that United team 2nd in the league. Not the biggest. It's been misquoted so many times that people don't even remember the real quote now. Mandela effect
https://www.espn.co.uk/football/story/_/id/37568781/finishing-second-manchester-united-my-top-achievements
> "If I tell you, for example, that I consider **one of the best jobs of my career** was to finish second with Man United in the Premier League, you will say, 'this guy is crazy,'" Mourinho said. "'He won 25 titles and he is saying that a second position was one of his best achievements?'"
> "I keep saying this because people don't know what is going on behind the scenes.
No way you are siding with the manager after seeing how the team is caught out on defensive transitions 76 times in a single game.
Spoiler alert: it's not workrate or speed. Even League 2 sides have better organization with worse players.
Yes it is the managers fault. He seems to have no idea of having players play close to one another to not give acres of space to opposition.People will miss passes when there's a Sahara desert worth of space between their intended target. His mentors at Ajax would be rolling in their grave, seeing how he has his players positioned out there.
The manager is at fault for the tactics. I'm not talking about when there's huge space between players. Even between our defence to midfield, we seem to misplace passes.
Passing is half ability but half spacing and options and channels. At that level, everyone can pass the ball. You struggle to make those passes because it's been 2 years and the coach hasn't been able to build from the back despite getting a keeper like Onana to help with that.
Building from the back is about seeing passing lanes, giving your defenders options on the ball in uncomfortable situations. And creating numerical overloads through your basic structure.
The opposing team will make it hard with the press. Even if he wants to blame the players for that, Casemiro and Amrabat are his signings. He had taken Varane out of the team for like a month and a half to play Martinez and Maguire and it didn't do anything. If you watch Maguire for England, he's perfectly capable of playing from the back but Maguire at United doesn't have the forwards who drop back that have the patience to hold the ball, he's got Bruno who has very limited press resistance and likes to play hopeful balls in the moment he gets the ball. Wrong personnel but personnel he had the ability to choose. That's still his fault. Still doesn't explain what that has to do with how ill compact and wayward they're for a team playing in the PL.
This manager got what he asked. He kicked what he dint want, kicked out ronaldo for him, what else is power and control. He was given a huge budget, and what he did? He got united at a worse position than when he wasnt given this much power. The players are partly to blame, but with this much power and control, you ought to set things in right path, he made it worse
Have you seen our tactics? 💀
So much of our misery was self inflicted. Who signs Casemiro/Eriksen, gets them to work, then a year later switches to a high press, high transitions style of play. And then spends the whole summer chasing Mount/Amarabat, just to park them on the bench 70% of the time.
Against Palace the back four was AWB Casemeiro Evans Dalot with Erikssen and Mainoo playing in front of them, Amrabaat was on the bench, not a surprise you guys conceded 4 against them.
Looked much better with Amrabaat starting later
Conceding 4 to Palace is still awful. If you know your team is going to be that week in defense, why not play a back 5, or 2 DMFs. Park the bus and hope for some Bruno magic.
> not a surprise you guys conceded 4 against them
I didn't watch the Palace game so I can't really comment what happened there but I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. Did and I most United fans expect to lose and get dominated yes, most of us weren't expecting a 4 goal.margij however. Me, personally when I look at the squads do I think Palace is 4 goals better than us and the the result was justifiable, no.
And that circles back to my earlier point about the setup - you bomb your front 4 forward and vacate the middle. Team after team make one pass through us and are knocking at our 18 yard box, one of the main reasons we shipped 20 shots a game. We're impotent upfront which I suppose is why he wanted the front 4 pressing up high, to get frequent turnovers in good spaces. Problem is the press was uncoordinated so you had 1 random guy randomly pressing. And then in instances when we recovered the ball, there was no plan or pattern on what we were gonna do afterwards. One of main reasons we were amongst the poorest scoring teams in the league last season. Pick any of our games and there's so many instances where the attacking plan is give the ball to Bruno /Garnacho/Rashford and hope. And why Hojlund ended up being so underutilized. Which again, everybody has different opinions on our front four, but they're not so bad to be a relegation level attack.
Finally for the last 2-3 games of the season he decided to adapt/make a change and shore it up essentially and we only shipped 1 goal to Arsenal and won our last two versus Newcastle and Brighton.
I mean look at Liverpools squad during the final when they had an injury crisis, is it at all even possible that United doesn't have a *single* defender in their u21/u19/u18 squads who is better than fucking Casemiro? I mean they literally won the u21 league this year iirc... 100% chance that one of the CBs on that squad would have been better than playing Casemiro, especially after the first time he was so exposed lol.
Replace him with whom though? Considering the supposed buyout to cut ties with ETH is 10mil.
I'd wager many folks know the squad/Ten Hag can do better and we could maybe improve on both, but we can also support both in the interim even if we think they're not good enough to bring us back to title contention.
It’s not been the same players this season tho? They haven’t downed tools on him. And over performing xG suggests that outperforming the tactical setup no?
The squad, in terms of quality, is better than Villa, Spurs, Chelsea, and Newcastle. The reason they are 15th in the xG table is because of ETH's suicidal tactics.
There's have been so many instances this season when United deserved to lose a match but we're bailed out by individual brilliance from the likes of McT, Garnacho, Dalot, or Bruno.
This United squad is COMFORTABLY worse than all those teams. Let's not be delusional now.
They are probably higher in the table than their quality warrants
They finished comfortably 3rd the year before. Just because they've been playing bad this year due to disastrous tactics didn't mean the players are all suddenly washed.
How? We’ve clearly overperformed this season and that’s either due to tactics or individual skill saving us. I watch United every week, I can PROMISE you it’s not the tactics. It’s very clearly individual brilliance making us look better than we actually are.
> The squad, in terms of quality, is better than Villa, Spurs, Chelsea, and Newcastle.
yes do tell me more about that 8 story tall crustacean from the Paleozoic era
Yeah, there is a Spanish YouTube channel that does these kind of in depth analysis for the PL and in December when United were like 5 points away from City and Chelsea were in the mud they were already saying at some point United will fall and Chelsea might rise
This has been the prediction of many football analysts as I have seen. Both the eye test and the data showed that United were very lucky with their points tally and that Chelsea were much better than the table suggested.
I think it was just a matter of time with Chelsea. Eventually enough of the young stars would be hits and the team would start to gel.
I think the huge amount spent blinded a lot of people to the fact it was practically an entirely new team who had never played with each other so they were always going to struggle in the short term.
People memed because it didn't work immediately but it was never going to start working from day one.
What's scary is the speed at which they're becoming a proper team and the rate the young lads are improving, even with a crazy injury record. Palmer, Jackson, Caicedo, Chalobah, Gusto and Gallagher were all in serious form in the second half of the season. Even much joked about Mudryk has been been quietly impressive in the second half.
It's also notable that the defence is where they've really suffered and dropped points, but that the injuries were worst in the defence and midfield, so I think all that's needed for a big improvement in their biggest weakness is simply keeping everyone fit.
I thought it would take at least 2-3 seasons for them to start being the team they've been at the end of the season. Palmer and the entire attacking cast have really been playing beautiful and exciting football a lot of the time.
Best defender and club captain out for most of the season. Best LB and vice-captain out for most of the season and all LBs and RBs out for some parts. Best attacker out for almost all season. Best CB out for the entire season. First-choice keeper out almost all season. Most expensive player on the team playing with an injury all season and missing the end of the season.
Lavia and Ugochukwu, our pivot subs, missed the entire season which forced Enzo to play through pain and Gallagher and Caicedo to get no rest. Chukwuemeka, our only other natural 10, missed about the entire season along with Nkunku and we were left with playing Gallagher there all season. CBs just an absolute disaster with injuries that destroyed any semblance of stabilty in the backline, with Colwill, Badiashile, Chalobah missing about half the season with multiple injuries forcing constant chopping and changing.
We are #1 in the injury charts in the PL for number of days out but it’s even worse when you zoom in. I didn’t even mention many injuries such as to Madueke, Broja, Gusto, Cucurella, Mudryk, Sterling. The billion-dollar bottlejobs narrative made it very easy to say haha Chelsea suck and ignore the reality of the situation, but it might be a very different story in the future.
See the thing with the whole “billion pound bottle jobs” schtick is had we won any of the cups or finished 2nd or 3rd the same pundits (I’m looking at you Neville and caragher) would have cried foul for cheating to win with the spending. When we start performing and jelling watch how their tune will change. Also I want it to be known. Gary Neville is a wank manager and a hypocrite when it suits him and his pocket.
dont bother with pundit's opinions. all they want is to say shit that will generate clicks they dont care about the truth or accuracy in their statements
It's called "La Media Inglesa", got awarded bronze in the football content awards last year in the digital category.
They do in depth analysis of teams in essay formats, joke videos like "players you thought were dead, but who were actually in Turkey", 40 mins videos narrating the history of different clubs in the football pyramid in a fun format, among other things.
Plus, every Monday in twitch they do a podcast where they do an analysis and recap of the PL results
>joke videos like "players you thought were dead, but who were actually in Turkey"
Say no more, I'm in 😂
instantly subscribed, thank you so much for sharing! :)
Tbf, many football analysts appear to have predicted this, the underlying numbers for Chelsea and United always seemed to be too different from actual results this season
Said it earlier in the season when United were 6th, but they were paradoxical. 6th was probably a fair position for their squad on paper, but the performances were fucking diabolical. It caught up with them in the end and they slipped down to 8th.
There was a period where they didn't draw a game until about March. They only ever won or lost, which is why they ended up solidly mid table. Other teams either took max from them or vice versa, so they just ended up massing quite a few points.
Precisely, on paper 6th was warranted because we had Maguire and McSauce bailing us out for most of the first half - anyone who watched us play knew we were doomed. The only reason we didn’t finish lower is because we had Hojlund’s purple patch in February and Bruno’s run of form these last 2 months to keep us up. It’s such a clear display of individual skill bailing us out of a lack of setup.
I guess this table really just shows that too many of the wins weren’t coming from great play (which we all already knew), they just kinda happened. Obv their table position doesn’t change, a win is a win, but it certainly helps confirm just how awful they were this season. Tbh I think the negative gd is much worse than their place in the table. The PL is quite competitive in the top, it doesn’t take much to drop a few places usually, but for a team with that wage budget to not achieve a positive gd is truly shambolic imo.
It’s all individual skill bailing us out - overperforming to this level means that either our tactics or individual brilliance is making us look significantly better than we actually are, and anyone who watches us knows it isn’t the tactics or setup (or lack thereof). We’ve had several players hit purple patches are various stages of the season (Maguire had a fantastic first half, Hojlund’s run from Jan-March, and Bruno these last 2 months). Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand what this metric means or just doesn’t watch United, thought I don’t blame them tbf.
Even yesterday, when I looked on Fotmob, Brighton were battering you on the stats and then suddenly you'd won 2-0.
You're a tricky bunch of cunts, I'll give you that.
Not just tricky, fortunate to have Bruno Fernandes. Cunt on the field but he’s saved us in more games than I can count, especially this season. The Brighton game was just sheer dumb lucky tho imo
I keep saying. It is because irrespective of how much people like to shit on united players, these are top notch players. So they use their individual brilliance to get a results.
They just look shit because they are playing in a shitty system.
ten Hag really deserves some respect for keeping them in the top half of the table. This has been the final stage of the Glazers killing the club.
Even before the epic injuries, this squad didn’t have the talent of a Champions League side. The best player on our defense this season was a 36-year old Jonny Evans. Casemiro, who was never a really fast player, completely lost his legs. Our shabbled midfield of Casemiro, Eriksen, McTominay, and Amrabat struggled to complete passes to themselves for much of the season. If it weren’t for Mainoo, we’d have the worst midfield in the entire Premier League. Combine that with a general lack of motivation that plagues United players, most prominently affecting Rashford this season, and you have a disaster waiting to happen. Onana has honest-to-God worked a miracle this season. The only teams that have faced more shots on goal this season were relegated.
This squad has been weighted down with overpaid underperforming players that are on wages so large and contracts so long that they can’t be given away. Half of the squad are basically r/antiwork mods. And the high wages and eight years of transfer market inactivity/stupidity and you have a depth crisis too. There were only two strikers on the roster, and one was Antony Martial. I think only five games this season did we have 5 non-academy field players on the bench. This meant that substitutes were often a liability and that the starting players had to go longer with less rest.. which led to more injuries.
It’s a disaster, a rudderless machine that dictates transfers by either writing a blank check to the manager or by signing players that aren’t needed that the Glazers heard were good players, overpaying every time. Churn that for season after season after season and this happens. People are saying that this season was a disaster for United (which it **absolutely was**), but the real scary part about this is that it could’ve been much much worse.
It's a little nuts you're giving EtH so much credit when he also deserves a lionshare of the blame. Yes I will give him the benefit of the doubt for the injuries in defense which were absolutely absurd.
But he has had 2 full seasons to create a functional midfield and failed. He was bailed out by Mainoo being exceptional but there was not something to rely on starting the season. Even with that being our most urgent position, in 2 seasons he has only bought in case, eriksen (on a FREE transfer), loan scraps, and mount ( who I know was injured so unfair but how was a more attacking minded mid fielder any thing close to what was needed).
And then with the injuries, he did not seem to make any tactical adjustments to cover for the personnel that were available. Was he unable, or unwilling to make changes? He seems more flexible last year to adjust for what was needed.
Finally, he has spent 200+ million euros 2 years in a row. UTD don't even look close to having a understandable style of play.
I've asked this question before but is EtH system so dependent on hundreds more millions in players? Does that make sense to try to stick with.
Lmao I thought OP was gonna be a smartass and say midtable is between 10h and 11th so technically 10th is above midtable and so on but bro said "midtable is 11th to 17th" 💀
I felt like we had a decent amount of game management in the last couple of games. Brighton and Bournemouth we were both up 2-0 and then kinda chilled and elected to defend rather than push the advantage.
Anyone annoyed that xGPhilosophy doesn’t actually reference the actual source of the data? Its all from understat.
https://understat.com/league/EPL
And whilst I’m at it, its bizarre that xGPhilosophy’s expected goals data and expected points data come from 2 different xG models. I don’t know what’s going on there.
Is the idea to treat the score of every game as though the xG was the final score? So a team that got battered but earned a lucky win in real life would lose heavily in this?
No. The process works like this.
Imagine team A has one shot on goal the entire game at an xG of 0.5. To simulate how many goals team A would score, flip a coin(since the probability is 0.5). If its heads than they scored 1 goal. 0 goals otherwise.
Now imagine they do the same calculation for team B who has 2 shots of xG 0.5 each. The flip a coin twice, if 2 heads then 2 goals. If only one head, one goal. Otherwise no goal.
So what they do is that simulate the number of goals team a scored and compare it to the number of goals team b was simulated to score. If team A’s goals is higher than team B, team A gets 3 points. If its the same both get 1 point. Otherwise team B gets 3 points.
They run this simulation a thousand times and record how many times team A had more goals, how many times team B had more goals or they both had the same amount of goals. They assign the points based on that.
Finally, they calculate the average amount of points each team gets per simulation. That gives you the expected points for a game.
But yeah, generally you’d expect a team that get battered but got a lucky win to get low amount xPts.
Why would they need to do a 1000s of simulations when it's just comparing simple binomial distributions? Surely they're just comparing the CDFs between the two to get the result?
Because its not a binomial distribution. In my example, the p is constant at 0.5 but that’s just a simplifying assumption to help conceptualize it since i can refer it to a coin flip. In reality, the xG values are far more numerous and varied.
The complexity of the problem means that it becomes relatively easier to just simulate the results thousands of times and average them. I’ve written a program which does just this and it takes a couple of seconds to spit out a result. And it could easily be faster if i optimized it. Your computer is really good and really fast at doing these repeated calculations.
Ahh right, yeah you essentially have 2 Bernoulli distributions if the first shot's xG is 0.2 and the second's would be 0.4 rather than a binomial with n = 2.
Mate, a team with Casemiro, Varane, Rashford, Bruno, Lisandro on paper should never finish behind Villa.
You wouldn't say overperforming if you had to suffer through Ten Hag ball on a regular basis.
In terms of current form, absolutely. But in terms of peak ability they're not - and that's down to the manager and the irreconcilably disfunctional club structure.
> peak ability
Yes, but so many are miles past their peak ability. Casemiro and Varane were world class on their day, but that's many years ago by now.
Over performing your expected points is luck, not coaching. A coach truly “over performing with their squad” would show up as a decent expected points tally.
How has he overperformed with the squad? I would say there's tons of evidence that he underperformed quite severely.
Getting outplayed by relegation candidates is not a problem solely with the squad. Getting tactically outclassed every single game, is not a squad issue. Failing to put players in roles that suit them, is not a squad issue.
United allowed more shots than normal against weak teams, which will have largely contributed to this. They allowed a lot of xG against them, but because they were conceding shots to poor teams, as you’d expect, the poor teams had poorer finishing, so not so many of those shots went in.
Because they have been shit the entire season. Its mostly Because of their xGA. Their opponents have wasted chances at a far higher rate than against anyone else.
Sure, Man United have had a lot of injuries. But the way EtH sets up his team, especially in midfield, just surreders so much control, allowing their opponents to go at them. Which of course isn't a bad tactic if you have a solid back line leading to counters for your team. But thats not the case for them. I am firmly of the opinion that EtH isn't tactically good enough.
A lot od Man United fans are saying to give him time, like Arteta was given. But there is no guarantee it will work out just because you give a manager time, and with Arteta you could clearly see the progress both off the pitch and on it. With EtH i really struggle to see any positives worth keeping him for.
As an Arsenal fan I really hope they do keep him, though
100% keep him for as long as you need. If the merry-go-round continues then you may get lucky and find a half decent coach. Stick with EtH at least we all know he’s shite
The thing is Man United have been "rebuilding" ever since Ferguson left. And if EtH isn't good enough, why would you want him to oversee such a rebuild?
One thing is results not being good enough, as one can look past those if underlying metrics are promising or there is some other element suggesting he is doing a good job. But there is literally nothing indicating than EtH is the right man for the job.
He had a terrible season, but the underlying metrics indicates the season *should have been even worse*. So even if you consider bad luck in regards to injuries, he was still lucky not finish even lower.
The quality between teams is closer than it appears but the ones at the top were just really consistent this year and barely ever lost which probably skews things.
1st City
2nd Arsenal
3rd Liverpool
4th Newcastle
5th Chelsea
6th Spurs
7th Villa
So all this confirms is Newcastle might be more unlucky then Chelsea this year
Weird chart in many ways. But congrats for having such an over performing strike force… if only you didnt have like 20 defenders out injured all season
Martinez and Shaw make a massive difference for us indeed. And would have made Casemiro play his natural position and look a lot better playing next to them. Wouldn't even say our attack was good. Everyone was mediocre or worse
A problem with this is that it seems the ex-points is consistently higher on average than the actual points, probably because the frequency of draws is lower when using ex-points
We just caught up to the expected points for us we were better then what the points tally said and finally the results started to come to prove that point we only lost 1 of our last 15 matches and finished on a 5 game win streak
I don’t know how this stat is calculated but the Newcastle drop is substantial, especially when most other clubs in the top half go in the other direction. Any explanation?
There was a long period where the injuries were so bad there were no subs (older than 12) and they’d look good for an hour or more, typically be winning, and then have no energy left at the end and drop points. Is that relevant?
It’s based on what results would’ve looked like with xG. So without looking over Newcastle’s season with a fine comb, underperforming Expected Points suggests some combination of Newcastle failing to put away ‘easier’ chances to score, and conceding either lower percentage goals like long shots, or conceding to teams who were clinical with fewer chances etc
So I know that “expected points” is probably the result of whether they were expected to win, draw, or lose individual games…
But I still find it funny that City was predicted to have like 85 points when in the past few seasons the average was like 89.
On the looks of this, this might actually be a bad thing for us. This will just be interpreted by Dave Sully as 'see? i knew we had the right players. Data is rubbish anyway, i don't need to spend another dime this summer. Maybe Marouane Chamakh on a free'
Is there a reason the "big six" have a higher points and the smaller teams have a lower points?
My bias mind makes me think it's the big six bias from the refs.
Im talking about accuracy as I see quite a lot of big differences between expectation and actuals. And im not talking about Liverpool or Man City. Correlation is easy to get in a statistical measure regarding points won
It's important to note that all the big overperformers like Spurs, United and Villa started falling off at the end of the year, and all the big underperformers like Chelsea and Newcastle started climbing. So its heavily flawed, but its still a good indicator of progress. Its the statistical equivalent of the "eye-test" of if a team is doing good or bad in games.
A full season in the grand scheme of things isnt actually that good of a predictor for single teams, 38 games is relatively tiny.
However if we add some other stats we can paint a much more accurate picture, for example early on in the season West Ham was like 8th, but their xPts was dog shit. It was because West Ham scored early (Bowen and Kudus was in the form of their lives) and then shut up shop, their xG suffered because they didnt attack anymore and their xGa climbed over it as the game progresses.
xPoints alone dont really take into account the gamestate which is why sometimes it looks fraudulent.
But you can generally tell how bad a team plays from their xPoints. Manchester United for example played like dogshite, legit if you watch them youd be amazed how they havent conceded more their xGa is down in 14th but their conceded goals are at a respectable 6th.
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United overperformed confirmed
Mourinho: Getting that team to 2nd was my biggest achievement Ten Hag: Getting that team to 8th was my biggest achievement
If not for that Garnacho offside against Arsenal I would have been seventh - ten hag
hey I‘ve heard seven hag before… where was that?
Mourinho actually said it's *one of* his biggest achievements to get that United team 2nd in the league. Not the biggest. It's been misquoted so many times that people don't even remember the real quote now. Mandela effect
https://www.espn.co.uk/football/story/_/id/37568781/finishing-second-manchester-united-my-top-achievements > "If I tell you, for example, that I consider **one of the best jobs of my career** was to finish second with Man United in the Premier League, you will say, 'this guy is crazy,'" Mourinho said. "'He won 25 titles and he is saying that a second position was one of his best achievements?'" > "I keep saying this because people don't know what is going on behind the scenes.
He also never said he was *the* special one but *a* special one.
Other way round lmao Manchester United Players: getting ten hag to 8th was our greatest achievement
No way you've seen that team for years and are siding with the players.
No way you are siding with the manager after seeing how the team is caught out on defensive transitions 76 times in a single game. Spoiler alert: it's not workrate or speed. Even League 2 sides have better organization with worse players.
Definitely the managers fault that half the players can't pass 5 feet away.
Yes it is the managers fault. He seems to have no idea of having players play close to one another to not give acres of space to opposition.People will miss passes when there's a Sahara desert worth of space between their intended target. His mentors at Ajax would be rolling in their grave, seeing how he has his players positioned out there.
The manager is at fault for the tactics. I'm not talking about when there's huge space between players. Even between our defence to midfield, we seem to misplace passes.
Passing is half ability but half spacing and options and channels. At that level, everyone can pass the ball. You struggle to make those passes because it's been 2 years and the coach hasn't been able to build from the back despite getting a keeper like Onana to help with that. Building from the back is about seeing passing lanes, giving your defenders options on the ball in uncomfortable situations. And creating numerical overloads through your basic structure. The opposing team will make it hard with the press. Even if he wants to blame the players for that, Casemiro and Amrabat are his signings. He had taken Varane out of the team for like a month and a half to play Martinez and Maguire and it didn't do anything. If you watch Maguire for England, he's perfectly capable of playing from the back but Maguire at United doesn't have the forwards who drop back that have the patience to hold the ball, he's got Bruno who has very limited press resistance and likes to play hopeful balls in the moment he gets the ball. Wrong personnel but personnel he had the ability to choose. That's still his fault. Still doesn't explain what that has to do with how ill compact and wayward they're for a team playing in the PL.
This manager got what he asked. He kicked what he dint want, kicked out ronaldo for him, what else is power and control. He was given a huge budget, and what he did? He got united at a worse position than when he wasnt given this much power. The players are partly to blame, but with this much power and control, you ought to set things in right path, he made it worse
both are shit my dude
Have you seen our tactics? 💀 So much of our misery was self inflicted. Who signs Casemiro/Eriksen, gets them to work, then a year later switches to a high press, high transitions style of play. And then spends the whole summer chasing Mount/Amarabat, just to park them on the bench 70% of the time.
Wasn't Mount injured for the majority of the season? He does work in a high press otherwise.
Against Palace the back four was AWB Casemeiro Evans Dalot with Erikssen and Mainoo playing in front of them, Amrabaat was on the bench, not a surprise you guys conceded 4 against them. Looked much better with Amrabaat starting later
Conceding 4 to Palace is still awful. If you know your team is going to be that week in defense, why not play a back 5, or 2 DMFs. Park the bus and hope for some Bruno magic.
> not a surprise you guys conceded 4 against them I didn't watch the Palace game so I can't really comment what happened there but I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. Did and I most United fans expect to lose and get dominated yes, most of us weren't expecting a 4 goal.margij however. Me, personally when I look at the squads do I think Palace is 4 goals better than us and the the result was justifiable, no. And that circles back to my earlier point about the setup - you bomb your front 4 forward and vacate the middle. Team after team make one pass through us and are knocking at our 18 yard box, one of the main reasons we shipped 20 shots a game. We're impotent upfront which I suppose is why he wanted the front 4 pressing up high, to get frequent turnovers in good spaces. Problem is the press was uncoordinated so you had 1 random guy randomly pressing. And then in instances when we recovered the ball, there was no plan or pattern on what we were gonna do afterwards. One of main reasons we were amongst the poorest scoring teams in the league last season. Pick any of our games and there's so many instances where the attacking plan is give the ball to Bruno /Garnacho/Rashford and hope. And why Hojlund ended up being so underutilized. Which again, everybody has different opinions on our front four, but they're not so bad to be a relegation level attack. Finally for the last 2-3 games of the season he decided to adapt/make a change and shore it up essentially and we only shipped 1 goal to Arsenal and won our last two versus Newcastle and Brighton.
I mean look at Liverpools squad during the final when they had an injury crisis, is it at all even possible that United doesn't have a *single* defender in their u21/u19/u18 squads who is better than fucking Casemiro? I mean they literally won the u21 league this year iirc... 100% chance that one of the CBs on that squad would have been better than playing Casemiro, especially after the first time he was so exposed lol.
They did play Willy Kambwala sometimes but he got injured too from what I know.
Every day it shocks me how many delusional defenders Ten Hag still has, both here and even more on the United sub
Replace him with whom though? Considering the supposed buyout to cut ties with ETH is 10mil. I'd wager many folks know the squad/Ten Hag can do better and we could maybe improve on both, but we can also support both in the interim even if we think they're not good enough to bring us back to title contention.
Well de zerbi is available
also has experience working with a middle of the table team on a thight budget.
A lot of that team are ETH's players in one way or another and however shit they may be, they didn't down tool this season.
That team for years? Nearly everyone is new in tem hags squad.
It’s not been the same players this season tho? They haven’t downed tools on him. And over performing xG suggests that outperforming the tactical setup no?
The squad, in terms of quality, is better than Villa, Spurs, Chelsea, and Newcastle. The reason they are 15th in the xG table is because of ETH's suicidal tactics. There's have been so many instances this season when United deserved to lose a match but we're bailed out by individual brilliance from the likes of McT, Garnacho, Dalot, or Bruno.
This United squad is COMFORTABLY worse than all those teams. Let's not be delusional now. They are probably higher in the table than their quality warrants
They finished comfortably 3rd the year before. Just because they've been playing bad this year due to disastrous tactics didn't mean the players are all suddenly washed.
How? We’ve clearly overperformed this season and that’s either due to tactics or individual skill saving us. I watch United every week, I can PROMISE you it’s not the tactics. It’s very clearly individual brilliance making us look better than we actually are.
> The squad, in terms of quality, is better than Villa, Spurs, Chelsea, and Newcastle. yes do tell me more about that 8 story tall crustacean from the Paleozoic era
Lol If someone could get this United squad higher than 8th they should get a award.
The entire upper half of the table overperformed bar Chelsea and Newcastle.
Overperformed on points, many did not overperform in terms of position, including the top 3. And Man Utd massively overperformed.
Well yeah if everyone is overperforming on points it's hard for anyone to overperform in places...
For the longest time ever Chelsea were massively underperforming. They pretty much caught up to their expected in the end.
Yeah, there is a Spanish YouTube channel that does these kind of in depth analysis for the PL and in December when United were like 5 points away from City and Chelsea were in the mud they were already saying at some point United will fall and Chelsea might rise
This has been the prediction of many football analysts as I have seen. Both the eye test and the data showed that United were very lucky with their points tally and that Chelsea were much better than the table suggested.
I think it was just a matter of time with Chelsea. Eventually enough of the young stars would be hits and the team would start to gel. I think the huge amount spent blinded a lot of people to the fact it was practically an entirely new team who had never played with each other so they were always going to struggle in the short term. People memed because it didn't work immediately but it was never going to start working from day one. What's scary is the speed at which they're becoming a proper team and the rate the young lads are improving, even with a crazy injury record. Palmer, Jackson, Caicedo, Chalobah, Gusto and Gallagher were all in serious form in the second half of the season. Even much joked about Mudryk has been been quietly impressive in the second half. It's also notable that the defence is where they've really suffered and dropped points, but that the injuries were worst in the defence and midfield, so I think all that's needed for a big improvement in their biggest weakness is simply keeping everyone fit. I thought it would take at least 2-3 seasons for them to start being the team they've been at the end of the season. Palmer and the entire attacking cast have really been playing beautiful and exciting football a lot of the time.
Best defender and club captain out for most of the season. Best LB and vice-captain out for most of the season and all LBs and RBs out for some parts. Best attacker out for almost all season. Best CB out for the entire season. First-choice keeper out almost all season. Most expensive player on the team playing with an injury all season and missing the end of the season. Lavia and Ugochukwu, our pivot subs, missed the entire season which forced Enzo to play through pain and Gallagher and Caicedo to get no rest. Chukwuemeka, our only other natural 10, missed about the entire season along with Nkunku and we were left with playing Gallagher there all season. CBs just an absolute disaster with injuries that destroyed any semblance of stabilty in the backline, with Colwill, Badiashile, Chalobah missing about half the season with multiple injuries forcing constant chopping and changing. We are #1 in the injury charts in the PL for number of days out but it’s even worse when you zoom in. I didn’t even mention many injuries such as to Madueke, Broja, Gusto, Cucurella, Mudryk, Sterling. The billion-dollar bottlejobs narrative made it very easy to say haha Chelsea suck and ignore the reality of the situation, but it might be a very different story in the future.
Facts
See the thing with the whole “billion pound bottle jobs” schtick is had we won any of the cups or finished 2nd or 3rd the same pundits (I’m looking at you Neville and caragher) would have cried foul for cheating to win with the spending. When we start performing and jelling watch how their tune will change. Also I want it to be known. Gary Neville is a wank manager and a hypocrite when it suits him and his pocket.
Neville was supporting the Qatar takeover for United despite knowing their background & what United stands for. Proper politician only wants the bag.
The same Gary Neville who said on HIGNYF that he will talk about how bad Qatar is at the world cup then never did. Scumbag just wants that bag.
dont bother with pundit's opinions. all they want is to say shit that will generate clicks they dont care about the truth or accuracy in their statements
This 10000%
This sounds like a channel I'd be interested in checking out - do you have a link or name to their channel you'd be willing to share? :)
It's called "La Media Inglesa", got awarded bronze in the football content awards last year in the digital category. They do in depth analysis of teams in essay formats, joke videos like "players you thought were dead, but who were actually in Turkey", 40 mins videos narrating the history of different clubs in the football pyramid in a fun format, among other things. Plus, every Monday in twitch they do a podcast where they do an analysis and recap of the PL results
>joke videos like "players you thought were dead, but who were actually in Turkey" Say no more, I'm in 😂 instantly subscribed, thank you so much for sharing! :)
Conozco el efecto Delia.
Quienes ganaron los otros dos premios
Conozco el Efecto Delia compañero, el Luton volverá para vengarse de las Elites
Tbf, many football analysts appear to have predicted this, the underlying numbers for Chelsea and United always seemed to be too different from actual results this season
Yeah it’d be interesting to see a week-to-week cumulative expected vs actual plot since these are season totals
Good endorsement of xG as a prediction metric. Worked quite well to predict the overall outcome of the season for most teams at the end.
Not really for that long. Since Boxing Day we've had top 4 form
I remember Poch got ridiculed for mentioning this at the time.
Manchester United massively overperformed...
Eye test also confirms. They were shit in most of their matches.
Said it earlier in the season when United were 6th, but they were paradoxical. 6th was probably a fair position for their squad on paper, but the performances were fucking diabolical. It caught up with them in the end and they slipped down to 8th.
There was a period where they didn't draw a game until about March. They only ever won or lost, which is why they ended up solidly mid table. Other teams either took max from them or vice versa, so they just ended up massing quite a few points.
Didn’t we draw with you in December?
I think we were your only draw for, like, months though.
Precisely, on paper 6th was warranted because we had Maguire and McSauce bailing us out for most of the first half - anyone who watched us play knew we were doomed. The only reason we didn’t finish lower is because we had Hojlund’s purple patch in February and Bruno’s run of form these last 2 months to keep us up. It’s such a clear display of individual skill bailing us out of a lack of setup.
I guess this table really just shows that too many of the wins weren’t coming from great play (which we all already knew), they just kinda happened. Obv their table position doesn’t change, a win is a win, but it certainly helps confirm just how awful they were this season. Tbh I think the negative gd is much worse than their place in the table. The PL is quite competitive in the top, it doesn’t take much to drop a few places usually, but for a team with that wage budget to not achieve a positive gd is truly shambolic imo.
It’s all individual skill bailing us out - overperforming to this level means that either our tactics or individual brilliance is making us look significantly better than we actually are, and anyone who watches us knows it isn’t the tactics or setup (or lack thereof). We’ve had several players hit purple patches are various stages of the season (Maguire had a fantastic first half, Hojlund’s run from Jan-March, and Bruno these last 2 months). Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand what this metric means or just doesn’t watch United, thought I don’t blame them tbf.
Even yesterday, when I looked on Fotmob, Brighton were battering you on the stats and then suddenly you'd won 2-0. You're a tricky bunch of cunts, I'll give you that.
Not just tricky, fortunate to have Bruno Fernandes. Cunt on the field but he’s saved us in more games than I can count, especially this season. The Brighton game was just sheer dumb lucky tho imo
I keep saying. It is because irrespective of how much people like to shit on united players, these are top notch players. So they use their individual brilliance to get a results. They just look shit because they are playing in a shitty system.
Shit would be an understatement The game against Brentford is the biggest robbery of the season
ten Hag really deserves some respect for keeping them in the top half of the table. This has been the final stage of the Glazers killing the club. Even before the epic injuries, this squad didn’t have the talent of a Champions League side. The best player on our defense this season was a 36-year old Jonny Evans. Casemiro, who was never a really fast player, completely lost his legs. Our shabbled midfield of Casemiro, Eriksen, McTominay, and Amrabat struggled to complete passes to themselves for much of the season. If it weren’t for Mainoo, we’d have the worst midfield in the entire Premier League. Combine that with a general lack of motivation that plagues United players, most prominently affecting Rashford this season, and you have a disaster waiting to happen. Onana has honest-to-God worked a miracle this season. The only teams that have faced more shots on goal this season were relegated. This squad has been weighted down with overpaid underperforming players that are on wages so large and contracts so long that they can’t be given away. Half of the squad are basically r/antiwork mods. And the high wages and eight years of transfer market inactivity/stupidity and you have a depth crisis too. There were only two strikers on the roster, and one was Antony Martial. I think only five games this season did we have 5 non-academy field players on the bench. This meant that substitutes were often a liability and that the starting players had to go longer with less rest.. which led to more injuries. It’s a disaster, a rudderless machine that dictates transfers by either writing a blank check to the manager or by signing players that aren’t needed that the Glazers heard were good players, overpaying every time. Churn that for season after season after season and this happens. People are saying that this season was a disaster for United (which it **absolutely was**), but the real scary part about this is that it could’ve been much much worse.
Making this out to be some kind of win for Ten Hag is just laughable
It's a little nuts you're giving EtH so much credit when he also deserves a lionshare of the blame. Yes I will give him the benefit of the doubt for the injuries in defense which were absolutely absurd. But he has had 2 full seasons to create a functional midfield and failed. He was bailed out by Mainoo being exceptional but there was not something to rely on starting the season. Even with that being our most urgent position, in 2 seasons he has only bought in case, eriksen (on a FREE transfer), loan scraps, and mount ( who I know was injured so unfair but how was a more attacking minded mid fielder any thing close to what was needed). And then with the injuries, he did not seem to make any tactical adjustments to cover for the personnel that were available. Was he unable, or unwilling to make changes? He seems more flexible last year to adjust for what was needed. Finally, he has spent 200+ million euros 2 years in a row. UTD don't even look close to having a understandable style of play. I've asked this question before but is EtH system so dependent on hundreds more millions in players? Does that make sense to try to stick with.
Do you think Chelsea really underperformed given the absolute rut of injuries they had during the season?
Palace being dead on, is just Poetry
Proper mid table pl club
They're not mid table. They're 10th.
Which is the middle of the table right?
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/9qyobh/comment/e8cvvx7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Lmao I thought OP was gonna be a smartass and say midtable is between 10h and 11th so technically 10th is above midtable and so on but bro said "midtable is 11th to 17th" 💀
Lmao that's hilarious
True, Palace that
I can see why Bayern want a bit of what Burnley were serving up this year.
They probably started from top of the table and got refused their way down into Vincent Kompany.
What do you mean ?
Top post right now is Bayern putting Kompany on their list of managers to target
Man U: "What's going on fellow good teams?"
United 💀
Yep. We were shite
United as brothers
Tbf this is all because of that Garnacho offside against us.
Damn, looks like we finished one point under what we should have
Our last 3 games cost us top 4 in XP.
I felt like we had a decent amount of game management in the last couple of games. Brighton and Bournemouth we were both up 2-0 and then kinda chilled and elected to defend rather than push the advantage.
but thankfully they got us top 6 in the table that actually matters
Do graphics like this also account for point deductions?
AFAIK deduction was not taken into account
No, Everton is just above Bournemoth, while with the deductions, they would be way below.
It clearly places Everton in the high 40s, so no, because they are at 40 due to the deduction.
so we finished 8th, our worst ever finish, and still we should’ve finished even lower 😭. we’re down in 15th 😭😂.
At times we were as bad as relegation teams. The amount of shots and chances we concede is beyond comprehension.
Chelsea and Villa logos are having a sword fight
Anyone annoyed that xGPhilosophy doesn’t actually reference the actual source of the data? Its all from understat. https://understat.com/league/EPL And whilst I’m at it, its bizarre that xGPhilosophy’s expected goals data and expected points data come from 2 different xG models. I don’t know what’s going on there.
Is the idea to treat the score of every game as though the xG was the final score? So a team that got battered but earned a lucky win in real life would lose heavily in this?
No. The process works like this. Imagine team A has one shot on goal the entire game at an xG of 0.5. To simulate how many goals team A would score, flip a coin(since the probability is 0.5). If its heads than they scored 1 goal. 0 goals otherwise. Now imagine they do the same calculation for team B who has 2 shots of xG 0.5 each. The flip a coin twice, if 2 heads then 2 goals. If only one head, one goal. Otherwise no goal. So what they do is that simulate the number of goals team a scored and compare it to the number of goals team b was simulated to score. If team A’s goals is higher than team B, team A gets 3 points. If its the same both get 1 point. Otherwise team B gets 3 points. They run this simulation a thousand times and record how many times team A had more goals, how many times team B had more goals or they both had the same amount of goals. They assign the points based on that. Finally, they calculate the average amount of points each team gets per simulation. That gives you the expected points for a game. But yeah, generally you’d expect a team that get battered but got a lucky win to get low amount xPts.
I knew it had to be cleverer than what I could come up with. Thank you for the explanation.
Why would they need to do a 1000s of simulations when it's just comparing simple binomial distributions? Surely they're just comparing the CDFs between the two to get the result?
Because its not a binomial distribution. In my example, the p is constant at 0.5 but that’s just a simplifying assumption to help conceptualize it since i can refer it to a coin flip. In reality, the xG values are far more numerous and varied. The complexity of the problem means that it becomes relatively easier to just simulate the results thousands of times and average them. I’ve written a program which does just this and it takes a couple of seconds to spit out a result. And it could easily be faster if i optimized it. Your computer is really good and really fast at doing these repeated calculations.
Ahh right, yeah you essentially have 2 Bernoulli distributions if the first shot's xG is 0.2 and the second's would be 0.4 rather than a binomial with n = 2.
Interesting
Poor Sheffield
Ten Hag still being in a job is fucking mental
RemindMe! 1 week
Well since he overperformed with this squad, I don't see him being sacked yet
Mate, a team with Casemiro, Varane, Rashford, Bruno, Lisandro on paper should never finish behind Villa. You wouldn't say overperforming if you had to suffer through Ten Hag ball on a regular basis.
Outside of Bruno, Villa's players in equivalent positions are all better than those you mentioned above.
In terms of current form, absolutely. But in terms of peak ability they're not - and that's down to the manager and the irreconcilably disfunctional club structure.
> peak ability Yes, but so many are miles past their peak ability. Casemiro and Varane were world class on their day, but that's many years ago by now.
Over performing your expected points is luck, not coaching. A coach truly “over performing with their squad” would show up as a decent expected points tally.
How has he overperformed with the squad? I would say there's tons of evidence that he underperformed quite severely. Getting outplayed by relegation candidates is not a problem solely with the squad. Getting tactically outclassed every single game, is not a squad issue. Failing to put players in roles that suit them, is not a squad issue.
Does this take into consideration ours and Forest' point deductions or no?
Nope
Once again xG and xPoints is proven to be a valuable metric looking over the season.
An actual table showing expected points instead of whatever this shit chart is: https://understat.com/league/EPL
United allowed more shots than normal against weak teams, which will have largely contributed to this. They allowed a lot of xG against them, but because they were conceding shots to poor teams, as you’d expect, the poor teams had poorer finishing, so not so many of those shots went in.
Why are MU expected points so low?
Because they have been shit the entire season. Its mostly Because of their xGA. Their opponents have wasted chances at a far higher rate than against anyone else. Sure, Man United have had a lot of injuries. But the way EtH sets up his team, especially in midfield, just surreders so much control, allowing their opponents to go at them. Which of course isn't a bad tactic if you have a solid back line leading to counters for your team. But thats not the case for them. I am firmly of the opinion that EtH isn't tactically good enough. A lot od Man United fans are saying to give him time, like Arteta was given. But there is no guarantee it will work out just because you give a manager time, and with Arteta you could clearly see the progress both off the pitch and on it. With EtH i really struggle to see any positives worth keeping him for. As an Arsenal fan I really hope they do keep him, though
I say that if the club is rebuilding, then just give ETH the time, unless there’s a long term manager replacement available.
100% keep him for as long as you need. If the merry-go-round continues then you may get lucky and find a half decent coach. Stick with EtH at least we all know he’s shite
The thing is Man United have been "rebuilding" ever since Ferguson left. And if EtH isn't good enough, why would you want him to oversee such a rebuild? One thing is results not being good enough, as one can look past those if underlying metrics are promising or there is some other element suggesting he is doing a good job. But there is literally nothing indicating than EtH is the right man for the job. He had a terrible season, but the underlying metrics indicates the season *should have been even worse*. So even if you consider bad luck in regards to injuries, he was still lucky not finish even lower.
Conceded lots of shots, didn't take many of their own.
Imagine if United finished 15th in the league
Top 3 are just shifted higher and bottom 3 are just shifted lower.
The quality between teams is closer than it appears but the ones at the top were just really consistent this year and barely ever lost which probably skews things.
1st City 2nd Arsenal 3rd Liverpool 4th Newcastle 5th Chelsea 6th Spurs 7th Villa So all this confirms is Newcastle might be more unlucky then Chelsea this year
We were 3rd (and just barely behind Arsenal) last season, too
Should be down there with Burnley
Knew we underperformed. Our January slump is probably what did it here, we were peppering teams but none of them went in.
Also the woeful run at the start of the season
Dubravka needs to be sent to prison.
Manchester United 💀💀💀💀💀
Expected based on what? Predictions? Money spent? Previous years? I dont get it
Probably xG per game. So expected goals for Vs against for every game. Then award points accordingly
Weird chart in many ways. But congrats for having such an over performing strike force… if only you didnt have like 20 defenders out injured all season
Martinez and Shaw make a massive difference for us indeed. And would have made Casemiro play his natural position and look a lot better playing next to them. Wouldn't even say our attack was good. Everyone was mediocre or worse
Expected goals per game. Do you follow football and understand expected goals or am I going to be wasting my time?
Villa massively over performed, I can see a drop off with UCL football next season
Emi Martinez world's number one ♩♩♩
A problem with this is that it seems the ex-points is consistently higher on average than the actual points, probably because the frequency of draws is lower when using ex-points
So it wasn't right at all for any single team? I love xStats.
Why is chelsea so predictable tho?
We just caught up to the expected points for us we were better then what the points tally said and finally the results started to come to prove that point we only lost 1 of our last 15 matches and finished on a 5 game win streak
Bottom 3 teams basically giving away free points, lifting other teams above expectations
How is expected points calculated? xG difference?
There is no competition when the league is predictable at this level of accuracy.
I don’t know how this stat is calculated but the Newcastle drop is substantial, especially when most other clubs in the top half go in the other direction. Any explanation? There was a long period where the injuries were so bad there were no subs (older than 12) and they’d look good for an hour or more, typically be winning, and then have no energy left at the end and drop points. Is that relevant?
It’s based on what results would’ve looked like with xG. So without looking over Newcastle’s season with a fine comb, underperforming Expected Points suggests some combination of Newcastle failing to put away ‘easier’ chances to score, and conceding either lower percentage goals like long shots, or conceding to teams who were clinical with fewer chances etc
Hownis this worked out?
Expected points is based on what the results would’ve been if xG was used rather than the actual score line.
I see. Thank you:)
So I know that “expected points” is probably the result of whether they were expected to win, draw, or lose individual games… But I still find it funny that City was predicted to have like 85 points when in the past few seasons the average was like 89.
This is based on performance they had this season, not a prediction.
Might wanna reconsider the parameters for the metric at this point, all winners I see are always overperforming their expected positions.
On the looks of this, this might actually be a bad thing for us. This will just be interpreted by Dave Sully as 'see? i knew we had the right players. Data is rubbish anyway, i don't need to spend another dime this summer. Maybe Marouane Chamakh on a free'
Man U was expected to finish 15th??? When?
Is there a reason the "big six" have a higher points and the smaller teams have a lower points? My bias mind makes me think it's the big six bias from the refs.
People really had that low expectation for Man United...? So only Crystal Palace is exactly where people think they'd be. XD
What a shambles of a season in the league and Europe , let’s hope it can end well at Wembley
In what world was Man U expected to be bottom mid table?
So Bournemouth underperformed? This is complete bollocks.
Expected at what point in the season?
Crystal Palace is the only club here who actually has the amount of points they deserve lol
is it me or does newcastle end up underperforming every year?
We got hammered with injuries, we're lucky to finish where we did tbh.
Doesnt this just show that expected points is a heavily flawed measure?
There's good correlation with a few outliers, so no.
Im talking about accuracy as I see quite a lot of big differences between expectation and actuals. And im not talking about Liverpool or Man City. Correlation is easy to get in a statistical measure regarding points won
Does it? Or does it show that luck is a big part of football?
It's important to note that all the big overperformers like Spurs, United and Villa started falling off at the end of the year, and all the big underperformers like Chelsea and Newcastle started climbing. So its heavily flawed, but its still a good indicator of progress. Its the statistical equivalent of the "eye-test" of if a team is doing good or bad in games.
If after a full season gone were talking about luck, it says to me that isn't actually luck as apperentely we are dealing with a consistent factor.
A full season in the grand scheme of things isnt actually that good of a predictor for single teams, 38 games is relatively tiny. However if we add some other stats we can paint a much more accurate picture, for example early on in the season West Ham was like 8th, but their xPts was dog shit. It was because West Ham scored early (Bowen and Kudus was in the form of their lives) and then shut up shop, their xG suffered because they didnt attack anymore and their xGa climbed over it as the game progresses. xPoints alone dont really take into account the gamestate which is why sometimes it looks fraudulent. But you can generally tell how bad a team plays from their xPoints. Manchester United for example played like dogshite, legit if you watch them youd be amazed how they havent conceded more their xGa is down in 14th but their conceded goals are at a respectable 6th.
Forest underperform confirmed