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father-ted said:
Probably as we were creating more chances last season?
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This is the problem with this discussion. You have two fundamental points of view.

A) Ronaldo has saved United from an awful season
B) Ronaldo is partially responsible for Uniteds poor form and we would be better without him. Doesn't matter if a player scores 40 goals for you if you would have scored 60 without him.

You can't know how a team would do without a player conclusively so its just speculation. The biggest fundamental change from last season is Ronaldo however.
 
Sorry Fez you have baffled me a bit there, all I said was that we would have been in the bottom half of the table without Ronaldo's goals?

I think you need to re-read the previous posts.
 
father-ted said:
Sorry Fez you have baffled me a bit there, all I said was that we would have been in the bottom half of the table without Ronaldo's goals?

I think you need to re-read the previous posts.
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I mean, most teams would have a large drop if you took away the goals of their top goalscorer...

The point is that it isn't how it works. Someone else would have scored goals in his place. Its therefore a largely pointless thing to say unless you are discussing the effect of that person on the team. So what are you saying?
 
I don't have the stats but I am guessing that our midfield created far less chances this season, the football has been dire.
Due to this, the goal ratio of Ronaldo is even more astonishing.
Would a different player have scored even more goals from those chances....Lukaku etc? (I expect not, as Ronaldo is still a real goal machine, even in his twilight years, he oozes quality even though he has lost a yard of pace, his reading of the game and positional play is second to none).
He has repeatedly created goals from almost nothing, for me he has done very well given the drought in chances created.
 
He has scored 18 goals this season in the league from an expected goals of....17.21. So he's created 0.79 goals out of nothing. You're right no other striker could do that. It's amazing how consistently you're wrong :D
 
Clarify 'expected goals' and also compare that to the teams 'chances created'.

I guess that the 'expected chances created' will be far lower as well, so horses for courses.
 
father-ted said:
I don't have the stats but I am guessing that our midfield created far less chances this season, the football has been dire.
Due to this, the goal ratio of Ronaldo is even more astonishing.
Would a different player have scored even more goals from those chances....Lukaku etc? (I expect not, as Ronaldo is still a real goal machine, even in his twilight years, he oozes quality even though he has lost a yard of pace, his reading of the game and positional play is second to none).
He has repeatedly created goals from almost nothing, for me he has done very well given the drought in chances created.
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This is what I am trying to explain. You can’t make that argument. Strikers don’t exist outside of the team. If Ronaldo wasn’t here, the whole team would play differently. The number and kind of chances the midfield/forwards would create would change. Would they create the same number of chances or more or less? Who knows.

Imagine putting DDG in the Liverpool or City teams. They would suddenly not have a sweeper keeper or someone with good distribution. If they played in exactly the same way as they currently do they would score less goals and concede far more.
 
father-ted said:
Clarify 'expected goals' and also compare that to the teams 'chances created'.

I guess that the 'expected chances created' will be far lower as well, so horses for courses.
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You've never heard of xG?

It is the number of goals an average player is expected to score given the shots they take.
 
Fair point Fez, however the way we are playing at the moment I seriously doubt we would have created more chances and scored more goals if Ronaldo was not up front.
Do you think we are dynamic enough to change our style of play with the current crop of players?
I felt sorry for Ragnick as he was a crippled manager before he even arrived, the poor mindset and extreme player power was always going to push against any style of play or changes that he tried to implement.
 
xG in of itself is a silly stat.

Take last year for example, your xG over the season was 67 and you scored 73.
This season your xG was 58.77 and you scored 57 goals.

Your xGA last year was 44.53 and you conceded 44.
Your xGA this season was 60.84 and you conceded 57.

Edit - taken out the season split as for some reason it was pulling incorrect data.
 
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xG is a useful stat, it’s just not the be all end all of chance creation. It is also, as far as I know not tailored to the quality of player on the end of the chance. For example JWP over a 30 yard free kick should have a much higher xG than Ronaldo for that same free kick.

The fact that it is largely very accurate should tell you that it’s a useful stat. It’s also quite literally the maths behind goals being scored.

You still need to watch games but xG is very useful.
 
It does not indicate the quality of those chances though, so a team could be creating lots of poorer half-chances where a player gets a shot off - so that stat would go against him?
 
father-ted said:
It does not indicate the quality of those chances though, so a team could be creating lots of poorer half-chances where a player gets a shot off - so that stat would go against him?
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Thats exactly what it does. It says "based on our data, a player in this position usually converts a shot from here 10% of the time, therefore its a 0.1 xG chance."

If it has a 10% chance of being scored and they get 10 of those in a game then the xG would be 1 because you would expect to score 10% of the time i.e 1 out of those 10 chances.

If someone has an xG of 10 for a season, that will be made up of dozens of chances of varying quality. The cumulative xG would go up game by game so after 5 games it might be 2.84 and after 12 games it might only be 3.78 because he didn't get many good chances in those 7 games.

Where it falls down is when it comes to chances not created. As far as I know, if you have a simple pass to give your mate a tap in and instead you shoot from a tight angle, that could go down as a 0.05 xG instead of what should have been 0.9 xG because your mate had an open goal if you had passed it.

This is why xG also needs you to watch games for the full picture. If you are making a mess of simple final balls you could be dominating the game and absolutely battering the opposition but have a low xG. If you aren't making those final balls to create a shot on goal then xG doesn't come into it.
 
Ah ok I didn't know how it worked, thanks for the explanation.
Hasn't changed my view on Ronaldo's contribution though, watching the actual game is my preference.
 
I think the big falldown of the stat is that if a chance is missed but would have been offside (but never goes to VAR because it wasn't converted) it still counts towards xG. it can make games look a lot closer than they actually are.

What it's really good for is examining trends. For example you're looking to sign two strikers, both have scored 20 goals in a season in similar gametime. Are they both similar options? What if one scored those 20 goals from 21xG and the other scored them from 8xG? The latter is unlikely to continue to exceed xG by that amount. For example Darwin Nunez is massively overperforming this season by a factor of 2.5 or something crazy, one of the many reasons I don't want us to sign him.
 
father-ted said:
Ah ok I didn't know how it worked, thanks for the explanation.
Hasn't changed my view on Ronaldo's contribution though, watching the actual game is my preference.
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So despite the facts that show he isn't massively overperforming at all you're just going to ignore them and say nobody else could have performed for us this season?
 
Where did I say he was over-performing? Why do you keep trying to twist things, can't we just have a reasonable debate?
We will all have differing opinions and stats are not the be all and end all, I can accept that and discuss but seems you cannot.

Given the ***** season we have had, only Ronaldo and DDG can hold their heads high and were in with a shout for the Sir Matt award - which came as no surprise.
 
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