To armchair fans like us.
One of the stats Graham look at when evaluating Klopp was Dortmund's xG and xGD during his last season.
[article]A first look at the numbers tells me that Dortmund certainly aren’t playing like a relegation threatened team. Our Expected Goals model (which basically assigns the probability of each shot being scored) has Klopp’s team in for scoring approximately 25 goals so far this season and a conceded total of 17 goals; this gives
an Expected goal difference of +8 goals. The reality of what happened on the pitch is very different however, with the concession of 26 goals dwarfing the 18 goals that they have actually scored – that is
a swing of 16 goals between the Expected Goal Difference as calculated by us and their real Goal Difference. And all of that occurred in just 17 games.
Dortmund have not had the good fortune to be in this position this season as
they have recorded six single goal defeats and three draws from their 17 league games played. In other words,
an additional goal here or there would almost certainly have resulted in additional league points for BVB.
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[article]“Pre-match, there’s a set of reports that James and Greg put together and then post-match there’s a similar thing that Harrison and Mark put together,” Graham explained.
“What we’ve built is a platform where the analysts can either look at the opposition analysis or post-match analysis from our point of view, so
we’ve got expected goals models and expected possession value models that are linked to video to say: ‘This is what we thought was a dangerous situation.’[/article]
[article]
Graham hardly noticed. He was immersed in his search for inefficiencies — finding players, some hidden in plain sight, who were undervalued. One afternoon last winter, he pulled up some charts on his laptop and projected them on a screen.
The charts contained statistics such as total goals, goals scored per minute and chances created, along with expected goals. I was surprised to see Graham working with such statistics, which he had described to me as simplistic. But he was making a point. “Sometimes you don’t have to look much further than that,” he said.
That July, Liverpool paid Roma about $41 million for Salah.
Graham’s data suggested that Salah would pair especially well with Firmino, another of Liverpool’s strikers, who creates more expected goals from his passes than nearly anyone else in his position. That turned out to be the case. During the season that followed, 2017-18,
Salah turned those expected goals into real ones. He broke the Premier League record by scoring 32 times. [/article]
