Bobo32
Senior Member
When you see passes to him from both WBs and Frenkie de Jong topping after three games played, it tells you that he recieved a lot of passes from these worse positions in these three games.
These graphs over one season could potentially say something, and when it's players instead of pairs, it tells you more about the individual players.
But it's still not saying that much. Messi and Alba were the main men in playing breaking, final, passes, as anyone saw. Dembele is shit but tries difficult passes, it is no surprise to anyone he'd be decent in this stat.
What to make of Braithwaite being on the receiving end a lot (like Depay in the first 3 games this season)? Was he the best player last season? The best without the ball?
The one doing the graphs thought so, he said that he thought the numbers highlighted Barcelonas reliance on crosses and wing play.
I don't think it tells that much about anything to be honest, but the thing it sort of tells is who is allowed to play with higher risk.
You can penetrate without having individual passes that score high on these xT delta stats. Your numbers only include passes, and it is inherently faulty that just the xT increasing pass should count. The same way that he has forward iterations to xT numbers for areas, he should have backwards iterations before the xT increasing passes, if he was to find the EV for the players performances. And that number would include faulty passes and actions of course.
No it is not more important.
The 6 yard is awarded this 0,4 number, but this number comes from including cutback passes etc, the shortest pass you can imagine recieved in that area is very dangerous and helps give the area its xT, but these passes gives very little xT delta
A long ball from Pique that is recieved by Depay in the "best" 6yard spot, will most of the time be hard to control, and maybe he'll have to take it towards the corner etc, but it will score the highest xT delta score.
It is a very simplistic stat missing a lot of essential information, and it's very easy to see many flaws with it.
It is correct, but please look it up.
If you had posted stats like these, you would have more of a case and I would be less unimpressed, but still very unimpressed.
The guy posting the stats from last season thought the sample size of Pjanic was too small to include in the pic you posted above btw, he played more than twice what Depay had done in the pic you posted. He also thought Dembeles sample size was only decent, and Dembele had played 6,5 times more than Depay had done after three games.
Of course it is correct.
If Roberto passed it back to ter Stegen, the xT value would still be slightly positive. When the ball is at the opponents hand, the xT value will be negative.
The xT is also calculated with future iterations in mind, and the reason the flanks for example have pretty positive numbers is that it includes backwards passes. It is very narrowminded to disregard backwards passes.
You have to understand that I understand some players are allowed to take risks to threaten.
Depay gets total allowance to take these risks, he takes all the set pieces, and he doesn't really defend, but he has very little to show for it so far. Once again I will mention that Roberto has as many non-penalty goals and assists as him, playing less than half the minutes, much of them as a defender.
This will probably change over time, but an xT combination graph from matchday 3, where he is on the recieving end of a lot of position improving passes, says very little about it. And it is not the case that Depay threatens a lot when he makes most of his mistakes, many of the mistakes are just sloppy, shitty, unconcentrated poor technique.
