Peripheral Football

In our ever-evolving game, it is no surprise that footballing stratagems go in and out of fashion. It wasn't that long ago that Pep Guardiola's Barcelona team employed a style of possession football that was easy to admire but incredibly difficult to emulate. Tiki-Taka, with its endless passing combinations, seemed like the ultimate style of play and it served to be the gold standard for a few years until gegenpressing came along with Jürgen Klopp as its pioneer. This tactical trend prioritizes pressing heavily right after losing the ball and it has been proven to be effective. As with anything that is successful, gegenpressing has been emulated and altered over the years to the point that many of the top teams are employing similar styles. In the current version of football where defensive styles are evolving, high pressing football is all the rage and the lines between different phases of play are being blurred, a stat to measure a team's pressing ability has become incre...

At the end of each season, it is customary to award the goalkeeper with the most clean sheets the Golden Glove or some version of that award. This is usually used to distinguish this keeper as the best in the competition. However, there is a problem with using cleans sheets to measure a goalkeeper’s competence and this lies in the fact that the stat fails to take into account all the other factors that go into achieving a clean sheet in any given game. The defenders always have a huge part to play in preventing goals due to all the clearances, tackles and blocks they make so it is entirely possible for a keeper to go a whole game without having to save a single shot. So, how exactly are we meant to measure how good a goalkeeper is if not with clean sheets? The answer to this question could lie in the use of a statistic called Post-Shot Expected Goals (PSxG). xG provides a rating for each shot based on the historical precedent of the probability of shots from any given location ending u...