Originally Posted by
Rjk
It's basically a measure of how many goals you would expect to score from the shots you have taken.
If someone has hit 3 shots from 40 yards in a game but no other shots and all 3 of them have gone in, his xg is going to be tiny, but the chances of him repeating that are also tiny. The xg is a better prediction of what is likely to happen next time than the actual goals scored.
Likewise if a striker has 15 shots in the 6 yard box and none go in in one game, he will have a pretty high xg for that game and the chances are if they played it again he'd get some of them in.
The difficulty comes in that there are lots of different ways people use to calculate xg, and they're all called xg, but they differ wildly in sophistication.
On a simple level you just look at where the shot was hit from, find out what proportion of goals that were hit from there out of all the millions of goals on record, actually went in then that's the xg of that shot.
Other models look beyond this, to which foot the striker used or if it's a header, to where the pass before it has come.from, to whether it was behind or Infront of them, to.whether there was "defensive pressure".
The more sophisticated ones use the player tracking data to.take account the positions of the defenders and the goalkeeper as well, although until very recently this was only available for the top leagues.
It's only interested in shots though, other metrics exist for other aspects of the game