Fulham's success is confusing... Here's why
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- čas přidán 21. 03. 2023
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Fulham surprisingly, in their return season back in the Premier League, are pushing towards the European places.
Jon Mackenzie has analysed their underlying numbers and suggests they are overperforming. But can it last?
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#Fulham #FFC #PremierLeague - Sport
As Arsenal fan, I'm so happy for Leno. He doesn't suit our style, but he's still a great shot-stopper
Hes better than ramsdale anyway
Yup he is a better shot-stopper than Ramsdale but Ramsdale's distribution is much much better though he makes mistakes for time to time (even Ederson does so no complain).
better than Scamsdale
@@aymanhaque6936 ramsdale passes the ball to the opposition half the time
@@ishaanhall78 Kicking the ball into the opponent's half and then trying to win the second ball is a tactic. By doing so you can quickly advance your team into an attacking position in the opponent's half and push your opponents into a deep position.
It's actually crazy how good they've been. A side that were widely expected to be relegated in the top half with some considerable comfort. Yet it feels like nobody's been talking about them nearly enough
Considerable comfort? They're 1 point ahead of 11th where they'll most likely finish based on form, especially now the suspensions will ruin them.
@@shoppingforleaves3162 In terms of relegation
They’ve been talked about too much, imo. Brentford have been talked about less and they’re there on merit, not over performance
I think Fulham still get relegated next season anyway
@@shoppingforleaves3162 Literally anything thats not 18th is huge success.
A key statistical and modelling point that I feel it's often misunderstood with expected goals (for and against) is that the models that generate these values are not individualized to player skill level. Hence, saying under-performing/over-performing the numbers implies a comparison to the player's individual contribution, but the correct way of thinking of it is that the player in question is comparing them to the *average player* in the model (hence what is an average player for all the leagues that the model was trained on). This is why good players typically overperform their XG whereas not-so-great players typically underperform their XG.
Another point to consider is that this is often a small sample size of the player's chances, so a small deviation like one or two goals from the XG can be probably attributed to chance rather than over-analyzing it.
Sadly too many commentators don't have basic knowledge of what they are presenting/are bad at math.
Is your first point not literally the whole point of xG?
@@josephwaghorne sure but when specifically analysing a team, someone like son has consistently throughout his career overperformed - especially from certain areas around the box.
So son collecting .7 xG a game could probably be relied on to score from, on a really consistent basis. Therefore it doesn’t matter what the average player does, it matters what son does.
Son this season has really struggled, you can no longer rely on major overperformance from him and spurs goalscoring ability has fallen off a bit, relying more on Kane.
The point of xG is to get a running average of the quality of chances in a game which can allow you to predict long term trends, if a player has consistently over/under performed through their career, what the avg is will be less indicative of the success measure that xG intends to be.
Kinda trash explanation but ye
I think the curved runs to make pressure on the ball carrier has to be one of the best defensive tactics recreated in recent years. Literally perfection for a lower rated side and can improve drastically your ball recovery.
Kind of reminds me of the TED talk that the Brentford owner gave years ago, the example he used was Newcastle finishing fifth in the PL, while also having a significantly lower goal difference than all of the surrounding teams, and that it was not sustainable in the long run
Really interesting video. I never really thought of Xg over/under performance like this, in terms of segregating it between which teams they play. Interesting how the conclusion was that although they’re over performing, they have a really good opportunity to match their underlying numbers with their actual results, whereas the initial thought would typically be the opposite; that their results would actually regress to the level of their underlying numbers. Great work Jon👍
I'll always miss Alex but John produces banger after banger too. GGs John and GGs Joe for getting him in the door.
Didnt talk much about João Palhinha who has been key to Fulhams success
No it was just about the most pointless metric in football expected goals and expected goals scored against
All the expected stats don’t matter at all
@@Alphoric lmao Brentford built a team based on these Niche stats. And their doing well. Must be something to it eh
@@Alphoric It was also about tactics, watch the full video.
@@Alphoric They do matter, you just can't understand them.
Without Joa we aren’t half the team
There's always those surprise clubs. The real test will be sustaining this form long term.
Brighton is setting the bar for that at the moment.
@@monrow1961 theyve been doing it for a few seasons
@@kururin7 Kicked on this season though. De Zerbi is getting the max out of that squad, imagine if they had a striker that could score reliably. I'd be interested to see what happens next season (assuming their squad is not picked apart and De Zerbi doesn't get an offer from a huge club) - it usually takes the league a season to work out how to play against a new style.
Potter got them goin and de zerbi is keepin up the momentum. Lets see how long it lasts, Ranieri won the league one season and almost got relegated the next.
@@drex5160 De Zerbi has done much, much more than simply "keepin up the momentum". They're much, much more potent now, and that's down to his tactics and getting players to produce goals and goal involvements.
This video highlights the one thing missing in xG and xGA. The quality of the players involved.
For example, Harry Kane consistently over-performs his xG. At some point you should consider that he is more like to score from each position than “the average player”. Additionally, he’s more likely to score against worse goalkeepers and less likely against great shot stoppers.
While it may be easier, arbitrarily splitting teams by top half and bottom half won’t tell the whole story either. These calculations could be expanded to consider the opposition team and players in each scenario and give a far more accurate story in predicting actual expected goals and assists.
I've been waiting a long time for a Fulham vid. Thank you all so much for the content.
Goals change games, and xStats currently do not take game state into account. For example, teams normally accumulate & concede xG at different rates when when it’s 0-0 compared to 0-1. So when you look at a full match, and especially multiple matches, of accumulated xStats, your using a measuring tool that will consistently say top teams over preform.
The solution to fix this misuse of xStats is to incorporate game state into the xG formula which is coming, or break up xG accumulated into different game states like xG for 0-0, xG for trailing 0-1 or xG while playing ahead 1-0 and so on.
If a penalty is worth 0.8 xG, Mitro has missed two pens this season, which explains a good part of the "xG gap".
I wonder why that wasn't mentioned.
What's his xViolentPushing/90?
😂😂
Would love a behind the scenes vid on how you guys do the tactical analysis, make one of these etc
Great video. Worth mentioning that against Arsenal, Newcastle and Brentford (top half teams) Fulham were without Palhinha and they’re overly reliant on his defensive midfield dominance.
Don't forget very late goals conceded against city and united. 2 points from those games lost out on as well.
Palhinha is quality.
any time a non tourist club has a vid the top comment is “ as a top 6 fan”
As a Fulham fan not worried about this at all you only stay up by beating the bottom half teams which we do quite often and the video suggests we aren't too lucky in doing this so long may it continue
I really enjoy video like this, that Tifo covers not just strategy but also the stat number and explains to us what it means. Great analysis like always. Keep up the good work guys
Really nice analysis work,this one. Thanks
McKenzie: "I've just finished my deep dive on Fulham, took me ages but I'm really happy with it".
Devine: "Mitrovic just got a straigh red card for pushing the referee".
McKenzie: "Motherf....."
Given previous such analysis, it would be interesting to know how Fulham's xG differential was impacted by game state as well. I've always thought game state's influence on xG and xGA to be one of of Jon McKenzie's major analytical points on this channel and one which may have added to his breakdown here.
what software do you use to do the analysis on the screen?
Please could you do a video on the United defence specifically to see if de gea is saving us or if we are generally performing better
I appreciate the tactical insights provided by the video, and it is generally a good sign for a recently promoted side to be performing asymmetrically in this way, because of the increased impact of taking points away from sides that rival your aims for the season (i.e. you win more '6 pointers')
But I still have to dissent a bit from the overall conclusion of the video. Even when segregating the output of the model results, Fulham are still overperforming their metrics on both sides.
Against top half sides, they are operating at -0.6 GD per 90 vs -1.1 xGD p 90 (a difference of roughly 0.3 points per game, I believe),
and against lower sides, a similar story - +0.9 GD p 90 compared to +0.4 xGD p 90 (which equates to a gain per match of about 0.4 points, again someone correct me if this is wrong or a little coarse grained)
Which is to say, we can't place too much emphasis on the asymmetric nature of their performances in terms of their overall results and league position, since their overperformance is pretty uniformly distributed, and we'd expect in the long run a regression to the mean against both lower and higher ranked sides, and therefore fewer points in all those games.
You're wrong
Kudo to Mitrovic because last time he played with Newcastle or Fulham in EPL, he was a very average striker. Now he's so lethal.
Very good video. Clear and yet still detailed. It will be interesting to see if 'second season' syndrome affects Fulham.
It all depends on whether we keep or lose Palhinha for me
@@matthewwoodgate8384 easily our most important player
Excellent analysis, both football and statistically speaking, this is a much better way to analyze things.
Revolutionary conclusion at the end there "Fulham gets less points from the good teams than they get from the worse teams", Stunnin
Watch the full video, it's about explaining why Fulham are getting less points from good teams and more from worse teams.
It’s an interesting point that intends to explain a reason why the underlying numbers don’t match up to the actual numbers.
If you don’t want to engage in the context don’t comment
4:54 Idk if I like the confidence level with which you say this. We're talking relatively smaller numbers here surely one would expect significant deviation from the expected value to not entirely be that uncommon. Can we have an expected goals 95% confidence interval? Or an Expected goals standard error just so we have some idea what this distribution is meant to look like?
Great analysis. Thanks for this.
Arsene Wegner and Arsenal think starting around 2008 or 2010 would dominate bottom half of the table but would loose most of their games against their top 4 rivals, yet it was good enough to get them top 4 with no problem, so if they become more ruthless against bottom teams, they could easily get into european places.
Hard to take my eyes off that forehead rug burn.
A fascinating video, I think Silva knows full well that the playstyle doesn't quite work against superior opposition but he has said time and time again that he doesn't want the team to compromise their aggression because it would hurt morale?
It makes sense. Only very accompished teams can drastically alter playstyle from game to game and have it work. Teams at Fulham's level benefit more from consistent messaging and trying to improve within their way of playing.
Fascinating analysis and a brilliant presentation
Uh isn't every team in the league going to be performing better against bottom half teams than top half teams? Doesn't seem like rocket science. You don't need to analyze expected goals to tell you that, it's blindingly obvious.
I’d love a video in this style but a retrospective of Leicester city during their title winning run. Just to see how it looked 😮
Great coverage.
Fulham fan here (also a month late). the team definately over performed early on (Mitro was on fire) this season. But the defence has since tighten up (started to happen from Sept/Oct) , this happened in conjuction with Scoring less too. My point being. The Team has already started to lessen the outlying XG stats.
Maybe they're just confident and make the best of any opportunity given them at any time during a game, or they like playing with each other and play well as a team. Stats only tell part of the story.
Amazing analysis - This is proper, Jamie "I wear tight trousers" Redknapp take notes
Interesting vid, although as you would expect teams to have more xga against the top half, the stat out of context didn't actually mean anything.
Silva isn't capable of changing his system, he's too rigid. It's the reason he failed at Everton, he did very well for a time but eventually teams figured out how to exploit his system and it was never the same. Fulham are doing very well this year but wouldn't guarantee it will continue for the next year or two.
They’ll do better next year not worse
@@Alphoric Assuming they keep Palhinha, which I wouldn't bet on. There's a dearth of top DMs and plenty of elite clubs who need one. Fulham might get lucky with this - ManU got Casemiro, Liverpool might count on Fabinho recapturing form and Bajcetic kicking on (imo, the former isn't going to happen and the latter should be an 8/backup, would love us to go for Palhinha), and so on.
@@paulie-g I think teams are unlikely to match Fulham’s valuation for Palhinha though. He’s on a 6 year deal with us, so still has 5 left. We’re a rich club so we’re not desperate for money. Clubs would have to pay what he’s worth to us and not what he’s worth to them and so I see valuations being widely different.
@@tomh2121 That's a fair point, but it also depends on the player and how hard he's willing to push for a move. Most clubs in Fulham's position would also be wise not to hamstring future recruitment efforts by becoming known for pricing players out of dream moves. He does seem the kind of player without whom the system wouldn't work (cf Gallagher at CP), so I certainly hope you can keep him as I hate it when 'more modest' clubs get their squads completely disassembled when they do well.
@@paulie-g I think there is an understanding that Palhinha can and will go, I just wonder if next summer is that time. Still 4 years on his contract then and 29. A decent fee would still be paid and we would have built a solid foundation for prem survival. We need to buy a new younger cdm and blood them in.
You can't really assess Fulham's xG-against discrepancy between the top-half vs bottom-half clubs without comparing it with those of the other teams around them. After all, there's such a huge gap this season between the top and bottom clubs that every club is going to have a similar xG discrepancy, regardless of the tactics they use.
Everyone is going to find it much harder to score against top half clubs, aren't they? But if Fulham's xG-against when playing the bottom half is much lower than the league average, you can start to examine what they're doing defensively that makes them so effective against those weaker teams, and so on.
Beautiful analysis
It hasn't always been pretty, but we're staying up. By Christmas last time we knew we were going back down. We definitely need to evolve next season, but we did what a promoted team needs to do, win against other bottom 10 teams.
Excellent video
I finally understand what xG is after the explainer at the front. Good job.
It’s the most pointless stat is what it is because at the end of the match it doesn’t matter if a team has an expected goals of 10 if they end up losing 1-0 goals matter not expected goals
@@Alphoric At matters because it tells you why a team is not finishing their chances. You could have an xg of 10 but almost all of your shots were from outside the box. You could have a high xg with shots close to penalty box, it could tell you your players are not finishing well compared to others. You could have a high xg but the opponent has a really good goalkeeper.
@@CLol11 it still doesn’t matter expected goals are pointless because football is about winning and expected goals are completely meaningless when you get games where 1 team gets xg of 3 and the other gets an xg of .05 if the team with the lower xg wins the xg clearly doesn’t matter. It’s not confusing that Fulham are doing well and using expected stats to show that is just dumb. It’s like bringing up haalands xg of 20 in the prem but that doesn’t matter as he’s scored 28 the metric is clearly flawed if it’s not showing reality it’s just so pointless and there’s a reason teams like Fulham are winning matches and it isn’t anything to do with their expected goals, not a single person at Fulham cares about xg
It also doesn’t tell you why a team is missing chances it just tells you that a computer somewhere has said this shot has a % chance of going in that’s completely different from if the shot does go in though. Even managers have said it’s a useless stat as it doesn’t truly reflect their team’s performances
@@Alphoric I think you are misunderstanding xG. xG is not supposed to exactly predict how many goals a player or team scores. The whole point of xG along with other stats is to tell you the performance of the team or player, not who wins or who loses. Look at Timo Werner for example, there's a good reason why he left Chelsea, he doesn't score a lot of goals and his xG vs goals scored supports that. If a player is well known to be underperforming their xG for long periods of time, teams will obviously try to find another target. You fail to realize that when looking at the xG of a specific chance, that decimal number that comes out is based the average player finishing a chance. Using your Haaland example, it shows that Haaland is obviously a very good finisher since on average, a player will score 20 but Haaland is doing even better than the average player by scoring 28. Teams like Brentford and Brighton do this a lot and constantly use stats like xG and others to sign their players, and look how well those two teams are doing. If you say xG is dumb then those two teams would have never been succesful if they didn't rely on it.
The point of xG is to help teams analyze their games not to tell which team deserves to win or lose. If you flip a coin 10 times, and you get 10 heads that doesn't mean the 50% to get heads or tails probability is wrong. When you do it like 1000 times the number of heads and tails you will get will regress towards the mean. Likewise, if a team is winning but their xG and xGA is telling them they should be losing, the chances of the team regressing back to the mean and losing will be higher. If you got a low xG then that means you will probably need to create more chances and you train your players to help create more chances, if you got a high xGA then you probably need to improve your defence. That is obviously an oversimplification but if a team is not performing well, they can use stats to help figure out how to improve the team.
The point im saying, is that you can't blindly use xG alone, you need to use it with context, to help make an analysis, its a stat that is used as information for the bigger picture.
@@CLol11 xg means expected goals expected and predicted are the same thing an xg shot of .5 means a computer has predicted that half those shots will go in
If a keeper is off his line and gets chipped from half way the xg is 0.01 even if in reality it’s higher that that
How top 6 clubs pass up on Palhinha is crazy to me
I love looking at stats like this. A lot of people don't understand or don't care about the nuances of statistics.
Very well explained
Genius, they're better against teams below them than teams above them ...... who would believe that ?
Tifo Team: why don’t we ever look at the post-shot xG for an attacking player’s shots? Wouldn’t comparing their post-shot xG to their xG be a measurement of their shooting/finishing quality? So if Mitro gets a header inside the six, but puts it right at the keeper, he’d get a negative differential, but if someone like KDB bends a shot into the corner from outside the box, he’d have a largely positive differential.
Not sure about Tifo, but various TA articles and pods very much do do that when discussing a player's quality. It's just that normal xG is the correct metric for the quality of chance the team generates, so is appropriate when discussing how that team performs.
@@paulie-g interesting, I’ve never heard it done before! I’ve also not seen any stat database that collects the post-shot xG for an attacking players shots, but I’m not subscribed to any paid data services either.
@@jeremiahbaker4489 Yeah, us mere mortals don't have access to the juiciest modern stats, sadly. Post-shot xG is the least of them, there's better pressing stats than PPDA, better progression stats and so on.
This whole video is just about how good a goalie Leno is and Mitrovic is a top striker. Any team coming to the PL next season should take note.
The phrase "the underlying numbers," lives in my head rent free now lol
This was really well done.
Team concedes more chances against better players than less good players. Huge if true.
How many times was "underlying numbers" said?
Tldw: Their goalkeeper good. They do well vs bad teams and do badly vs good teams.
But they haven't done horrible against top teams, aside from the recent Arsenal & Brentford matches (both without Palhinha due to a unfair suspension), they lost all their matches against "top teams" to losses by a single goal, usually a relatively late goal.
I don't see know people find Fulhams success confusing. Have any of ya actually watched them play?
Wow, team plays better against bottom half of the table and worse against top half of the table. What a surprise. 😮
Silva passed record of loyalty, is extremely low.
Especially with those 3 red cards...
they are just a solid, solid team. love watching them play
Am I the only one who can’t cope with the numbers on the shirts in the background missing the number 7
Marco silva is such a great coach. I really hoped he had replaced mourinho at man utd at the time
I'm glad this shines a spotlight on how good Leno has been for Fulham this season.
Shocking we got him for 8 mil, he’s worth a lot more
1:44 the idea then...HE SCORES!
Did they get a much higher value xGot which would basically justify their xg underlying numbers? 2:57
I love this channel
One might even say that they have been playing.... Elite football. I'll see myself out.
11:41 I swear you said "defensively", but the closed caption writes "offensively". The analysis only makes sense if you mean "offensively", as you just showed Fulham playing a high press against Arsenal.
I think they would go down in the table next season
John have you considered working for a football club as an analyst? Job offers should be incoming
Jons knowledge of ball is actually insane!
You'd think top quality managers would see the need to defend slightly differently against Leeds than Man City
What the video doesn't mention is particularly away we do actually sometimes sit back a lot which was very successful vs Chelsea and (albeit with a lot of luck) got a win away at Brighton playing that way
Because the top half sides are better at attacking???
Wonder how they'll do without mitrovic
Will be harder but we have an average replacement in Carlos Vinicius. Luckily we aren’t reliant on Mitro for goals as our other forwards like Solomon and BDR chip in
Do we really need to be explained what expected goals is 3 times in every video? Really feels like John is unnecessarily talking down to the audience
I'd love to see this for united
I'd say they should continue in the same vein against the top teams as well and just try to improve their overall gameplay. To remain in PL, most important thing to do is to beat the bottom 10 teams which their style is clearly allowing them to do, and it shows in the underlying numbers vs those teams as well. So rather than alter their playing style completely each week according to opposition, it's better to try and perfect your style and allow every player to become an expert in what they have to do in each situation on the pitch. Against the top teams, they can continue their high risk, high reward approach. After all, the whole idea is to get the most points while playing attractive football as well rather than just improve underlying numbers.
It's a decent analysis, but don't get too statistically obsessed as the numbers are only a part of football. Also against Arsenal Fulham were without Paulhiha and Wilian too.
Fulham are a good bet to go down next season
W TIM REAM
They probably wont be making it any higher than they are now considering Mitrovic is most likely facing a significant punishment over his FA cup tantrum
I dont mean to be rude but you spent 12 mins explaining why it's harder to beat Manchester city than Southampton
JJ should have made this video. He's all about confusion
What success what will they this season
They’ll collapse next season following the trend of Leeds and Sheff utd. I think some Superstition finishing 9th in a teams first season and having a horrible season after
The conclusion doesn't entirely make sense. This wouldn't reduce the gap in expected points
Jon ‘underlying numbers’ Mackenzie
if i had a dollar for every time Mackenzie used "underlaying numbers" id be very rich
Summary: They need to learn to park the bus against bigger teams
Shame they’re probably going to go a bit downhill now after Mitro is banned for a while
and still finish 11th probably
@@matthewwoodgate8384 yeah there's a big drop off after 11th place so I can't imagine them going any lower that that
Leno so good
They will prob lose their top three players in the summer so will struggle next year
Expected goals are silly and it's ruining football - pushing teams to be conservative hog the ball and only justifies shooting when players are literally closer than the penalty line.
That's been going on since long before xG became popular in punditry and fan circles. There's a reason there are far fewer shots from distance these days - teams had figured all this out long before we got to hear about it.
XG has got nothing to do with this, its just strategy. A team is not going to purposely play worse by encouraging players to shoot outside the penalty box and pray that the ball will go in when its much easier to score when you are in the box. If you want football to be "unruined" do you want there to be a rule where a team gets more points from shooting farther away just like in basketball?
Don't just about all teams concede more goals against the best teams in the league
compared to the worst in every league that has ever been played?
I really enjoy most of your analysis but this example was poor.
You needed to show the average goals conceded against top half opposition by teams in Fulham's current position over several other seasons to show a serious comparison.
It is well explained in the video. The problem is that Fulham play the same way vs teams that will punish you for every mistake as they play vs relegation fodder who are not.
Let's take the example mentioned in the video, the game vs Arsenal. If Fulham played a low block vs Arsenal as most teams do, they could have kept Arsenal at bay, or not scoring more than one or two goals. What happened in reality is that Fulham were 3 goals down at halftime and it could have been 7.
Your idea of analysis over several seasons doesnt hold water in football. Purely because you can have 3 different teams, tactics and managers in that time.
A team could finish one season 6th, another one 12th and be relegated in third season. Just taking average position/points from those 3 seasons to make some comparison wouldnt work at all.
@@Qlicky The video explains as you say, that Fulham play the same way against the top half teams v bottom half.
Fulham are 9th. The video needed to show how teams in 9th or with similar points as Fulham have conceded against top half compared to bottom half in other leagues/previous seasons.
I would suggest well over 90% of them concede more against top half opposition. We need to know how Fulham compare with these teams.
@@MartinGreen932 The video didn't need to show that at all, it's you who thinks showing stats for multiple seasons somehow meaningfully relates to any other single season.
It does not. And it never did. Which is why this video doesn't show that.
Chelsea was 10th in one season and then went on to win it the next season. The season afterwards they were 5th. They went from 50 points to 93 points and then to 70 points. 20 points difference between any single of those 3 seasons.
Going by your logic there wasnt a chance in hell for a team sitting 10th winning the league next season and then not even making top 4 season after that.
These comparisons of multiple seasons in football tell you nothing at all. Because there are injuries, manager sackings, players transfers and dozen of other things that directly affect it.
I thought Andreas pereira was crap proving to be a decent mid table player
REEAAAAAMMMMM