Silva’s Playbook

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Think Wolves, West Ham and Leicester will all be in the mix for 7th. Have to say Bournemouth have been good as well.

If he can seal that 7th place and give 6th a bit of a long hard look, continuing along the lines we’ve seen on the pitch then I’d say this was a good year.

Give me another Richarlison and a few Dignes next summer and we are cooking with gas.

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Yes getting harder to see Tosun’s way back isn’t it. Shame because he seems sound he just hasn’t blown anyone away.

Richarlison doing OK up top still, think an upgrade in CM could still be the biggest step forward we take. A top RB to fill the position for the next 5-6 years would be good, and of course a real thoroughbred goal scorer is welcome at any club, but similar to someone above - I’ve no idea what sort of striker he’d want for this side.

Or what we’ll do with the left hand side with Richarlison, Lookman and Bernard all making a case for it.

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Moshiri said we wouldn't be spending in Jan and wants to bed in the youngsters.

But I think replacements for Tosun & Walcott are now top of our priority list.
Jury is still out on Gomes, but it definitely wouldn't hurt to have another option in the middle. (Both a defensive & and offensive one really. Gana, Davies & Gomes for 2 positions is insufficient i feel. Especially if we grab a Europa spot)

Yeah can understand him in that we’ve spent and we want to take stock and let the dust settle, but if there are deals there for the right players then we should never say never.

Don’t think Jan is the vital time to make the changes because I don’t think there’s a great deal we can do this year, but yeah centre mid, right wing (unless, Lookman..) and up top all need reinforcements.

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He has an £80m release clause, I reckon we will sort a deal out if he continues as he is doing.

Wouldn’t pay half that tbh

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Fuck me, I'm assuming City aren't on there because they are so farr ahead of everybody else and off the grid?

Keep scrolling.

But basically yeah!

Worth bearing in mind our numbers are middle of the pack yes, but have been getting better!

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I'm not massively acquainted with XG so I might be massively off with this post.

From my point of view, teams will score goals every season that wouldn't normally be 'expected'. They may also save certain goals through unexpected amazing defending. Not always the case for us, but you know what I mean.

These should still be accounted for in any statistical model. Perhaps XG does account for them and I just don't know the details. Or maybe that's the actual league table, which accounts for that scenario.

Either way, Silva has given the team confidence, which has resulted in play and attempts on goal that may be recorded against expectations. These may not have been attempted by the players under previous regimes.

Yes all teams will sometimes score goals they ‘shouldn't’ and also miss horrendous sitters - but everyone is in the same boat in that repspect so it doesn’t really matter.

It just takes thousands and thousands of shots historically and assigns touch points to them, then when you take a shot it lines it up against those touch points and says right out of 10 times (or whatever) how many of these have historically usually been a goal?

It stands to reason the best sides create the best chances and the worst sides allow the most dangerous chances against them, but xg is just a way quantifying your performance by quality of chance, and it’s a pretty good one on my opinion.

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I’ve not seen anything for just the more recent games but if you think about watching us we do tend to give away some big chances against us every game so I expected the xGA to be bad.

The surprise for me initially was the xG as I felt like we’ve been playing well but there has been a few games where I’ve felt like we played well but when you look back at it we’ve not had any clear scoring opportunities.

Even if we stay where we are on that chart I’d expect us to finish 7th as xG doesn’t take into account the quality of the players getting the chances, which is where we’ll do better than the likes of Watford or Wolves.

Yeah we’ve been improving. About 10 pages / a month or two ago the Ram posted that we were about 15th in the xg league.

Our numbers are now reflecting our performances and results, which is positive.

There’s a nice form of graph, think it’s maybe called an xg plot which marks your XG/Xga across a timeline, and marks where manager changes occur.

I’ve been waiting for an update from the account that makes them but basically Koeman/Unsworth/Allardyce - there wasn’t much in it. A slight dip in chances conceded with Allardyce, but results improved quicker than performances. Would be interesting to see the plot with the first few moths of marco’s reign.

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Aye don’t worry about it lads

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Great stuff from @toffeeananalysis

https://toffeeanalysis.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/you-only-look-at-the-table-after-ten-games/

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There's gaping holes in a lot of these new analytical stats. Everyone wants to be the new Bill James in their respective sports so bad that their not seeing these holes.

Sorry just to jump back to this - there are gaps, as there are in any quant work, you are trying to turn life and sport and art and beauty into numbers and extract meaningful learnings without blowing your brains out - however, there is a huge amount of work going into finding these gaps, and working on the models etc.

It’s unfair and frankly a bit daft to suggest they are ignored or not worth the paper they are printed on.

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Sorry, my post did seem a bit daft. I wasn't meaning to suggest they are ignoring the holes and weren't working on them. And I think the more stats you can come up with the better. But basically It just seems to me a lot of these analytical guys are putting the cart before the horse in a lot of their work. It's not a race to see who invented it all.

I really don't see these types of stats working in any other team sport than baseball either as baseball is a very individual team sport. Meaning it doesn't really matter who you play with, what system you play in, etc. etc. It's all down to you when you're up to bat trying to hit that ball, or trying to catch the ball. You could put Mike Trout(best player in baseball) on the worst team and he'd have basically the same numbers. I don't think you could say that for any other sport.

I know what you mean, but the world has moved on from moneyball. It really, really has and I can tell you for a fact that teams are finding angles and making progress based on statistical work like this, and have been for a decade or more.

PSG are signed to Statsbomb. Liverpool have an advanced analytics department and use it heavily in scouting which is v.clearly paying off. City have been using it since Mancini and beyond. Almost every team in the top flight is, much like almost every shop you visit online or walk through the door is - what matters is the level of buy-in and joined up thinking across heads of departments.

Nobody is saying it runs football, but denying its value and importance at this point is starting to look like staring facts in the face imo.

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Soccernomics had a chapter on Moyes at Everton.

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Oh really, what was the summary?

Watched Rio Ferdinand talking about him the other day, it was all very familiar.

That, similar to Allardyce, he was a fairly early adopter of analytics. Sprints etc.

Had a department set up to scout upcoming opponents, interestingly they pointed out he, or his team, would look for not the player that caused problems, but the player who would most often play the passes to the player who causes problems. I guess that kind of work now is called xgchain or xgbuildup? Not 100% familiar with it but it makes sense I guess.

You could say what we did to Jorginho isn’t a million miles away. Shut down the conductor kind of thing.

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We need to revamp the right hand side of the team over time.

When Gana drifts out to the right, and it ends up being a triangle of Coleman-Gana-Walcott, it looks fucking awful. Three players who play in straight lines, and have no subtlety to their game at all.

*coughs politely*

The right side in general is weird. Should work really well but is very hit and miss. I think it's clear Coleman is rated by Silva though, Same goes for Walcott

It’s clear we don’t have a premier league level alternative, yes.

Disappointed Lookman still isn’t starting over Walcott but I can sooooort of understand it.

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https://statsbomb.com/2018/11/idrissa-gueye-powers-evertons-surprising-defense/

Very interesting piece, Gueye’s incredible ball winning is powering us at the moment and allowing silva’s ‘everyone up’ ethos to work better than it has elsewhere in the prem.

Interesting that we’re 11th for expected goals per game, and 11th for passes, but we are managing to make a lot of shots despite the fact we don’t really have a serious striker.

In general the article portraits an interesting picture that doesn’t really match the current feeling. We are pretty good at the moment and we deserve to be where we are, and silva has found a way to make it work that relies on one super-powered Kante-like midfielder charging about winning the ball whenever he goes anywhere near it - but up top we are taking quite a few shite shots until we squeak one in.

An injury to gueye, or a dip in finishing, and we may well struggle however.