The revolution started many years ago, when a security watchman at a Pork and Beans plant named Bill James spent all of his free time devoting his considerable intellect into something trivial: he tried to come up with better ways to understand the sport of baseball. Those first Almanacs sold in the dozens of copies, but the ideas spread far and wide as they brought the most important thing to professional sports teams: winning on a budget.
This trend has specifically spread to soccer with the invention of xG, a metric originally used by professional bettors as a way to try and gain an edge and now oft quoted on soccer shows and Internet forums by people who failed Algebra. It is calculated by tracking every shot taken and assigns a value of how often that chance should be converted into a goal based on a number of factors (distance to goal, type of pass, what body part is used, etc…). Those values provide context for how good of a chance the shot is at scoring.
After the epic beat down Austin FC put on LAFC there was a lot of discussion about this:
For those of us who watched the match (and it ran on a loop at the Compound for a few days after) seeing the xG chart doesn’t fit with what we saw. Austin FC had control of the match throughout and converted chances (especially Urruti’s second and Driussi’s customary goal) that even in the moment fans expected they would score. Conversely, Seattle played a great match that Austin was never in contention of winning and yet…they won on xG?
A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time and energy (mostly on the internet) arguing about the merits of xG and why it doesn’t seem to measure AustinFC’s current success.
We at The False Nine are huge fans of statistics and numbers, so we felt like putting on our Thinking Chapeaus to try and come up with something that would allow us to properly quantify why Austin FC have been so good this season, so we present:
The Expected Different Attitude for Winning Games, or for short: xDAWG
For those of you who blissfully have been living under a rock, the catchphrase “He/She/They/Ze have that dog in them” has become popular as a way of talking about players/teams that have a certain, “I don’t know what” about them that makes them special. Unfortunately for us, despite its popularity no one else has tried to quantify it.
Until now.
In trying to figure out xDAWG, we quickly realized that stats like tackling %, close outs, or distance run in a match could be Instructive but still limiting due to game situations. Ultimately we had to follow the wise words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “I know it when I see it.”
So we watched back through every Austin FC match of the season (including the loss in Carson) and used our eyes to determine each player’s xDAWG.
It was quickly apparent that a player either had it or they don’t, which makes our calculation easy, xDAWG is on an integer only 0-1 scale.
Players with a 1.0 xDAWG:
#14 Diego Fagundez
#1 Brad Stuver
#4 Ruben Gabrielsen
#3 Jhohan Romana
#17 Jon Gallagher
#5 Jhohan Valencia
#6 Daniel Pereira
#8 Alexander Ring
#7 Sebastian Driussi
#37 Maxi Urruti
#2 Moussa Djitte
Players with a 0.0 xDAWG:
#31 Andrew Tarbell
#15 Kippy Keller
#18 Julio Cascante
#23 Zan Kolmanic
# 24 Nick Lima
Tomas Pochettino
# 11 Rodney Redes
#13 Ethan Finlay
#16 Hector Jimenez
#20 Jared Stroud
#9 Danny Hoesen
Unclear due to lack of evidence:
#12 Damian Las
#34 Will Pulisic
#26 Charlie Asensio
#77 Emiliano Rigoni
#32 Washington Corozo
“Has that Pup in Him”
# 33 Owen Wolff
Having done these calculations, it becomes very obvious where Austin FC’s deficiencies are. We plan on updating these periodically (or at least when a player in the “unclear” section does something to clearly show which side they should be on.
So listen, dear Claudio, please, find some defenders with a 1.0 xDAWG for next season. We need them.
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