The College Dropout

You just know if one of them wins the FA Cup they'll finish 8th in the league. Chelsea would have to go on a mean run to get 6th and win the FA Cup.

This Newcastle team plays with more intensity than any Newcastle team I've ever seen. Particularly the forward players and their pressing.

Haaland at Real would be lethal too.

Was just thinking.. Cole Palmer plays with so much swagger and freedom at Chelsea. He would never be given that license if he stayed at City. Imagine how good Foden would be at Madrid under Carlo? Given license to just ball out.

Agreed. If he didn't want the surgery then fair enough. He hopefully has another 60 years in his body and must make the decisions that are best for him.

Basing it on Dortmund and Bayern not doing well in the Bundesliga and PSG being PSG

Jude was stinky again. At least he scored his penalty.

If not for the red Barca would’ve beat them. We should’ve beat them twice. They are not that good.

Yeh it’s Real’s from here. They are legit the best team still in it.

Proper CL KO football. 2 hours of dour football. One team playing from penalties for 105 minutes.

He always gasses not long after an hour. He needs to improve on his conditioning.

Huge DGW coming up. I'm chasing #1 in the NO league who has a decent gap on me. But he only has his bench boost intact. He only has 4 doublers in his squad coming up and seems to be writing the DGW off. I'm hoping I can cut his lead by 20-30 points. Any less than 15 points is a failure. I suspect some free-hitters might overtake me. But if I'm within 30 points of #1 I'll be happy. Wildcard and bench boost to go. 25k atm. Would be happy if I ended the season at this rank. Disappointed if I end up outside the top 60k (best finish so far). Have to at least beat that from here.

We are operating a policy of full compliance and nothing that would raise serious suspicion. Without FMV we could've sold ASM for double and there's nothing anyone could've said about it. That's an extra £25m

Without FMV we could do a £50m per year stadium sponsorship, £50m per year Official Tractor Partner sponsorship and could sell Paul Dummett to a PIF Saudi club for £50m.

Looks like possibly 6-year FFP violations or 2 back to back 3-year rolling periods.

City built during FFP largely still. They didn't have to deal with FMV which is really killing us. The bolded has largely always been the case. One thing about UEFA FFP/PSR that I don't understand. Why were Milan banned from Europe for that 1 season but PSG have never been banned?

The Arsenal stadium stuff was pre-FFP & PSR. The Chelsea thing was obviously done with FFP & PSR In mind. It's totally different. No issue with infrastructure costs not being included. They improve the game more widely and add long-term value to a club and stimulate the economies of the city/towns the clubs are in.

I don't remember this match. But looking at the stats broadly. Man U had 20 attempts. Which is a lot. But no big chances. So that 1.16 is likely an accumulation of high volume of low Xg shots. Sofascore and the highlights have Bournemouth creating 4 big chances and scoring 3. They had 10 shots with 4 on target. Watching the highlights all of the goals were good chances but none were sitters. Those headers get ballooned fairly frequently which is why their individual Xg is lower than we might think. The headers weren't point blank but they were uncontested. I agree the Bournemouth big chances could cumulatively have a higher Xg. But again, good chances but not sitters or 1v1s I think a wider context of the stats paints a decent picture (when watching the highlights anyway). 4 big chances to 0, Bournemouth deserved to win and Man U deserved to lose. I agree the Xg paints a closer game than what I've seen in the highlights. Big chances is also a favourite stat of mine. Some models use it to mean an Xg of over 0.25, 1 in 4 is scored. But it differs model to model. Thanks for sharing. I remember Burnely Dyche team tended to concede a high volume of low quality chances. With Nick Pope in goal it made it look like they were lucky but really the shot quality was poor and they had a beast in goal.

We finished 5th with 50 something points iirc. 60 points is 6th/7th in most seasons. This season 6th will be 61-65 points most likely.

Do people have examples of when they thought Xg was wrong? I think sometimes specific shots might seem out of whack with the eye test. But not whole matches typically

With Nick Pope in goal, we were that type of side to overperform our Xga. Maybe it's some psychology to it. He intimidates opposition - maybe via making a few good saves, then they try extra hard to hit the corners or blast it to beat him and the shots go astray. Maybe we make those chances a little bit harder with him due to pressure on the ball or positioning. Lots of games with Pope in goal we withstood heavy pressure. Maybe he's just that good and Dubs is just that bad. But I think Dubs started the Chelsess game actually. I think Man U are that type of side. I expect the opposition to fall apart in front of goal against them. I've been waiting for the Xg/Xga stats to come to fruition all season and it doesn't (consistently). Opposition keep fluffing great chances and they keep being relatively clinical.

I think Milan was much the same but not as bad. On the balance of play, we should've lost that game as comfortably as the Dortmund game. I think the Xg for that game was something like AC Milan 1.8-2.2 : Newcastle 0.1-0.2. 8+ shots on target for Milan and 1-3 for us. On the balance of play, I don't think we deserved any points away from home in the CL.

Yeh of course. they had 31 shots. A full 14 off target. A bunch blocked. 7 on target. Even in these shortened highlights. They had 4 or 5 great opportunities. Some really poor finishing, some great goalkeeping and great blocks. Xg isn't predictive of the future. It tells a story of what has happened. It was wave after wave of attack and they were consistently generating opportunities. Xg and looking at data in general helps to reduce bias especially. IMO if we had last that 3-1 without the penalty, we couldn't complain. They sliced us open time and again and we offered little going forward for 45 minutes. But it hurts because they didn't and were gifted a penalty.

A penalty Xg is .8-.85. Their overall Xg was roughly 4.5-4.8. They had plenty of big chances. Sofascore says the had 8 non-penalty big chances, we had 2. Sofascore defines a Big chance - a clear-cut scoring opportunity, like a one-on-one situation or a shot from just a few yards out. Tbf Arsenal we were bad for 90 minutes. The PSG game was more similar to the Chelsea game. I'm a fairly avid FPL player And I find Expected stats very useful. It nearly always reflects something true to real life, especially over several games. Eg Darwin Nunez has excellent movement and gets on the end of lots of quality chances but he’s a poor finisher. He’ll routinely underperform his Xg. Son on the other hand routinely over-performs his Xg but he sometimes goes through phases where his Xg is prohibitively low, despite the strong finishing. He doesn’t do so well against low-block defences where his Xg dramatically drops.

They had loads of chances. Loads. Barcola in particular. They cut us open time and again. We were eventually robbed. But the defensive performance was bad like it was against Chelsea in the league cup, or Chelea or Arsenal in the league.