Brighton’s xG under-performance explained - could Seagulls be about to turn a corner?

There’s a lot of talk about expected goals in football coverage these days - but what does it actually mean?

Here, we try and shed some light on the burning questions surrounding the metric, which has crept into our consciousness over the past few seasons.

We’ve included an interactive graph – made with Flourish – which includes every team’s expected goals for and against, so you can see for yourself how Brighton ranks against their Premier League rivals.

We’ll also take a look at what expected goals actually means for Graham Potter and the Seagulls’ season so far.

WHAT ARE ‘EXPECTED GOALS’?

For a statistic that can seem complicated at first glance, the explanation is actually rather simple.

Expected goals - or xG as it appears on your television screens - measures the quality of a shot based on different variables.

These include assist type, distance from goal, shot angle and whether it was defined as a ‘big chance’.

In short, a player having an xG of 0.3 means he or she would score 30 percent of the time.

When looking at the xG of a Premier League team, an xG of 10 would equate to the number of goals a team has been expected to score up until that point in the season.

For example, Chelsea boasts an xG of 13.6 but have netted 20 goals in the Premier League so far this campaign, meaning they are over-performing.

WHAT CAN EXPECTED GOALS TELL US?

Measuring expected goals can give fans an indication of the number of times that a team or individual player should have scored on average, given the type and number of shots they have taken.

Of course, this isn’t an exact science and the expected goals statistic is prone to fluctuate during a season.

WHAT DO EXPECTED GOALS TELL US ABOUT BRIGHTON?

Brighton’s xG this season so far is 12.36, the 7th highest in the Premier League. In reality, the Seagulls have found the net 11 times this campaign.

That means Potter’s side are under-performing compared to the number of goals they are expected to score using the xG metric.

A fact which won’t surprise fans given the Neal Maupay saga, Danny Welbeck’s misses and Brighton’s lack of striking options.