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Aug 24, 2022Liked by Saturdays on Couch

You might have better figures than me but I see them as having exceptionally good shot quality under Conte at both ends of the pitch. As in better than Munich on the offensive side and better than Atletico on the defensive side. That's what seems to be driving most of their top 4 quality xg figures, which in turn is driving most of the model based predictions out there and presumably affecting the markets. It would be nice if we had a good understanding beyond guesswork as to what degree teams can sustain this sort of control over shot quality, to what degree it is a trade off against other things etc but here we are.

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yes this is a good point. we don't really know how long teams can control many things, I do think the extreme nature is pretty clearly unsustainable (.06 against for example is way below last years league leading .09). if they had given up two big chances that boosted that number to .09 they would be underwater in xG and alarm bells ringing. I did once do a sort of study on these extreme chances that influence so much of xG models over short samples, >.5 and above and found there didn't really seem to be much repeatability. good teams generally generate a lot of .2-.35 or something shots but the yard or two it takes to go from .3 to .8 is often quite a lot of luck.

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Aug 24, 2022Liked by Saturdays on Couch

I am surprised they are still playing so passively, would've thought their offensive reinforcements in Richarlison & Perisic was to allow a more possesion-based style. But maybe they think Kane can only score on transitions?

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Richarlison can fit quite well in a transition type team I think, with his pressing and dribbling ability. but he doesn't really seem to have a clear path to lots of minutes anyway unless an injury or big time bad spell from Son or Kulu

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