It's five matches into the season and everyone knows the table is lying... but is the xG table lying? More specifically, what can statistics tell us this early in the season, what does it mean that statistics "become reliable" after a certain period of time, and how does this inform how we're thinking about Tottenham and Chelsea and Arsenal and Everton?

Caley's R2 charts: https://cartilagefreecaptain.sbnation.com/2015/10/19/9295905/premier-league-projections-and-new-expected-goals Support the show

Is The (xG) Table Lying?

Soccer analysis, analytics, and commentary with hosts Mike Goodman and Michael Caley

Sports

A big weekend in the title race, Liverpool and then Arsenal lost winnable home matches in succession and it was highly dramatic, but it seems far from obvious to us that we learned much from the drama.  Support the show

In Which We Refuse To Construct Narratives

The club is in an odd spot. They're at risk of relegation, and worse, relegation would probably be a death sentence for Everton Football Club as an operation. But they're also pretty good? With some valuable assets to sell? And a good manager? If it weren't for everything else...

So we discuss how we would approach the problem of running Everton.  Support the show

If We Ran Everton

We take questions from the mailbag on how we watch games, on Jeremy Doku and Brennan Johnson, and then we end up building an entire theory of the intersection of player development and modern tactics in the development of really fast guy wingers.  Support the show

Mailbag: Castles in the Air

Part Two of our conversation with official Double Pivot Financial Shenanigans Correspondent Skanda Amarnath (@irvingswisher). And while there are a lot of important details, there's a simple takeaway. Chelsea's PSR crunch is significantly worse than has been generally reported. Support the show

Chelsea and PSR with Skanda Amarnath

There has been a lot of news about the Premier League's PSR with the Everton points deduction, reports of violations at Nottingham Forest, and all the stories about how clubs are seeking to get into compliance with these regulations. But we think the actual news here has not been well explained in much football media. So we called in an actual finance expert, the Double Pivot's Financial Shenanigans Correspondent, Skanda Amarnath (@IrvingSwisher) to walk us through what has actually changed -- it's not the rules -- and why a PSR system with teeth is in some crucial ways not only different from North American salary caps but the opposite of a salary cap. 

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Is The (xG) Table Lying?

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