Explained: Soccer Statistics

👋 WELCOME TO THE TAP-INN

Happy Monday, folks.

Twenty-five goals across nine games, four of them inside half an hour at Brighton, and a Liverpool side that needed until the 99th minute to rescue a point at Newcastle.

Here's what's on tap today:

• 📊 Part one of our guide to soccer's numbers, ranked from useless to essential

• 👹 Manchester United lose to a team that hasn't played in the Premier League since 2017

• 🇪🇸 Mourinho is back at Real Madrid (and on Netflix)

Let's pour.

🥃 TOP SHELF

Part one: What the soccer stats on your screen actually mean

Every bar shift ends the same way. You count the till, and it gives you one number. The dollar figure. That number tells you exactly what you took in. It tells you nothing about whether it was a good night. Whether you were rammed for two hours and dead for six. Whether the whole lot came from one bachelor party who'll never set foot in the place again.

Soccer stats vs US sports stats

America counts everything. Baseball has kept records since the 1850s because it's built out of countable moments. A pitch, a swing, a result. Stop, write it down, do it again. The NFL is the same.

Soccer wasn't built that way. Ninety minutes of one long, mostly unbroken event, and the thing you most want to count happens fewer than three times a game. There's almost nothing to write down. Then cameras got clever enough to log every touch, and the floodgates opened. There's too much data now, so here are the parts worth knowing.

“So which stats actually matter, Joe?”

1. Possession

The one everybody quotes and in my view the one that tells you the least. Especially in the modern game. It's just the share of the game each team had the ball. On Saturday, Manchester United had roughly two thirds of it against Hull City and got beaten 2-0.

Having the ball is not the same as doing anything with it. Keep that in mind every time someone in the bar tells you that one side is dominating.

2. Shots and shots on target

This one is better. At least somebody's trying to score. Liverpool had 27 shots at Newcastle on Sunday to Newcastle's 13. Seven found the target. They still only scraped a 2-2 draw, and one of their goals was a penalty in the 99th minute.

Twenty-seven shots sounds enormous. It means nothing if they're all from thirty yards with three defenders in the way. Which is precisely the problem the next number was invented to solve.

3. Expected goals (xG)

This is the one worth learning, and it's far simpler than the name makes it sound. Understand this and you’ll sound like a soccer super-fan in no time.

Every shot gets a score between 0 and 1, based on how often that type of shot has historically been scored. Tap-in from two yards with the goal gaping? Around 0.9. Hopeful shot from the halfway line? Around 0.02. Add up every shot in the game and that's your xG.

If you follow basketball, you already have this. Everyone knows an open layup is worth more than a contested three from the logo. xG just puts a number on it. Liverpool finished Sunday on 2.73 xG to Newcastle's 1.43. In plain English, Liverpool made far better chances. They could still only get a draw so this stat isn’t foolproof either.

The honest part about xG

Over one game, it's close to useless but over 38 games, it's one of the sharpest tools in the sport. Outscore your xG all season and you're likely riding your luck. But remember it is a measure of how well you played, not how well you finished.

4. Goal difference

This is the only stat I’ve featured that actually impacts the table. It’s goals scored minus goals conceded. When two teams finish level on points, this splits them, which is why a 4-0 is worth a good deal more than a 1-0 come the end of the season. Brighton sit top of the table this morning, ahead of Arsenal. The only reason is that they beat Aston Villa 4-0 while Arsenal beat Coventry 3-0. One goal. That's the gap after Week 1.

On Friday, we’ll cover part two and look at the numbers they don't put on your screen, and the two professional gamblers who used them to get their clubs to the Premier League and compete there. Moneyball style.

I’ve given you my ranking, what’s yours?

🗣️ SOUND LIKE A REGULAR

“Against the run of play”

/əˈɡenst ðə rʌn əv ˈpleɪ/ 🔊

phrase · soccer

1. Definition: A goal scored by the team that has been getting battered. Nothing about the previous twenty minutes suggested it was coming, and then it arrived anyway.

2. Origin: "The run of play" means the general flow of a match, borrowing the same sense of run as a run of luck or a run of form. Something happening against it is the game briefly ignoring everything that came before it.

USED IN A SENTENCE

"Newcastle had barely been out of their own half all afternoon, then Willock puts them 2-1 up. Completely against the run of play."

🗞️ THE WEEKLY TAP-IN

Premier League roundup

Nine games, twenty-five goals, and almost every prediction published on Friday in the bin.

Two of the three promoted clubs won in week one. Let's go through it.

• Hull City 2-0 Manchester United. Back in the top flight for the first time since 2017 and picked for 20th by nearly every pundit going. Two set pieces, two center backs on the scoresheet, job done by half time. United manager Michael Carrick is under pressure after one game.

• Brentford 3-0 Tottenham. Keane Lewis-Potter, Vitaly Janelt and Michael Kayode all scored before Spurs worked out what was happening. Not the start Spurs manager Roberto De Zerbi wanted.

• Brighton 4-0 Aston Villa. Four goals in 31 minutes. Then to make matters worse, Villa debutant João Gomes kicked out at an opponent and was sent off after a video review. Villa are bottom.

• Ipswich Town 2-1 Sunderland. The second promoted side takes three points, and the first three goals scored on Saturday all belonged to newly promoted clubs. Ed Sheeran, lifelong Town fan and small shareholder in the club, watched it in a Toronto bar packed with North American supporters.

• Manchester City 2-1 Bournemouth. Man City manager Enzo Maresca's first league game after ten years of Pep Guardiola, rescued by a late Joško Gvardiol winner.

The Champions League

Twenty-nine clubs are in. Seven places left, and they get settled over the next two days. The playoff second legs are Tuesday and Wednesday. A reminder of the state of play from the first legs: Celtic are all but through after beating LASK 3-0, and Bodø/Glimt won 3-1 away in the Netherlands.

Then Thursday, the draw. Here's the bit that catches everyone out: there are no groups anymore. All 36 teams go into four pots of nine, and every club plays eight games against eight different opponents, four at home and four away. One enormous league table.

Keep an eye on Real Madrid. José Mourinho, better known as "the Special One," is back in charge thirteen years after he left, and opened with a 2-1 win at Espanyol. Netflix dropped a three-part documentary on him this month, filmed over two years, with football legends Alex Ferguson, Didier Drogba, Zlatan and Frank Lampard all lining up to have their say. Mourinho's own verdict, from the trailer: "You don't do a documentary with a guy that wins nothing."

Matchday 1 is September 8.

Wrexham’s slow start continues

Two games, two draws, two points. Phil Parkinson's side were pegged back by a last-gasp Cardiff equalizer a week ago. Then on Saturday they drew 1-1 at home to Watford, with Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac watching on.

Both goals landed inside the opening 25 minutes. Luca Kjerrumgaard headed Watford in front, Danny Imray levelled with his first goal for the club, and nobody scored again. Wrexham hit the post twice, exactly as they had at Cardiff.

Here's why it stings. Last season they finished seventh, the highest placing in the club's 162-year history, and missed the playoffs by two points. The team that edged them out? Hull City. Who spent Saturday beating Manchester United.

Fine margins in this division. Tom Brady’s Birmingham is up next for them on Friday.

📝 ASK JOE

"I watched every game of the World Cup this summer and there was a water break in every single one. Now I'm watching the Premier League and there are none at all. Did they change the rule?"

Thanks to Jamie in Wisconsin for this one. Nothing changed. You've just moved between two very different competitions.

Here's the baseline that catches out everyone coming from American sports: soccer has no timeouts. So a water break isn't part of the game. It's an exception, granted when it gets dangerously hot, measured on a scale called Wet Bulb Globe Temperature that bundles heat, humidity, sunshine and wind together.

This summer was the outlier. FIFA made three-minute breaks compulsory in all 104 World Cup games regardless of conditions. The Premier League schedules none. The law leaves it to the referee, and this is England in August.

Read more: Why the clock never stops in soccer

Want to submit your own question about soccer? Just reply to this email, I read every response.

🔥 HOUSE SPECIALS

Stat of the week: Nine Premier League clubs began this season with a new manager, the most on an opening weekend since 1946.

Wardrobe watch: Ever wonder who sells the most jerseys? Nobody publishes real figures, so every "best-selling" list you've seen is an estimate dressed up as a fact. The estimates do agree on the top two, though: Real Madrid first, Barcelona second, both somewhere north of three million a year. Over here it's a different answer: Mexico's national shirt is likely the most popular in North America, selling over a million.

Flashback: Before Saturday, Hull City's most recent Premier League goal came on May 21, 2017, in a 7-1 defeat to Tottenham. Nine years and three months between goals. Worth the wait.

Underdog corner:Regan Slater spent last season in the second division and had never played a Premier League game. On Saturday he took a corner and a free kick, and Manchester United couldn't handle either.

Most clicked from Friday:A link to the Premier League’s soccer bar finder. You do all love a drink.

🎺 LAST CALL

We’ve already seen the goal of the season.

Saturday in Birmingham, England. Not the Premier League, but the division below it, where clubs spend the year fighting to get promoted. Two teams you’ve almost certainly never heard of, tied 1-1, five minutes left.

Dom Ballard is 21 and came on as a sub. A teammate lifts a ball into the penalty area behind him. Ballard is facing the wrong way, his back to the net, which is the last place you want to be when the ball arrives.

So he flicks his heel at it in mid-air, never once seeing the goal, and buries it in the top corner. Inside an hour the internet had decided the Puskás Award, FIFA's yearly prize for the best goal on earth, was already settled.

Check it out here.

Until next time, Sláinte.