Beyond xG: Using PFF Shooting Grades to improve goalscoring predictions in MLS

Expected goals (xG) have become the most widely used metric in football analytics in the last decade. In short, xG models, such as the one developed by American Soccer Analysis, calculate how many goals a team should have scored based on the characteristics of the shots they have taken. Penalties provide the easiest example: roughly 76% of penalties are converted, so each penalty has an xG value of 0.76. Many articles have shown that using expected goals is preferred to actual goals when evaluating performance, because the metric is generally much more stable due to the rare nature of actual goals.

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