Over the past 12 month there has been a big rise in the amount of data analytics that has previously only been used behind the scenes in football clubs coming out into the mainstream.
One of these really cool pieces of data is Expected Goals - often referred to with the acronym xG.
xG can be applied to both teams and players.
So Man City could be said to have an xG of 2.79 in a game, meaning that based on the number and quality of chances created the data would suggest they would have around that number of goals.
If Man City finished the game scoring only 2 goals then they would be seen to have not been as clinical in front of goal as the should have been. If they finished with 3 goals then they are on par with what was expected. Anything more than three goals would suggest the strikers had a great game or scored goals that would not have been considered likely based on the chance created.
The same is true of individual players. In the modern game top clubs look to sign players that exceed their xG rating as this would suggest that they are a clinical finisher based on the chance their teams are creating for them. So if over the season a striker was has an xG of 11.2 but has scored 15 goals, this would highlight an in-form player.
How does xG apply to betting?
Now that you understand what xG is, how can you apply this to your betting to make more profit.
There are two key ways in which we use xG to make better bets, the markets we focus on are Both Teams to Score and Over 2.5 Goals as these align really well with the xG datapoint.
For the Both Team to Score market, we are looking to find matchups where both teams in the game have an xG of 1.5 or more, as this would suggest that the likelihood of both teams finding the net is really high, even if they underperform slightly they should still score at lease one goal each.
For the Over 2.5 Goals market we are looking to find matches where the match xG is over 3.2 as this has a high correlation with games that end over 2.5 goals.
The hardest part of applying this is finding sites that give you the xG values for both the teams and the match as a whole, one of the few sites on the Internet that provides this is FootyGuru365 and they use this data to power their algorithms.
The key thing is to scan the games for given day and make a list of the best games and either look to bet on them Inplay or pull two or three selections together into a multiple bet so that the odds can stack up to provide sufficient value.
We hope you find this guide useful and are able to use the concept of xG to help you make more profit from your betting in the future.
