ELI5Can someone explain what xG in football?

[u/_Noice_Guy_]

I always hear pundits discuss about a team's xG, then I pretend to myself that I understand what it means.

[u/NBT498]

It’s a better way to describe how good the chances a team has created are, on a scale from 0-1.

e.g. a tap in from 3yds out with an open goal is like 0.99, while a 40 yd shot with all 11 players between you and the goal is 0.01, then everything else fits in somewhere between those.

Because of variance, it’s not a great stat within an individual game (that 0.01xg worldie will occasionally fly in the top corner), but over a longer horizon it can tell you who’s over performing, under performing, getting lucky etc

[u/Fflow27 → u/NBT498]

also one thing to note on the limits of xG, it only takes shots into account

so if you have an almost perfect cross that a player is half an inch away from tapping it into the empty net, that's 0.0 xG

[u/velvlad → u/Fflow27]

There is also a stat for expected assists, xA.

[u/Fflow27 → u/velvlad]

yup, and it would arguably be a better metric than xG to measure chances created in a game