No one expected Celtic to win the league title this season. Well, when I say no one that’s not strictly true. There are some hardcore Celtic fans out there that expect the league title this season regardless of the mess Neil Lennon and the board left the squad.
After all, we have the biggest budget of any other team in the league and should be able to walk over the rest of the league right?
Last season blew that argument clean out the water so sometimes bigger is not always better. Unless it comes to goal difference.
A report was published last night regarding the xG phenomena that seems to have gripped the game.
For those unfamiliar with it, expected goals (or xG) measures the quality of a chance by calculating the likelihood that it will be scored from a particular position on the pitch during a particular phase of play.
And with Ange Postecoglou’s style of play, Celtic are carving out many, many chances within a match and it has left our biggest rivals worried.
A Rangers football stats analysis account tweeted a report that has predicted a massive league title win for Celtic this season using xG stats and has made an admission that they are worried as the stats they are using is fairly accurate.
The Rangers Report twitter account has a track history of using in game stats and these amazingly predicted the rise of Celtic star David Turnbull:
When you parse out the projections based on actual goal production & Expected Goal production this is how it looks. The obvious issue is in attack.
Rangers are averaging 1.67 goals per 90 (& 1.40 xG per 90).
Last season those rates were 2.42 & 1.80 pic.twitter.com/c3WpJN31pB
— Rangers Report (@TheGersReport) October 16, 2021
Do I expect Celtic to win the league by 20+ points…no & I sure hope these projections are very wrong.
But, it is clear that one team is playing very well while not maximizing their results, while the other isn't playing that well & dropping more points than anyone expected.
— Rangers Report (@TheGersReport) October 16, 2021
And to show one of the reasons why they are so worried about these stats? They pulled the exact same data from their COVID title win and the results were comparable with their predicted Celtic title win this season:
For context, I went back to 2020-21 to see how accurate the projections were after 9 matches.
Ex. Rangers were projected to have 104.26 points, they ended up with 102 for an accuracy rate of 98.8%
42% of the projections had acc rate of 89%+
92% had rate of 79.5% or higher pic.twitter.com/zXFVeaMc6s— Rangers Report (@TheGersReport) October 17, 2021