Visualizing Expected Goals, Actual Goals, and Player Salary

By Alex Rathke (@alexrathke)

If you have not heard of Expected Goals (xG) then please have a read of these posts before continuing. 

11tegen11 has written about expected goals (xG) and concluded that it predicts future performance better than other metrics such as Points Per Game (PPG), Goal Ratio, Shots Ratio & Shots on Target Ratio.

Using the interactive visualization, you can see how your favorite players performed each season and how much they earned per season. As you will notice, a number of players "over-perform" and others "under-perform" their xG every season. We could classify them as being "lucky" or "unlucky". Dan Altman in this video explains why this may or may not be the case.  

This vizualization allows you to judge players in the league and establish salary cut-off points based on performance. While there are many factors to consider before evaluating recruits, this viz may help in one way or another.  

Just as a side note, I also decided to include each club's salary expenditure per position (Goalkeeper, Defenders, Midfielder & Forwards) & the percentage changes per position (as above) for the last three seasons. 

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Twitter: @AlexRathke