The verdict, before the numbers
Europe's opening weekend finished 113 goals to 139.
One hundred and thirteen is the real figure, the one on the scoresheets of forty-five matches across Serie A, the Premier League, La Liga and Ligue 1. One hundred and thirty-nine is what the chances created deserved.
In between sits a hole of 26.09 goals. An entire matchday's worth of scoring lost to posts, saves, offsides and bad finishing, and with it, much of the meaning we are about to attach to the first league tables.
What we are measuring
Expected goals answer a single question: how likely was that shot to end up in the net? A shot from two metres into an empty net is worth around 0.90, nine times out of ten it is a goal. One from thirty metres is worth 0.03.
Add up every shot from a weekend and you get how many goals that same weekend would have produced if it were played a thousand times. The answer: 139. It produced 113.
Goals tell you how it ended. xG tell you how it was being played. When the two numbers disagree, over time it is almost always the second one that wins.
The missing-goals table
Not every league wasted its chances in the same way. Here is how much each of them left behind, and, the more honest figure, how much per match.
| League | Matches | Goals | Expected goals | Missing | Per match | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Serie A | 10 | 24 | 33.27 | -9.27 | -0.93 | | Ligue 1 | 9 | 20 | 27.56 | -7.56 | -0.84 | | La Liga | 16 | 39 | 44.02 | -5.02 | -0.31 | | Premier League | 10 | 30 | 34.24 | -4.24 | -0.42 |
Serie A is the worst finishing league in Europe: almost a goal thrown away per match. Ligue 1 is not far behind. La Liga, across sixteen matches, is comfortably the most efficient: three tenths of a goal lost per game, which is close to normal wear and tear.
(The Bundesliga does not appear: the German season has not started yet.)
One win in four and a half went to the wrong team
Of 45 matches, 10 were won by the side that created less than its opponent. Not "played worse" as a feeling: built fewer chances, measured one by one.
It means that right now, across four leagues, ten teams are sitting on three points the pitch did not award them, and another ten have nothing to show after being the better side.
The most glaring cases:
| Match | Result | xG | Who created more | |---|---|---|---| | Atalanta - Sassuolo | 2-1 | 0.92 - 2.70 | Sassuolo, almost three times as much | | Toulouse - Lyon | 0-2 | 2.16 - 0.76 | Toulouse, almost three times as much | | Bologna - Lazio | 0-1 | 2.06 - 0.81 | Bologna | | Everton - Crystal Palace | 2-0 | 1.45 - 2.23 | Crystal Palace | | Nice - Lorient | 0-0 | 1.09 - 1.98 | Lorient |
Sassuolo sit bottom on zero points after one of the best attacking performances of the round. Toulouse created chances worth more than two goals and conceded two without scoring. Lorient dominated a match that finished 0-0.
Who overshot in the other direction
Two teams scored far more than they built, and they deserve exactly the same suspicion, just the other way round.
Inter 4-1 Monza, xG 1.54 - 1.22. The scoresheet says thrashing, the chances say even contest. Inter's gap is +2.46: the biggest in Europe over the weekend. It may mean they have forwards who turn ordinary chances into goals, a real quality, but one that has to be confirmed rather than declared after ninety minutes. Or it may mean it was a perfect evening, and perfect evenings do not come round every week.
Athletic Club 1-3 Sevilla, xG 1.46 - 0.97. Sevilla scored three goals from chances worth less than one: +2.03. A hugely valuable away win, built on an accuracy nobody sustains across a season.
And who deserved every bit of it
The exceptions, where the pitch and the scoresheet tell the same story.
Roma 4-0 Fiorentina, xG 3.78 to 0.29, thirteen times as much. Seventeen shots to nine, eight on target to four. There is nothing to correct here: Roma created four goals and scored four.
Brentford 3-0 Tottenham, xG 4.04 to 0.76. Here the 3-0 is, if anything, less than deserved.
Lens 5-2 Auxerre, five goals scored, 5.12 expected goals. The most honest scoreline of the entire European weekend.
The honest bit
One round proves nothing, and this analysis least of all: forty-five matches sounds like a lot, but for each individual team it is a single game. Anyone selling you a definitive truth in August is selling you something.
What we can say is more modest and more useful: none of the tables you are reading today shows who is playing best. Those 26 missing goals will come back on their own: that is how the statistics work, not a wish. And when they do, anyone who only watched the results will talk about a "crisis" and a "surprise".
Anyone who also watched the chances knew from the opening weekend.
And your team? In the Meritometro you will find, match by match and league by league, who really deserved the three points. In the Nerd Zone you can run the numbers yourself across every competition. Who do you think is bluffing the most?