Football Manager 2021: "xG" - this is how the new feature works

About a month before the release of Football Manager 2020, Sports Interactive has started to reveal the new features. It quickly became clear that the so-called "xG" will probably be the most important new feature.

Clear view: with the "xG" you can analyze goal danger of your team in FM 2021 much better.

The statistic "Clear goal chances" FM players always felt the designation as quite fuzzy. With "xG" it should now become more concrete in Football Manager 2021.

Football Manager 2021: Expected Goals - this is how the real model works

"xG" stands for "Expected Goals". The term comes from real soccer and is now adopted in Football Manager 2021 for the first time:

• With the Expected Goal model, a certain probability of success is attributed to each scoring chance.
• For the calculation, several factors are taken into account, such as the number of opponents, the shooting position and the distance to the goal. As a basis serve the collected data from many years: Thus, it can be estimated how many comparable scoring chances in the past have led to success.
• The quality of each individual chance is thus vividly quantified and you can see whether your team also really develops high-caliber chances.
• From all chances, an "xG" total value is calculated. This indicates how many goals the team should have scored based on their scoring chances according to probability. This can also be converted to individual players - for example, a striker may have a value of 2.5, which means he should have scored two to three goals.

By the way, the quality of the player is irrelevant to the "xG" value. Therefore, top players can be expected to match or even exceed the probability in the long run. For weak players, the opposite is true.For FM 2021, this aspect will certainly be extremely interesting, as it gives a much clearer dimension to the analysis of team and players.