Agreed there is a place for them but until "********ing moronic pass by a GK" is a stat, these numbers will miss the reason we lost.
So in other words, Ola Kamara is wasting his chances? And everyone else is wasting the chances that Meram creates. Sounds great!
Finishing (aka the act of scoring an actual goal in real life) is the entire point of the sport of soccer. Being expected to finish but not finishing ends careers. It's only in the we-have-advanced-metrics-too world of modern soccer does xG get celebrated as anything more meaningful that "wastefulness."
How do they have more goals per game than expected goals per game? I don't know if I trust that stat.
Shouldn't expected goals per game treat scoring an actual goal as a very high, some would say definitive, indicator of an expected goal?
Honestly, for the time being at least, all these stats are good for is in painting a mathematical picture of how a particular team is bad (or good, maybe.) Team A might have the same record and goal differential as Team B. But by mind-numbing number crunching we can learn that the reason Team A sucks is because they can't convert on all the chances they create, while Team B constantly gives up the ball in midfield due to sh*t passing. Both teams lose a lot and don't score many goals. The problem is twofold - first, unless we're analyzing teams from the Greek 3rd division (or an equivalently obscure league), why not just watch the teams play? It shouldn't take to long to notice Team A's dreadful finishing and Team B's crap passing. The second problem is, we're not yet at a point (and may never be) with these analytics that we can use them to inform transfer or coaching decisions. Maybe Team A isn't really bad at finishing; maybe what gets coded as 'chances created' by the Opta wizards aren't really chances at all... And maybe the solution to Team B's passing problem isn't to buy Joe Allen, maybe it's to play an extra man in the center of midfield. These are evaluations beyond the scope and ability of analytics, soccer being a fluid game without a large number of discrete events that occur in a vacuum.