A New Club Record: Goals Galore (Part Two)
After the draw at Stamford Bridge when the Reds managed one shot on target from 13 attempts on goal, here’s the second part of the chapter looking at Liverpool’s season when the quest for the quadruple came so agonisingly close and we scored 147 goals!
Deserved Goals
In 2010, Finnish subscriber Aki Pekuri wrote an article for The Tomkins Times about his model called ‘deserved goals’ – a kind of precursor to expected goals. Two years later he wrote another article, this time about the role of luck.
“I realised it is the tenth anniversary of my TTT article about getting luck on our side,” he told me in March 2022, “and oh boy have we got it!”
“I don’t even remember how and where I originally started reading your articles, but at least the reason is still crystal clear – literally in-depth analysis based on research and data. You definitely were a trailblazer in the field of football analytics, or should I say football transfer and manager performance analytics. You used to write for the official Liverpool FC website, right?”
As Aki notes, indeed I did, from 2005 to 2010. I also co-wrote a purely statistical Liverpool FC book with Oliver Anderson in 2006, The Red Review, which included a lot of things that became mainstream a few years later (hockey assists, adjusting everything to per-90, distance of shots that led to goals, with/without comparisons, and so on). Of course, since the big data revolution, much of it (and anything I could do now) is miles behind expected goals and, further ahead, the AI algorithms analysing football. It all became very professional and gigantic data in the interim.
“Your texts provided clarity to what was happening and I was hooked. At the time I was also finishing my Masters thesis in 2009 after spending six months in University of Sheffield year earlier. And oh, the first child was born. Career-wise I somehow ended up becoming a researcher and stayed at University of Oulu further six years until 2015 when I completed my dissertation.
“A sort of book also, that. But honestly, I have presented my chapter in These Turbulent Times more proudly and way more broadly than my academic output.”
[These Turbulent Times is a 2013 anthology of some of TTT’s articles since the site’s inception in 2009, by, other than myself: Lee Mooney, Andrew Beasley, Dan Kennett, Daniel Rhodes, Graeme Riley, Bob Peace, Krishen Bhautoo, Daniel Geey, Mihail Vladimirov, Paul Grech, Neil Jones, Ted Knutson, Simon Steers and others, many of whom now work within the game, if no longer writing for TTT.]
“By the way, it was a Commodore 64 game called FA Cup that made me a Red. The idea of the game was to choose a club and a tactic for each match to simulate through the match. Options were A, B or C meaning attacking, balanced, defensive and once I figured out that A works for Liverpool FC I won the cup nine out 10 and was so happy about it. It was 1990 or 1991 so I was eight or nine years old. I still own the cassette.
“Nowadays I still watch every LFC match but reading and analysis are almost limited to browsing through Twitter before going into bed. Yet I still dream of finding enough energy and courage to make a career shift towards data and analytics. It is also nice to think ifs and buts regarding my early work and to notice how relatively advanced the models and thinking were back then.
“I see my ‘deserved goals’ in 2010 as the same concept as xG nowadays but of course with less advanced model and assumptions. If I recall it correctly, in that luck article I only separated normal shots from clear-cut chances and valued them with a single number. For betting I based my model to shot maps which was enough to beat bookies in most leagues bar the Premier League.
“Without coding skills it was just too time consuming to maintain as I manually entered each shot from each match over multiple leagues to 8x5 matrix table. That was the accuracy, the field was divided to 40 parts that each had a unique value i.e. probability of scoring, aka deserved goals aka xGs. These days as daughters are grown up I have more time that I am allocating to local football.
“After Covid restrictions in early 2020 we registered our team to northern group of the Finnish 5th division. Everyone was just eager to get out and do sport again, and I ended up making a comeback after a 20-year break. Not that I ever played in the senior team or any division even when younger. I just quit when I was 18.
“Last year we were promoted from the 4th to the 3rd division and I have given up a playing role as training has intensified. My role in the first team is now to look after money that we don’t have, and as team leader handling all the general or administrative stuff. No one is paid a penny and my deal is that I am allowed to participate training anytime!
“To secure playing minutes at more appropriate level I gathered another group of players and registered the reserve team to the 5th division again. There I am also a treasurer and team leader but it seems also a manager. I am still undecided whether I should play as a 10, 9, 8 or 6. Maybe I will choose that Juan Riquelme role as we are both slow.
“Anyway, I live in a city of Kemi, just at the southern border of Lapland region, with 20,000 habitants. The club Kemin Palloseura has quite a nice history and in the summer we celebrated our 90 year anniversary. In 1985 the club won bronze in the ‘Finnish Premier League’ and 1986 was runner-up in the cup. I guess the glory part ends here, but I am fine with that and learned to be patient with LFC. The most successful player from KePS as the club name is abbreviated, is Hannu Tihinen who played eight games for West Ham in 2001. I watch basically all games comfortably from my own sofa. Locally there is just one bar that shows football, but there is no real following behind any club so one must bring his own friends to raise atmosphere.
“In bigger cities and especially in Helsinki there is a good following and multiple sport pubs to watch matches with other Reds. I used to go to those when my work required weekly travelling couple of years ago. The official LFC supporter club Finland is also more active in south where cities are bigger.”
Steven Wilson, 54, is a Pacific Islander who has lived in Texas for the past 25 years. For him, football is becoming more fun.
“I enjoy football more now than in my early life. I used to play all sports and watched all sports and knew baseball, American football, basketball far more than football. But now my life (outside of family) is centred around football. Not only am I the President of the OLSC, I am President of a local youth club. I am on the board of the Austin Soccer Foundation (promoting grassroots football). I referee, all the way to the collegiate level.”
[At this point I felt tempted to ask if he wanted a job at the PGMOL.]
“I am a licensed coach and have coached for 10 years. I have played semi-pro and traveled around Europe playing and I still play twice a week. I really can’t explain the reasoning for losing interest in the other sports, but it probably coincided when my love for the Reds started.”