Manchester United have made an underwhelming start to the new season and sit 11th in the Premier League table after five games.
The Red Devils were handed a difficult run of fixtures to kick off the new campaign and have already faced two genuine title contenders in Arsenal and Manchester City.
United lost both encounters but deserved to beat Arsenal on opening day, and also secured a difficult three points by beating Chelsea 2-1 last weekend.
Positive stats
Despite sitting in the lower half of the table, Ruben Amorim’s side actually have the highest expected goals (xG) of any team in the league, as per WhoScored.
Expected goals measure the quality of chances and is thought to be a more accurate indication of a team’s performance in front of goal. United’s xG over the first few games is 9.98, leading Chelsea in second place on 9.35.
But where overachieving Chelsea have actually scored 10 goals, excluding own goals the Red Devils have only netted four times – their xG underperformance of -5.98 is streets ahead of anyone else.
Rooney realism
But where these stats may give some fans reasons to be cheerful, United legend Wayne Rooney is sceptical of the metric and believes it is skewing owners’ view of the game, and of what success looks like.
Speaking on his BBC podcast, Rooney lamented the lack of exciting long shots being unleashed in today’s game and blamed it on the fascination with xG. He said: “Owners want high xG because they think if you’ve got high xG you’ve got more chance to win the game.
“If you’ve got Frank Lampard for instance, who had lots of shots from the edge of the box, his xG would be really low. But he scored 200-and-odd goals in his career.”
He added: “The closer you get to the goal, the higher the xG is. So teams are actually not shooting from the edge of the box anymore.”
His comments are not limited to United, whose impressive xG is something of a saving grace for them. He is addressing a wider trend in the Premier League where there are far fewer shots taken from outside the box per game than there used to be.
When asked how early in a player’s career the data becomes important he explained: “Players get all of the footage, they can look through the footage during the training sessions and in the classrooms of what they’re doing, which is fine, but I think a lot of players now are relying on it [footage and data] too much.”
Fireworks in Birmingham
In the same episode, Rooney gave some illuminating insights into United away days. The 39-year-old recalled that fireworks let off outside the team’s hotel were not uncommon during his playing career.
He said: “There was one year, we played New Year’s Day and we stayed in a hotel in Birmingham. Because there were parties downstairs in the function rooms, they put us on the top floor. But they forgot to tell us that there was a firework display on the roof of the hotel.
“At midnight all the players were woken up by all these fireworks going off right above us.”
Featured image Richard Heathcote via Getty Images
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Joe Ponting
Joe has spent more than half his life writing about football and all of it following United. As a child he told a doctor his name was ‘Paul Scholes’, but could never pick a pass like him no matter how much he tried.
