Chelsea find a way to concede 8 goals from 2 xG

Paris Saint-Germain defeated Chelsea 8-2 on aggregate in the UEFA Champions League round of 16, doing so with 2.16 xG to Chelsea’s 2.22. There isn’t a single person who watched all 180 minutes of the tie who would tell you that it was a dead even contest, or that they’d expect Chelsea to win half of the time if the tie was replayed several times over.

In a simpler time of Twitter banter, we’d spend a day attempting to refute folks who said this was proof that xG is useless. And it’s true that, on an individual game-by-game basis, it’s not good for much other than “graph funny.” But we have the power to show you the funny graphs, so we’re going to show you the funny graphs.

I would personally classify 3 of the 8 goals as the direct result of very silly defender or goalkeeper errors, the type of which Chelsea’s staff would have found unacceptable. One more was probably in the “keeper could have done better” category, but half of them were just insane finishes. They’re the kind of goals that have pundits believing they can repeat as Champions League winners, despite all their hiccups this season.

Filip Jörgensen and Robert Sanchez certainly didn’t turn in their best performances, but the post-shot xG stats don’t look so bad for them. PSG’s attackers hit their shots with power and superb placement. I think Bradley Barcola’s opener was as close to a 99% goal as you’re ever going to see with the goalkeeper in a decent position.

Teams do not turn 2 xG of shots into 7 post-shot xG of shots on target very often, but Chelsea’s defending made it quite easy for PSG’s attackers to line up their shots and get plenty of power behind them. There were also pretty significant game state effects at play here — PSG were leading or tied for 170 out of 180 minutes. They didn’t have to take any risks to get a high volume of shots.

It feels icky, to me at least, to refer to this result as bad luck for Chelsea. They made several amateurish errors in front of their own goal. A team of Champions League winners capitalized on those errors and showed their talent with their precise execution. Calling this bad luck dismisses the accomplishment of the winning team and apologizes for the losing one, as if they did not both actually do things that led to the result. I don’t think the result of PSG advancing over Chelsea was lucky at all; PSG are better than Chelsea, and played better than Chelsea.

But the magnitude of the result is certainly the kind of thing you’d only expect to see about 1% of the time a Champions League knockout tie has a set of shots that looked anything like these. Scoring 8 times from this set of shots is ridiculous. I don’t think that Chelsea are nearly as bad as this score makes them look.

Chelsea should probably go get a proper goalkeeper, though.

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