An xG review of Brentford’s 2024/25 Premier League season | OneFootball

Blink and you might miss the next big thing in the fast-moving world of football statistics - as concepts such as game state, field tilt and PPDA gain traction - and Playmaker's latest stat summary delves deeper into the fascinating world of expected goals (xG).

The preserve of anoraks and stattos until a few years ago, the metric is now familiar to the majority of football fans, especially those keen to look beyond results and gain a greater understanding of how teams actually perform.

For those still unfamiliar with xG, now is the perfect time to dive in!

By way of a short summary, the model has been specifically designed to assess the probability of a shot resulting in a goal.

The metric uses historical information from thousands of shots with similar characteristics to evaluate the likelihood of a goal on a scale between 0 and 1.

A shot with a high xG of 0.9 would generally be expected to hit the net nine times out of 10, while an effort on goal with a low xG of 0.1 should, on average, result in a goal only once in every 10 attempts.

In the context of Brentford's season, expected goals data can help us gain a better sense of how clinical the Bees were in attack, as a team and individually, and help us assess the quality of the chances they created (and conceded) in the Premier League.

One last thing before we launch into the empyrean: the expected goals metric does not include own goals. Off we go!

High Expectation, High Reward

With their heavyweight forward line of Bryan Mbeumo, Yoane Wissa and Kevin Schade on top form, Brentford bagged a club record 66 Premier League goals last term as they took their attacking game to new heights.

Mbeumo's power and pace + Wissa's intensity and intelligence + Schade's prodigious leap and well-timed runs equalled a perfect storm of attacking options that simply blew away many top-flight defences.

Mikkel Damsgaard's intelligent prompting added another layer of creativity in midfield, while Keane Lewis-Potter's impressive progress afforded the Bees winger-level delivery at left-back.

Anyway, let's cut to the chase: did Brentford out-perform their expected goals or not last season? The answer is that the Bees did not… but neither did they fall below them!

In fact, the west Londoners performed nigh-on exactly in line with their xG: the 65 xG-eligible goals (as mentioned, the metric disavows the own goal Manchester United's Luke Shaw scored for the Bees in May) Brentford plundered during the last campaign coming by way of 65.08 xG.

There are two key upsides to Brentford’s expected goals alignment worth noting. The first is that their xG performance suggests the Bees were neither 'lucky' nor 'unlucky' over the course of the season; they got their just rewards in xG terms and deserved their record-breaking goal tally.

Secondly, in the context of the top flight as a whole, the Bees were one of only three teams with a claim to matching or improving upon their xG data in the Premier League: Wolves (+5.01 xG) and Nottingham Forest (+4.85 xG) the others.

The Overachiever

Brentford collectively performed in line with their expected goals numbers, but individually speaking there was one notable exception: their top scorer Bryan Mbeumo.

The Cameroon international hit 20 top-flight goals to join Ivan Toney as one of only two players ever to reach the milestone for the Bees in the Premier League, and Mbeumo’s over-performance against his xG was remarkable - although a look at his highlight reel from last season speaks to the high quality of his finishing.

Full of trademark curlers from the right flank, thundering volleys (including his Goal of the Season winner against Tottenham Hotspur) and composed finishes after line-breaking runs, Mbeumo’s goal collection was of a very high standard and, in a break from tradition, also included three right-footed efforts!

Mbeumo’s finishing was so good, in fact, that - in xG terms - he had no right to reach the 20-goal mark last term.

According to the xG model, Mbeumo should have ended last season with a creditable - but far from milestone worthy - 13 Premier League goals.

In other words, the 25-year-old winger exceeded his projected xG by 6.79 xG to join his former partner-in-crime Toney in the Bees’ record books.

Those numbers put Mbeumo clear of the division’s other notable ‘over-performers’, namely Man Utd’s new signing Matheus Cunha (a positive xG differential of +6.3 xG) and Nottingham Forest striker Chris Wood (+5.07 xG).

Creative Force

Players’ Player and Supporters’ Player of the Season Mikkel Damsgaard was rightly recognised at the end of his third season at Brentford, the Dane’s technique, work ethic and passing range providing his side with genuine penetration in the final third.

Damsgaard finished the season with 10 Premier League assists, a haul which only three players (Mohamed Salah, Jacob Murphy and Anthony Elanga) could better, but the big story from an xG perspective brings us back to Mbeumo.

Liverpool’s Salah may have ended the season with the top tier’s Playmaker Award on his mantelpiece (along with a Premier League winner’s medal and the Golden Boot!), but astonishingly Mbeumo should have finished the season ahead of him and every other player in the league, according to expected assist (xA) data.

Very much aligned with xG’s methodology and principles, xA measures (to quote Opta) 'the likelihood that a completed pass will become a goal assist. It considers several factors including the type of pass and end-point and length of pass’.

While Salah bagged 18 assists from an xA of just 9.06, Mbeumo managed seven assists from a superior xA of 9.26 - which was actually the highest in the Premier League.

Reading between the lines, these discrepancies in xA indicate that Salah’s team-mates deserve plenty of credit for the Liverpool star earning 18 assists, while Mbeumo was perhaps unfortunate not to end the campaign with a few more next to his name.

Big Shots

A key danger related to the explosion in the football stats scene is that the sheer volume of data can quickly become overwhelming - the stats that matter submerged in a sea of meaningless numbers.

However, there are two fundamental xG stats from the Bees 2024/25 campaign which clearly illustrate their efficiency at both ends of the pitch. Let’s start in attack and focus on the Bees’ shots on goal.

As referenced, Brentford’s bottom line is that they want to deliver the ball into optimal areas to create high quality chances with the best possible odds of scoring - and their xG-per-shot data was the best in the Premier League last season.

On average, Brentford’s 440 shots on goal last season carried an xG/shot of 0.15 - ahead of champions Liverpool (0.14) and every other team in the division.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the pitch, Brentford ensured that the shots directed at their own goal were the worst on offer in the division.

Arsenal may have had the best defensive record in the Premier League last season (34 goals conceded), but even the Gunners (0.11 xG-per-shot conceded) gave their opponents slightly better shooting opportunities than Brentford (0.10 xG/shot).

Was Premier League Justice Done?

Let’s wrap up by briefly touching upon the closely related metric of expected points (xPts), which estimates how many points a team should theoretically have earned from a match based on the quality of the shots they created and conceded.

Derived from xG data, xPts can help determine if a team's actual points align with their performance levels - and in Brentford’s case they very much do!

In fact, although Brentford’s expected points tally of 54 xPts was slightly lower than their actual total of 56, the Bees still place 10th in an end-of-season justice table which ranks Premier League teams by their overall xPts hauls.

While teams such as Nottingham Forest (14th rather than 7th in the real world) exceeded their xPts estimates, and others like Bournemouth very much didn’t (the Cherries should have qualified for the Europa League, according to the metric), Brentford were very much in sync with the xPts universe, so in this regard justice was done from a Bees perspective.

Check out the Premier League justice table here, and please feel free to drop Playmaker a message on anything xG-related, or otherwise, on X!