A dozen years ago, on a different website, I wrote an article titled How to Watch the World Cup Like a True Soccer Nerd. The idea was simple. It was summertime and the World Cup was around the corner and lots of Americans would be tuning in. Presumably, many of them would be sports nerds, familiar with advanced analytics in their preferred sports but not well versed in their soccer equivalents. The point was to give a crash course to catch those soccer neophytes up to speed. Well, now the 2026 World Cup is here, on U.S. (and Mexican and Canadian) soil no less, and we’re back for round two.
A lot’s changed since then, both in soccer, and with nerds, and with nerds in soccer. In America now, it’s trivially easy (though certainly not cheap) to watch any of the biggest soccer leagues in the world, men’s or women’s. Last season, we here at Paramount (never ever forget that you can subscribe at Paramount+ to get absolutely all this soccer goodness) broadcast the Champions League, Europa League, Conference League, Serie A, Carabao Cup, Championship, League 1, League 2, NWSL, USL, Liga MX, SPFL and more. And we’re just one broadcaster. It’s 2026; if you want to find a soccer match, you can find a soccer match.
As soccer has grown up, so have soccer fans. A decade ago, dragging your sorry ass out of bed at 7:30 a.m. ET might have involved wrangling a hangover, possibly by stumbling down to one of the handful of bars open for supporters groups looking for a place to watch their favorite team. Now, for those same fans, it often involves wrangling a toddler. Soccer is the weekend soundtrack for parents everywhere just trying to get their baby to eat their apple sauce.
As with parents, so too with sports analytics. By 2014, analytics was a mainstay of American sports; the nerds had won the war and were fully integrated into teams across baseball, basketball, and increasingly the National Football League (we’re just not gonna use the word “football” today, so as to avoid confusion, it’s soccer and it’s the NFL). Now, the nerds ARE the sports. In baseball, players in a slump will habitually get the numbers crunched to reassure themselves that they’re still getting their process right. Everyone in basketball understands that three is more than two. Heck, even in football, the idea that you’re supposed to go for it on fourth down a lot more than coaches had been has sunk in.
Soccer is behind, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been progress. Before the 2014 World Cup, expected goals (xG) was a relatively new stat that bloggers liked to throw around, and the smartest teams in the world (along with folks in the sports betting space) had at their fingertips. It was like a little bit of secret knowledge shared with a select few straight from mystifying computer programs. Now, it’s everywhere. Every team has it, broadcasters cite it with regularity (sometimes, they don’t even bother to say “if you’re into that sort of anything” anymore), and every annoying fan on social media uses it to argue in the dumbest way possible about why their team should or shouldn’t have won. It’s mainstream.
So, it doesn’t really make sense to put together another breakdown covering the basics. More people know the basics now. There are plenty of places to learn about the offside rule, why players flop to draw penalties and what an overlap is. Heck, you can go back and read that original piece if you want. If that article was soccer nerdom 101, let’s make this belated sequel 201, and cover some slightly more advanced concepts. You’re ready. I believe in you.
1. OK, but really, what is Expected Goals (xG)?
When a new stat breaks through into the public consciousness, it can often be a double-edged sword. Sure, more people are using the number you devoted your life to rigorously studying, calibrating, building, and releasing into the world like a delicate baby dove, but, OH MY GOD, have you seen the crimes against man, nature and statistics they’re using it for? I suppose, in that way, it fits perfectly on social media.
At its most basic level, expected goals accounts for everything that goes into a shot and calculates how often, on average, that shot becomes a goal. This is an extremely noisy measure. Just because a shot from the middle of the box, taken with a player’s foot after a cutback played from close to the endline around the edge of the 18-yard area might average getting scored 40% of the time, it doesn’t mean that some specific instances couldn’t be much higher and some much lower. The power of xG comes from its average. Those things average out very quickly and somewhere around the three- to five-game mark, a team’s xG difference reliably gives more information about a team’s future performance than their goal difference. That’s what’s empirically proven. The fancy statistic predicts future results better than the basic one in multi-game samples. It doesn’t predict every single thing; it just predicts more than goals. That’s why it exists.
But wait, you say that teams only play a maximum of eight games, and only four of 48 will get there. And two of those are in the third-place game … so does that even count? I am a good, upstanding statistics citizen and don’t wish to commit stats crime; what good are expected goals in such a small sample? I’m glad you asked.
Because we know expected goal averages work over the long term, we can do all sorts of fun descriptive stuff with the statistic in the short term, even for a single game. Let’s look at the biggest club game of the season as an example, the Champions League final. That game, played on May 30 (and airing on CBS and Paramount+, a running theme), was between Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain. It was a match tied 1-1 after 90 minutes, and after 120 minutes it was decided in a penalty shootout. I’m going to drop the xG race chart below, which shows that PSG “won” the xG battle 1.75 to 0.50.
CBS Sports
What does xG tell us about this match? Were you to use it as a blunt instrument, which is to say, exactly as fans the world over are most likely to use it, it would simply tell you that PSG were a lot better, should have won the game in regulation and that Arsenal were “fortunate” to get to penalties. This is what we call, to use a highly technical term, bad. The stat contains lots of useful information at a per-game level, but it doesn’t contain that kind of ground truth.
Here’s what we know. PSG took 21 shots for 1.75 xG, but that stat comes with a giant caveat: They won a penalty. Penalties are fairly random events. I know you’re going to want to argue with this, but again, we’ve got lots of empirical data here, and we know that xG is actually better at predicting future results when you strip away the randomness of penalties. It’s not satisfying, but it’s true. So what we actually see is that while PSG had an xG of 1.75, 0.79 of it came from that one penalty shot. Everything else was 0.96 xG from 20 shots. Further, we can see that Arsenal scored extremely early in the match. They spent about an hour with the lead. They didn’t need to score to win the title; they just needed to keep PSG from scoring.
Let’s sum all this up. If you analyzed that game without expected goals, you’d see a PSG that dominated; they outshot Arsenal 21-7, won a penalty, and were unfortunate not to win the game outright. If you analyze it poorly using xG, you’ll get the same result. PSG won the xG battle 1.75-0.50; those Arsenal bums were lucky to make it to penalties. Actually using the statistics well presents a much more nuanced story. Arsenal scored early, defended excellently for an hour, conceding only about 0.25 xG before conceding a penalty. Then, in the remaining 30 minutes of regular time and an additional 30 minutes of extra time, they continued to defend well, but could not attack at all, even though the game was tied. The key insight is that while PSG had 20 non-penalty shots, they amounted to less than 1 xG. Arsenal may have faced a lot of pressure, but conceding less than 0.05 xG per shot means they gave up no good chances (average xG per shot is about 0.10). Adding xG into the mix tells a much more nuanced story. It’s not that PSG were undeserving winners; it’s just that they were deserving winners over an Arsenal team that also played very, very well defensively.
Even in single-game samples, xG is an important tool for showing, with greater granularity, what happened and why. It will be extremely useful at the World Cup for explaining the game. Just don’t use it in any sentence that includes the word “end of (discussion).”
And there’s one more point to add before you are all bored beyond expected tears. On a player-specific level, xG is also a very valuable tool. Look, everybody loves a banger. Goals fired in from 30 yards out, rocketing top shelf, or curling inch-perfect into the corner are the lifeblood of fandom. Seriously, just look at what United States men’s national team left back Antonee Robinson did in the side’s final tune-up match against Germany.
They’re also rare and somewhat random. Everybody understands they don’t happen often; that’s what makes them amazing. At least everybody understands that until a player goes and scores a couple, and then the world starts suggesting that might keep happening with regularity. Don’t believe me? Here’s what Aston Villa and England midfielder Morgan Rogers mentioned after scoring a couple of high-profile lasers in January.
“If you actually look at shots we’re hitting, they’re good options to take. We’re not taking potluck shots. You can’t always score the perfect goal, from a cross or a tap-in. There are different ways to score goals,” he mentioned.
And while I appreciate the sentiment, you always want your players to have confidence. Here’s Rogers xG on a 10-game rolling average across the Premier League and Europa League.
CBS Sports
The bangers look great, but you always come down to xG Earth eventually. The best players in the world can outrun xG by a bit, maybe even up to 20% or so. But the real money is in getting high-quality, high-xG chances. Though, to be clear, even those aren’t a guarantee. At some point in the tournament, I promise you will see a tap-in, a sure thing goal that there’s no way on god’s green earth a player could miss. The xG value of that goal will not be 1.00; it will be somewhere between 0.95 and 0.99. You will be incredulous. How could that not be worth 1.00, you will ask. And the soccer gods will smile down on you and say four words.
Eric Maxim Choupa-Moting.
And now you know what xG is.
2. Formations — Forget what you have been told
Last time I did this, I wrote a whole thing about how confusing formations were, except for one specific part: Are teams playing two or three center backs? Modern managers took that as a challenge. This is particularly relevant to the United States men’s national team, where nobody is quite sure how many defenders they are supposed to be playing with. This isn’t a bad thing.
In their World Cup tune-ups, U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino trotted out a lineup that included five guys whose best position is somewhere across a back line in Antonee Robinson, Tim Ream, Mark McKenzie/Miles Robinson, Alex Freeman and Sergino Dest. Antonee Robinson is the guy who plays on the left and runs up and down a lot — that’s easy. Tim Ream, the U.S. captain, is 38 years old. He isn’t running anywhere. He’s a center back — that’s all easy. The same is true for the younger, more athletic McKenzie or Miles Robinson — certainly sprier than Ream, but every bit as much center backs.
Where things get weird is with the last two guys: Dest and Freeman. Both of their most natural positions are right back, or even right wing back. In the ancient days of, like, 2014, 2004, 1984, or maybe even 1884, we’d have understood how this works — playing two fullbacks on the same wing has been a defensive strategy. One plays as a winger in front of the other one, who plays as a full back. Two guys, primarily designed to stop the opposition. That’s not what’s going on here.
Dest and Freeman are both attack-minded defenders, both of whom are at their best getting forward. So, how are they lining up? Well, Dest mentioned during the week after the first game that he’s the wingback, which would make Freeman the third center back, playing inside as part of a back three. However, Ream, the captain, had a different understanding.
“Serg is a right winger. In fact, we went over video, and in some moments, he was playing like a wingback but really should have been higher.”
Welcome to the idea of the “flex four.”
Pochettino’s tactics are a natural extension of changes in defensive concepts over the last decade. What once was a bright line between a back three and a back four has blurred as managers try to get the absolute most attacking contributions they can from their defenders without leaving themselves vulnerable to counterattacks. Having three defenders back can be a safety blanket, but it’s not always necessary. Increasingly, teams are lining up with two guys who stay home, two who get forward (Tim Weah called it a “false wingback” role), and a fifth who floats between those jobs depending on the moment.
All of that can strain traditional definitions of winger vs. wingback, center back vs. fullback, and even broader positional concepts. Heck, when Germany unveiled its World Cup squad, it just called everybody either a defender or an attacker and didn’t even bother delineating who they expect to play in midfield.
The other thing that makes this development interesting is not the kind of approach that has often been seen in the international game. International soccer tends to be, for lack of a better word, stupid. The tactics are more basic, the approach is simpler, and the games are less complex. There’s a good reason for that; there’s simply a lot less time for training in the international game, where teams convene for a couple of games at a time every few months. Combine that with the fact that often the talent disparity between the best teams and everybody else is huge and advanced tactics just aren’t all that necessary.
Two things have changed ahead of this World Cup, though. First, across the world, more club teams are implementing this kind of murky blurring of the back line, so more players are coming into camp with experience in it. That’s a point Malik Tillman made about his time at Bayer Leverkusen, which prepared him for this approach. And second, there are many more elite managers at this World Cup than usual. Usually, the best in the game take the prestige and paychecks at the world’s biggest clubs. This time around, it’s not only Pochettino and his Tottenham, PSG and Chelsea resume, but also Thomas Tuchel leading England, Julian Nagelsmann with Germany, Carlo Ancelotti with Brazil, all of whom are elites in the game, before getting to long-time legends like Marcelo Bielsa with Uruguay, or the more journeyman sorts of club managers like Rudi Garcia with Belgium. There are just more guys comfortable with club tactics than usual.
Will it work for the USMNT? They won’t know until they play the games, but if Dest can keep doing this, nobody will care what position he’s called.
Don’t get too excited about all those possible attacking formations leading to a World Cup full of daring attacks and marauding runs, though. Every coin has a flip side.
3. I’m sorry, did you say Meat … Wall?
Another way of looking at the tactical innovations above is that managers are working really hard to get a third big guy on the field without sacrificing too much in attack. And why would they be doing that? Well, there’s a set piece revolution sweeping the game that my Double Pivot Podcast co-host Michael Caley has charmingly named “The Meat Wall.”
The basic idea is this. For most of recorded history, soccer wasn’t played. But then it was, and for most of soccer’s recorded history, corner kicks have not been particularly dangerous attacking moments. This is for two main reasons. First, headers are generally low-quality shots. They often come closer to goal, which can make them appear more dangerous. But even accounting for that, when they’re taken in crowded areas against set defenses from static positions, only the corners whipped into the absolute best locations really lead to goals. And second, you can’t get the ball into prime locations from a corner kick because the keeper will claim it. Corner kicks are just particularly susceptible to the goalkeeper running off his line and clearing the ball with a punch, or catching it before it can land in a dangerous location.
What the meat wall approach supposes is, “What if they couldn’t?”
The theory is basically this.
- Put a bunch of players in front of the goalkeeper to physically impede them from coming off their line to claim a corner.
- Take a normal corner aimed at a dangerous area that the keeper would usually stop the ball from getting to. It can be the front post, the back post, the middle of the six-yard box, whatever.
???- Profit
That’s it. Unfortunately, it works really, really well. Arsenal were the team most associated with rolling this strategy out and they won the Premier League and were runners-up in the Champions League, and you can see plenty of examples of it here.
Nothing breeds imitation like success. This has been combined with the finding that taking many long throws is also a profitable strategy. Bring your big center backs up into the attacking area, throw the ball towards the front post, try to get some sort of contact, create an ugly mass of chaos and hope the ball goes in the goal.
The general unifying theory here is that if you can get the ball into the center area of the box with a lot of big bodies around and the keeper unable to claim it, that’s good for the attack. This is a problem for the game. For starters, teams are taking more time than ever to set up for these attempts. Long throws in particular have taken something that used to involve no downtime, a quick restart of play and turned it into a slog as the team’s center backs come jogging up the field to get into position, take their time getting set up and all to create an ugly scramble. While these goals are efficient, they aren’t fun, and as this strategy spreads, it’s eating into the dynamism that makes soccer special. Instead of finding different ways to score, different teams take different approaches to breaking down defenses. Everybody is converging on this one strategy because it works.
Analytics discovering a game-breaking strategy that also makes the game less fun for viewers isn’t new. Baseball has been struggling with the revelation that three true outcomes (home runs, walks, strikeouts) are the really important stuff for 15 years now. It took a while, but basketball finally accepted the analytics finding that three is 50% more than two, and it changed the game forever; some people maintain that it has for the worse. Heck, meat wall isn’t even the most ridiculous name for one of these things; for that, I give you the NFL’s “tush push.” There’s a real chance, though, that the meat wall may be a similar moment for professional soccer. And the degree to which it impacts this World Cup will be a signpost on that path.
Sports are not helpless in the face of these changes, of course. When baseball teams realized that the data was telling them they could micromanage the positions of their defenders and even make big changes to where they historically started, baseball simply banned the overshift. There are now rules meant to inhibit all pushing of tushes. There are early signs that soccer is aware they might have a problem and is considering how to act.
The powers that be are instituting a time limit on throw-ins ahead of this World Cup. You want to get your center backs into the box for the chaos ball? They’d better bust their butts up the field to get there in a five-second window. Similarly, a new rule at this World Cup will allow referees to disallow a goal on a set piece for a foul committed before the ball was put into play. Previously, referees were constrained in what they could do in that regard. Fouls before the ball was in play did not result in the attacking team losing their corner kick. And once the ball was in play, that was it, the ball was in play.
It’s possible this will be enough to stem the meat wall tide. But this has proven to be a very powerful tool in teams’ arsenals (pun very much intended), and it may overpower small rule changes around the edges. If this becomes a World Cup of set pieces, it’s possible it could spur the sport to take even more serious action over the direction tactics are headed.
4. It’s all about the money (same as it ever was)
One place where sports nerds have come a long way in the last decade is the financial side of things. Cap management, free agent signings and luxury taxes. Analyzing the business of sports is as much a part of the experience as analyzing the guys on the field. Nowhere is that more true now than in soccer.
The structure of the global game makes financial analysis both more important and more complex than in American sports. Clubs aren’t operating in a closed system with shared revenue and enforced parity. They are also navigating overlapping competitions — domestic leagues, domestic cups and continental tournaments — while competing against teams with vastly different financial resources. That creates a constantly shifting landscape, where spending rules, competitive balance, and long-term planning are intertwined in ways that don’t cleanly map to the salary-cap or luxury-tax logic American fans are used to. There are acronyms like FFP and PSR (that’s Financial Fair Play and Profitability and Sustainability Rules), all of which involve legislating what percentage of revenue can be spent.
Look, for the purposes of the World Cup you don’t need to know what all those letters mean. You just need to know that money is pouring into the game and the upper echelons of soccer are big, big business. And the money isn’t equal. In the last 15 years, the Premier League in England has pulled away from the field. It’s not so much about the top top teams. PSG are the two-time defending Champions League winners. They’re from Paris. Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain. Bayern Munich in Germany. Those are teams that can play with anybody. But in the last few years, the Premier League’s financial might has shown through in its depth. Last summer at the inaugural Club World Cup, Chelsea beat PSG in the final. And while Chelsea might be a habitual Premier League powerhouse, over the last four seasons, they’ve finished 10th, fourth, sixth and 12th.
Depth shows itself in other ways, too. While PSG dominated the Champions League the past two seasons, England has dominated the rest of the European competitions. English teams have won the last two Europa Leagues and the last two Conference Leagues.
And here’s how that extends to the World Cup. There are 176 Premier League players taking part in the World Cup. That’s 75 more than any other league. Clubs up and down the Premier League have access to the best players in the world. Four of the top seven clubs by representation are Premier League clubs. That includes Manchester City at the top with 19, and Arsenal in third with 16. That all makes sense: They’re the top two teams in the Premier League. You then have Manchester United, who finished third last season, and Crystal Palace, the Premier League’s 15th-place finisher and also the Conference League winner. Not exactly a world-bestriding superpower.
This creates a weird set of cross-cutting patterns. Of the 19 players going to the World Cup from City, only four are English, and of them, Marc Guehi and John Stones might contribute, but the other two are backup keeper James Trafford and fullback Nico O’Reilly. Some of City’s biggest stars, the likes of Erling Haaland (Norway), Rodri (Spain), Jeremy Doku (Belgium) are load-bearing pieces for teams across the world. The same is true of non-English super clubs. Bayern Munich has 18 players going; one-third of them are German, but the list also includes England striker Harry Kane, France winger Michael Olise, defender Dayot Upemacno, Colombia’s Luis Diaz and more.
The point here is that the World Cup has kind of a two-tier system. The very best players in the world play for a handful of megaclubs across Europe’s elite. But most coming out of the next tier — the very good players — are in England. For America, that includes Chris Richards, Antonee Robinson and Tyler Adams (and Haji Wright’s Coventry City was promoted to the Premier League last season). A third of World Cup contender Brazil’s squad is in England (8/26), France is close (7/26), then Spain (6/26) and Argentina (5/26).
This kind of dominance extends to management, too. A full quarter of the tournament, 12 teams, are currently managed by a coach who has previously managed in the Premier League. That spans from the highest-profile managers like Tuchel at England and Pochettino with the USMNT to the outer regions of the tournament, like Dick Advocaat with Curaçao.
The bottom line here is that the modern game runs through England. It’s true during the club season, and it’s true during the World Cup. The nation of England may not win the World Cup, but whoever does win, England or otherwise, will be heavily influenced by the Premier League, on and off the field.
