Not so Super Hoops will want to get their season back on track

Celebrating their newly owned stadium, Coventry City crushed next Saturday’s opponents Queens Park Rangers 7-1 on Saturday.

The New York Times has been trying to make sense of what happened using the expected goals model.  It’s clear that speculative sharp-shooting played a big role in their result. Two goals came from outside the box, and the overall xG per shot stood at a paltry 0.07.

Take Coventry striker Victor Torp’s brace. His first saw him reach behind him to guide the ball through a sea of bodies into the bottom-right corner. The xG value of this shot is 0.04, and it’s pretty reasonable to estimate that only one in every 25 of these efforts goes in, given the precise nature of the finish that is required with so many players between Torp and the goal.

His second was even more spectacular and unlikely: a ferocious curler into the top-right corner. The model puts it at a one per cent chance, and again, it’s difficult to argue with that assessment.

But stringing together that many low-probability finishes in a single game is incredibly rare. By analysing the individual xG of each of Coventry’s 19 shots, the model puts the chance of scoring seven or more at 0.004 per cent — roughly 1 in 25,000.

The unlikeliness the model assigns is matched by the observed data. Across 18,631 matches in England’s top four leagues, the Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A since the 2019-20 season, only two produced a larger single-game xG over performance: Wigan’s record-equalling 8-0 win over Hull in the Championship in 2020 and Mansfield’s 9-2 victory against Harrogate Town in League Two in 2024.

Single games are subject to so much randomness that no one model can fully capture it. Even the chances that feed into xG are context-dependent over 90 minutes: a high-value opportunity can come from a calamitous mistake or a fortunate bounce rather than repeatable attacking play. That variance makes huge outliers like Coventry’s possible (though still improbable).

QPR goalkeeper Joe Walsh should have prevented four goals. While his positioning and shot-stopping were far from pristine, this feels an unduly harsh assessment of his display on Saturday, and it’s hard to fault him for the majority of the goals.

Coventry’s over performance was mainly down to freakishly good finishing, but the model probably did undervalue the value of their opportunities. But the very rarity of an over performance like this points to their clinical display being a massive statistical outlier rather than evidence of a busted model.   (Anyone familiar with a basic two variable linear regression knows that such outliers occur).

The result doesn’t help very much as QPR will be determined to prevent a repetition in front of their home crowd.