Trending: Shots in box
One of the measures that goes into the team model looks at how each team has performed against their opponents compared to how the league fared in that same fixture. So, if for example, Southampton at home are surrendering nine shots inside the box per game and Everton come in and rack up 12 SiB, they have 'overperformed' by 33%. Rather than look at the standard measure of form (i.e.goals) which focuses on the results rather than the process, we can look at this data and see if teams are playing consistently or trending in one direction or the other. The added benefit to this metric is that it is opponent adjustment so 'form' doesn't get blurred by simply having a run of easy or hard games. Although the model measures shots inside the box, outside the box and those on target, I have found SiB to be (a) predictive of future success (see graph below) and (b) generally consistent for a given team (unlike SoT which can be affected by crazy on-target rates like Steve ...