Claudius If you look at football data, it tells you what you see with your very eyes.
But does the data do that? The tweet you posted above seems like an example of the ambiguity of it all. While the advances in football data in recent years add to our appreciation of the sport as fans, the pitfalls are abundant.
The first strange premise in the tweet's line of thinking is that "Ødegaard's new, freer role" can or should be taken as the main discriminator between these two recent batches of data. There's no particular justification for that. It's just one of many things that has happened—if it's actually happened at all (I can't recall Arteta or anyone else at the club acknowledging it).
An amateur pundit settling on a subtlety like Ødegaard's positioning as if it were a geological upheaval in our tactical approach—a tweak that doesn't even involve a new XI, or a player changing positions on the pitch!—says a lot about how very, very settled our tactics and selection have been of late.
The tweet also relies on the idea the "underlying numbers" shown in green (xG etc) should be considered more salient than our actual goals scored when we're predicting future performance. But for some reason, metrics that might support that conclusion ("post shot" xG comes to mind) aren't even given. They'd be handy for this ongoing discussion about finishing.
So the sizzling take becomes "be patient, because since Wolves, our odds have actually been better, it's just our luck has been worse". The match after these numbers were current, we turned in a shocker versus Fulham!
In that other thread, I offered a psychological explanation for our wan results. I reckon the fixity of our tactics and selection are hitting the players' collective morale and speed of thought. I don't back myself up well at all, but with or without accompanying data, I think it's as good an explanation as shrugging and suggesting reality just keeps using bad luck to cheat the models.
The whole discourse around Arsenal this season has become a rolling tribute to these confounding gaps between what we measure, what we expect, and what is actually happening. Every other video is "Are Arsenal better or worse in 23–24?" It's been a bit weird lately, but if anything, it all demonstrates the data can't be enough.
