The weekend ahead: Clásico, Napoli – Roma and Basel – GC
This weekend there are five matches that we are following here: on Saturday Napoli against Roma, the London derby between Chelsea and Tottenham, and Dortmund against Frankfurt; on Sunday Basel against GC and, to round things off, the Clásico. Below you will find a card for each match. Before kick-off it only shows the teams, the league and the date. After the final whistle it fills itself in: with the score, the xG of the final analysis and the xG after the match, the opportunity if there was one, and the goals. So the post still holds once the weekend is over.
The matches
All times are Swiss time. Overnight into Sunday, summer time ends and the clocks go back one hour; the times for Sunday already take this into account. Kick-off times may still change; the match page is what counts.
Saturday, 18:00. Napoli at home to Roma, a clash between two big Serie A clubs.
Saturday, 18:30. Chelsea against Tottenham Hotspur, a London derby in the Premier League.
Saturday, 18:30. At the same time in the Bundesliga: Borussia Dortmund at home to Eintracht Frankfurt.
Sunday, 16:30. Basel against Grasshopper, a Super League classic.
Sunday, 21:00. To round things off, the Clásico: FC Barcelona at home to Real Madrid.
What comes when
The same sequence runs for each of these matches. About 48 hours before kick-off comes the Preview, calculated with the expected starting XI: probabilities for all markets and expected goals (xG), but no opportunity yet. Until the final analysis, we check every hour whether a regular is newly missing. We show significant absences as an impact. As soon as the lineups are official, the model recalculates with the eleven players who actually start. That is the final analysis, on average about 60 minutes before kick-off. Only the final analysis shows an opportunity on the match page, at most one per match, and only its opportunities count in the performance record. Not every match gets an opportunity; so far, roughly one in three to four does. If the edge is not big enough, we do not show one. Why that is so is explained in the post Why many matches have no opportunity.
During the match, the match page shows the probability of another goal for each team, recalculated continuously until the end of regular time. This number is available to subscribers and for matches you have unlocked. In addition, the “In-game impacts” card shows sending-offs, substitutions of key players and injuries.
- Preview about 48 h before with the expected starting XI, no opportunity
- Impacts until kick-off when a regular is newly missing
- Final analysis about 60 min before with confirmed lineups, at most one opportunity
- Live another goal per team, in-game impacts
- Review after the final whistle opportunity, xG before and after, influences per goal
After the final whistle, the opportunity goes into the performance record, and the match page shows the review: what the model expected and how the match fitted with it. The cards above then show the xG of the final analysis next to the score and the xG after the match. How the model calculates is explained in the help under The model: xG from the starting XI.
You will find all of the weekend's matches in the Match Center. The cards here fill themselves in after each final whistle: if you read this later, you will see the score, xG and opportunity right here in this post.