How Novanta Lab works

Novanta Lab publishes its own football models. We don't resell anyone's data — we build models from publicly available match records and publish what they produce, with the error bars shown. Every model here can be checked, and nothing we publish can be taken away from us.

TrueGoals — our expected goals (xG) model

xG (expected goals) is a standard football metric. The xG on this site is produced by our own model, TrueGoals — we compute it ourselves from public match statistics. We never copy or resell anyone else's xG figures.

TrueGoals estimates how many goals a team's performance in a match typically produces, based on shots, shots on target, corners, home advantage, and opponent strength. It's trained on over 250,000 team-matches across 20+ years and 21 leagues.

It is a team-level model built from match statistics — it does not use shot-location data, so it won't match shot-by-shot models exactly, and we don't pretend otherwise.

How well calibrated is it?

A good model's predictions should match reality on average — when it predicts 2 goals, teams should score about 2.

The honest numbers: TrueGoals beats a naive shots-on-target baseline on both Poisson deviance (0.840 vs 0.870) and mean absolute error (0.758 vs 0.771). It is slightly conservative on very high-scoring performances — a known limitation we're refining.

xPoints and the Luck Index

xPoints is expected points. For each match we simulate the result from both teams' xG to estimate how many league points a team's performances should have earned, then add those up across the season.

The Luck Index is actual points minus xPoints. A positive number means the team has collected more points than its underlying performances suggest — such teams often regress toward their xG over time. A negative number means the reverse: better performances than the results show.

"Luck" here is shorthand for that gap between points and performance, not a claim about literal chance. It's descriptive, not a prediction or a betting signal.

Our data

Match results, shots, corners, and other statistics are compiled from publicly available records going back over 20 years. We mirror this data ourselves. Our models and their outputs are our own.