The question
Aston Villa beat Manchester City 2-1 on Saturday, ending City’s perfect start to the season. Nicolas Jackson scored both goals and took 13 FPL points. FPL’s expected goals (xG) gave him 0.37 for the whole match: on a normal night, chances like his add up to about a third of a goal.
So how do you score twice from a third of a goal, and does it tell us anything about Jackson?
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The main chart
How do you score twice from 0.37 xG?
xG judges a chance by where and how it was taken, not by what the shooter did with it. Both of Jackson’s goals were the kind of chance the model rates low and a good finisher can still take.
- 6 minutes: John McGinn won the ball after a loose touch from Marc Guéhi and fed Jackson, who turned Elliot Anderson and drove a shot into the roof of the net. A shot taken after beating a defender, at an angle, rates low on xG because most of those shots are blocked or saved.
- Second half: shortly after Erling Haaland headed City level, substitute Ibrahim Mbaye played Jackson through and he finished first time from the edge of the box. The ball squirmed under Gianluigi Donnarumma. Edge-of-box shots are low-xG chances, and this one needed help from the goalkeeper.
How likely was it? If 0.37 xG is treated as one night’s worth of chances, a simple probability model gives a 31% chance of at least one goal and about a 5% chance of two or more. That is roughly one night in twenty.
Real matches back that up. This season there have been 108 player-matches where someone had between 0.30 and 0.45 xG. Only 3 of them produced two or more goals, about 3%. Jackson’s Saturday is one of the three. It is rare for one player on one night, but across a league season it is expected to happen to somebody most weeks: 8 of the 15 braces this season came from under 0.40 xG.
What the numbers say
The odd part is how steady his chances have become. Jackson played little early on: no minutes in gameweek 1, 45 in gameweek 4, and 0.00 xG in two of his first four matches. Since gameweek 5 he has played 81 to 90 minutes every week, and his xG has sat in a narrow band: 0.44, 0.42, 0.36, 0.37. That is a striker getting the same diet of chances every match.
He is finishing well ahead of those chances. He has 4 goals from 1.83 xG this season. The same probability model says a player with 1.83 xG scores four or more about 11% of the time: unusual, not unheard of.
Villa won a match they did not dominate. Adding up every player’s xG, Villa created 0.61 against City’s 1.55, their third-lowest xG in eight league matches. They have now won twice while creating less than their opponent; the other was 3-2 at Tottenham in gameweek 5. In the two matches where they created even less (0.30 at Brighton, 0.34 at home to Arsenal), they lost without scoring.
Compared with his last Premier League season. In 2024-25 at Chelsea, Jackson scored 10 goals from 11.68 xG in 2,220 minutes, 1.68 fewer than his chances were worth, with 0.47 xG per 90 minutes. Now the chances have dropped to 0.30 xG per 90, yet he is scoring more often (0.66 goals per 90, up from 0.41) and is 2.17 goals ahead of his xG. In short, he is scoring more from less, and gaps like that usually narrow as a season goes on.
What they do not say
- Eight matches is a small sample. A finishing run of 4 goals from 1.83 xG can disappear in a month.
- The probabilities are approximations. They treat the night’s xG as one total; with each shot’s xG the numbers would shift a little. FPL does not publish shot-level xG.
- xG is FPL’s figure. It does not measure how good each finish was, which is the whole question here.
- None of this proves Jackson has become a better finisher. It shows steady chances and, so far, more goals than those chances usually bring.
Last week’s forecast, checked
Last week we gave Everton roughly a one-in-four chance of a clean sheet at Arsenal and said the most likely outcome for Vitalii Mykolenko was one goal conceded and about two points. Everton lost 2-0, so the clean sheet did not come and Mykolenko scored 0 points in 73 minutes, below our most likely outcome but within the range we described.
Next week: Jackson v Fulham
Villa host Fulham on Saturday 31 October (20:00). Starting from Jackson’s average of 0.40 xG per match since gameweek 5, and adjusting for Fulham conceding slightly less than the league average (1.37 xG per match against 1.46), we expect about 0.37 xG. That gives him roughly a 31% chance of scoring and about a 5% chance of another brace. The most likely single outcome is no goal. FPL’s own projection is 8.0 points, which leans on his recent form more than his chances. This assumes he starts and rests on eight matches, so treat it as a rough guide; we will check it next week.
Three takeaways
- Two goals from 0.37 xG happens about once in twenty such nights for a player, but somewhere in the league most weeks.
- Since gameweek 5, Jackson has had 0.36 to 0.44 xG every match. That consistency is the real change.
- For Fulham at home, expect chances like Saturday’s, with roughly a one-in-three chance of a goal.
Sources and licences
- Fantasy Premier League public data: goals, expected goals, minutes, points, cards and fixtures for 2026-27 gameweeks 1 to 8 (confirmed), and FPL’s projected points. Used for all three charts and every figure from this season. SimPitch is not affiliated with the Premier League, Aston Villa, Manchester City or Fulham.
- Fantasy Premier League data for 2024-25: Jackson’s minutes, goals and xG at Chelsea, from the vaastav/Fantasy-Premier-League archive (MIT licence).
- Match reports: linked and paraphrased, not quoted: ESPN (how the goals were scored), theScore (goal times and assists).
- Calculations: the probabilities use a simple Poisson model on FPL’s match xG. The Fulham forecast scales Jackson’s average xG since gameweek 5 by Fulham’s xG conceded per match relative to the league average.
- Photo: Nicolas Jackson, 16 June 2026, by Bryan Berlin via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0), resized.
- Charts, text and calculations: made by SimPitch from the data above. © simpitch.co.uk.
Corrections
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SimPitch (2026). Nicolas Jackson, doing more with less. simpitch.co.uk, 27 October 2026. https://simpitch.co.uk/weekly-analysis/posts/odd-gw8-jackson/