Oh I think I see what you’re saying: a poor team will create poorer chances in general, leading to lower xG shots. There’s truth in that, but is it the case at Spurs? The club has had an average league position of 4.6 over the last 10 seasons, which suggests it has had above average players, regardless of (lack of) trophies, so you’d have thought, on balance, those players would in general be capable of “good play” resulting in high xG chances. All that is besides the point, though. This analysis is about how Son has an uncanny ability to score low xG chances.

Handy hint: you can eyeball low xG goals by looking at a player’s Goal Log on FBref then sorting on the xG column, low to high. Always fun to check out the really low ones. The PSxG stat (called xGOT on Sofascore) gives us an indication of how savable the shot is - the closer to 1, the less likely to save. It’s a useful indicator of the “quality” of the shot to go along with the “difficulty” represented by xG.

E.g. https://fbref.com/en/players/92e7e919/goallogs/dom_lg/Son-Heung-min-Goal-Log