Sometimes not playing is as important as playing to improve the Goalimpact. Take for example Thiago Alcántara. Without him Bayern had an some, partly embarrassingly, bad performances including a loss against Augsburg, a 0:3 defeat in Dortmund and of course the 0:5 in the two legs against Real Madrid. Unsurprisingly, this caused the Goalimpact of many Bayern players to drop. The biggest hits took David Alaba (-1.7), Mitchell Weiser (-1.5), Philipp Lahm (-1.4), Mario Götze (-1.1), plus Toni Kroos and Manuel Neuer who both lost 1 point.
Thiago Alcántara didn't play and hence wasn't held responsible for this streak of bad games. As everybody else was rated down, Thiago's earlier games are seen in new light and his GI should improve accordingly. Just it didn't. It even fell marginally by 0.2. The reason for this is that the algorithm identified another, more important factor to explain the results: Thomas Müller. Here are the Bayern games in April split into the parts with and without Thomas Müller. Do you see what we mean by "Goalimpact Machine"?
Without Thomas Müller, Bayern München didn't have A SINGLE positive goal differential. With Thomas Müller, München failed to outscored their opponents only once and had six, partly strongly, positive goal differentials. This is Goalimpact in it's purest form. Thomas Müller already had a very high score, but this result outscored even the prior high expectations and hence the score raised an incredible 7 points from an already high expected peak of 168.6 to 173.3. His current Goalimpact is 169.
Update: I had the first ManU games the wrong way round. So actually, this was one period without Müller that had a positive goal differential. The overall picture is unchanged, though.
Thiago Alcántara didn't play and hence wasn't held responsible for this streak of bad games. As everybody else was rated down, Thiago's earlier games are seen in new light and his GI should improve accordingly. Just it didn't. It even fell marginally by 0.2. The reason for this is that the algorithm identified another, more important factor to explain the results: Thomas Müller. Here are the Bayern games in April split into the parts with and without Thomas Müller. Do you see what we mean by "Goalimpact Machine"?
| Goal Differential | without Müller | with Müller |
| Augsburg | -1 | 0 |
| Dortmund | -3 | 0 |
| Braunschweig | 0 | 2 |
| Bremen | n.a. | 3 |
| HSV | n.a. | 3 |
| ManU | 1 | -1 |
| ManU | 0 | 2 |
| Real Madrid | -1 | 0 |
| Real Madrid | -1 | -3 |
| Kaiserslautern | n.a. | 4 |
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Thomas Müller: Mover of the Month April 2014 |
Update: I had the first ManU games the wrong way round. So actually, this was one period without Müller that had a positive goal differential. The overall picture is unchanged, though.