What does data of a million football games tell us?

DATA - By digging through the basic data of one million football (soccer) games, going back to 1901, you can distill some interesting trends. The average goals scored per game is 2,77. But there’s a lot more to it.

Courtesy of the people of Footballfans.eu, a groundhopping community, I was able to analyse the outcomes of a million football games. The oldest games are from the English First Division in 1901. The database now contains competitions and cups from over 75 countries and most international championships. It’s a wealth of data, that shows for instance that the home game advantage has been declining over time. Or that players in the northern hemisphere score more goals during the summer, but players in the southern hemisphere do not. And that Morocco is the country where the least goals are scored on average.

But first, let’s look at the distributions of the scores from all the games in the data set. As you can see, 1-1 is the most common score, 11 percent of the games end that way after regular playing time.

In the section “other scores”, we find some pretty exotic results. How about 0-31 in the game between Snæfell and Haukar in Iceland? Or 24-0 in a game in Estonia between Levadia and FC Soccernet? Also worth mentioning are two very old friendly games. In 1908 Denmark defeated France with 17 to 1! More recently in 2011 San Rafael lost to Atlético Madrid with 1 to 19.

Now let’s have a more narrow look. We only take the top two divisions of each country, only the normal competitions and we start in 2000.

The graph looks quite similar to the previous one. There seems to be some consistency to it, so use this wisdom for your future bets!

Trends

Now let’s look at trends. This time we take all the national competitions (not cups), starting in 1901 (watch the gaps for the wars). And for each year we take the average number of goals scored in a game that year.

There are lots of fluctuations in the first half before it starts to stabilize and show a slight downward trend. Maybe because the goal keepers keep growing.

We now zoom in to the period starting 1946 and break it down to the home and away goals as well:

Now that looks interesting. It looks like the home advantage is declining. We can visualize this better by only showing the difference between the average number of goals scored by the home team and the away team.

Clearly a downward trend for the home advantage in the last thirty years. Bring in the talking heads!

Brazil becoming less attractive?

Let’s zoom in again. Only the top two divisions for each country and a shorter period.

Boring. We have to try something else. Let’s use all national competitions again, but this time split them across the globe. So how does the North compare to the South?

That’s better! There seems to be a trend there. Are the Brazilians losing their reputation for attractive football? Are the Argentines no longer so eager? What’s up?

Okay, now let’s compare national competitions to international competitions (world cups, EUFA cups, etc…)

They seem to be in step, although one might think the international competitions trend is two years delayed from the national one. Curious.

More goals in summertime

Let’s take a completely different angle. Do the seasons have any influence on the scoring? For this we have to split up between north and south again, of course.

Yes, the summertime in the north makes players score more often. Odd thing is, not in the south. What could explain this phenomenon?

Day of the week

The last viewpoint uses the day of the week. More goals on Sunday or on Monday?

The two top level divisions seem to play very consistent over the week. But below that, Sunday is the worst time to go and watch a game if you want the most bang for your bucks.

Liechtenstein most goals, Morocco the least

The table below shows the average score per game, per country. Best country first (so you have to search your country maybe). All national competitions are used.

Best stadium for scoring goals

The second table is about stadiums of course. Since the data comes from a groundhopping community, we need to state something about the grounds. In the list below we used the two top level divisions. For each country we calculated which stadium had the highest average score since 2000. This time is sorted by country.

If you have any interesting suggestions for doing more with the available data, please let us know in the comments. In the meantime, have a look at the source for some inspiration. This post wouldn’t have happened without them.

NB: Dutch/European decimal notation is used. So where you see 2,77 the Brits and Americans should translate this to 2.77
NB2: This article is published under a Creative Commons license. Feel free to copy and just add credits linking to this version.