Last week, Arsenal beat Porto because of the fallout in London. Inter Milan took a two-goal aggregate lead and succumbed to Atletico Madrid on penalties in Spain. Barcelona bounced back from a draw against Napoli to advance to the quarterfinals. And Borussia Dortmund held on through gritted teeth to a 2-0 win over PSV Eindhoven.
If you watched a football game during the week last week, you watched one of those Champions League games and missed one of the season’s games because of it.
When Inter and Atletico met at the Metropolitano, the most exciting match in Europe, the Premier League, was played in a 12,000-seat stadium between the teams ranked 18th and 13th in the English top flight.
In that match, the visitors from Luton Town took a 3-0 lead in the first half and probably looked to be pulling a result that would have lifted them out of the relegation zone. And then, five minutes into the second half, Bournemouth pulled one out, and then Array and Array and yet to complete one of the biggest comebacks in Premier League history.
If you had bet $10 on Bournemouth at half-time, you would have won $150 – they have become the third Premier League team to go into half-time with 3 passes and win the game. While this comeback is historic, it shouldn’t be that surprising. In a broader sense, Bournemouth-Luton is nothing new: Premier League groups are scoring passes for laughs this season.
Suddenly, Premier League teams are on track to break the previous record for goals scored in a season. This begs a good question: what’s going on?
Here’s what a team’s score looks like since the 2008-09 season:
For 15 seasons, the score remained stable, rising between 1. 24 and 1. 43 goals per game per team. This season, they have risen to the top with 1. 63 goals per game. (All data for this season is from the last full league match circular. )
The per-game numbers don’t literally contextualize what’s happening and how it affects what you can see at the end of a given week. The average over the last 15 seasons was 1. 37 goals per game, or 52 goals per season. Extrapolated to 38 games, the current goal rate would take the average Premier League team to around 62 goals until the end of the season. That’s 10 extra goals per season per team, which adds up to around two hundred extra goals in total.
Many statistically significant increases are undetectable to the naked eye. As Bill James, the godfather of baseball’s analytical revolution, once said, “You can’t tell the difference at all between an Array300 hitter and an Array275 hitter. The difference is once every two weeks. ” The difference between a smart hitter and an average hitter is simply visual: it’s all about the record. “
However, the increase in the number of goals scored this season is not just about the record. You can see and feel the extra two hundred goals. So why is everything so obviously different?
The Premier League told us this was going to happen. After the World Cup experimented with much more rigorous accounting and therefore increased downtime in Qatar, English football followed suit.
As head umpire Howard Webb before the season:
“We will continue to charge the time in the precise way we want for goals and substitutions. Remember, the only goal we’ve told the referees is the precise timing of goals, the precise timing of substitutions and the precise timing of red cards. Consequences are granted, everything else is equal, being more potent with delaying tactics and time-wasting tactics.
“In the Premier League, we watched 8. 5 minutes last year. We looked at the chances that happened last year and implemented the new methodology, and we think it’s possible to spend up to 11. 5 minutes per game, which is 3 minutes more. “
He’s pretty right, too. In week 28, there were 11. 9 minutes of added time in each match. This represents a breakthrough in the last 15 years:
And in the same vein, there is also a huge accumulation of goals in stoppage time.
119 goals have been scored in the first or second half of this season. That’s 16 more goals than the record of the last 15 seasons: the 103 scored in 2016-17. Last season, 84 goals were scored in stoppage time.
We still have almost a hundred games left this season.
Compared to the average of the last 15 seasons, injury time per game has increased by 73%, but that’s not the only reason why extra stoppage time affects more goals. Goal stoppage time has a higher rate at 90% from 0. 11 goals. consistent with the game at 0. 21.
Why is this possible? Well, not every minute of every football game is the same.
According to analyst Michael Caley in a study published in his newsletter Expecting Goals:
“An underrated statistical fact about football is that goals are not distributed lightly throughout the match. Approximately 56% of goals are scored in the second half. And it’s not a slow build-up throughout the game, but the probability of goals. It builds up to the max without delay from the start of the second half, remains solid for most of the half, and then culminates in second-half stoppage time.
Perhaps by adding more time at the end of matches, the Premier League has added even more high-probability goal time to matches.
In other words, if the probability of a goal being scored increases as the momentum progresses, then we wouldn’t expect a 73% build-up in stoppage time to result in a 73% build-up of goals. A resolution backlog of more than 73% can be expected, and that’s precisely what happened this season.
However, the increase in the total number of goals is solely due to the increase in injury time. Goals scored in regular time are also on the rise:
The average over the last 15 seasons is 1. 26 regular goals per game, while this season we are at 1. 41. That’s still a slight increase from last season’s high of 1. 32. That’s about 5. 7 more regulation goals per team per season, or about 114 more goals in total.
So while additional targets have been accumulating at a much higher rate, increased regulatory targets still account for most of the increased targets. My first intuition about this?
With VAR now focused on unprecedented fouls in the penalty area, that alone could increase. Most significantly, Premier League players seem to be getting better at converting consequences. In the 10 seasons since 2008, only three consequences have been changed by 80% or more. The conversion rate has remained relatively solid at around 78%. In the past five seasons, however, the 80% mark has been surpassed three times. This season, the conversion rate has risen to 88. 5%.
However, despite the league’s good penalty shootouts this season, regulation penalty goals have only increased slightly: 0. 11 per game this season, compared to an average of 0. 09 over the past 15 seasons. That still leaves an additional 0. 13 regulation goals consistent with the game that are not penalties.
My reflection of the moment: some kind of broader structural change. Perhaps with the growing monetary gap between the Premier League and the rest of the world, Premier League teams are dedicating their resources to the most beloved players: the ones who score goals. Did you shift more of your spending on moves to strikers and, in turn, that led to more goals?
Not bad! In fact, it may even be quite the opposite.
“Strikers generally accounted for 48% of the annual wage bill in the Premier League between the 13-14 and 23-24 seasons,” Aurel Namziu, a knowledge scientist at consultancy Twenty First Group, told me. “This season, that figure is about forty-five percent, which is below average. “He added: “Centre-forwards usually account for 20% of the transfer payment each season in the Premier League. This season, they also accounted for 12 percent, which is below average. “
So what’s it? Over the course of a full season, we are on track to accumulate approximately 98 regulation goals without penalty. Where do they come from?
ESPN FC’s Ryan O’Hanlon explains why the Premier League has scored more goals than in past seasons.
I imagine they could have been set-pieces (as clubs eventually started hiring specialist coaches to implement planned routines), but this season is no exception when it comes to goals that are set in regular time. Almost all of the preparation comes from open play.
And what do open-plays do these days?
Thanks to the influence of Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola, Premier League teams pass more effectively and press more effectively. What happens when teams pass and press harder than ever?We’re seeing more teams looking to play out the back, which means more opportunities for urgent groups to win the ball back, but we’re also seeing groups that are better able to break through pressure and then gain speed and attack a defense that’s driven up the pitch.
This season, Premier League teams are attempting 67. 1 per cent of their shots from inside the box, the highest score since 2008 and well above the 15-year average (59 per cent). A shot is lower than ever, and the expected target price of each shot is also increasing more and more.
Stats Perform also records a somewhat debatable statistic called “high chances. “It’s debatable because it’s subjective. Here’s how they describe it: “A scenario in which a player deserves to be expected to score, usually in a one-on-one or point-blank range, when the ball has a clear trajectory towards goal and there is little for moderate tension in ‘The Shooter’. The user who scores the game decides whether luck is good or not, and although it causes problems, it is very useful for our existing needs.
If groups create more chances from higher pressure and by piercing higher pressure, then we would see more “big chances” created as either condition leads to an attacker running towards goal, at high speed and with little resistance. While there is no knowledge about the best opportunities prior to 2010, here’s what the progression of the best opportunities without penalty, through team and play, looks like since then:
The average Premier League team is creating 1. 8 great chances without penalty consistent with this season’s game. (All consequences also count as great possibilities, however, we’ve ruled them out because we’re already over that number. )The last top 1. 54 last season, while the average for the last 12 seasons was 1. 33. Basically, that’s around 0. 5 great additional chances per game for both teams, which means a big extra chance for one or both Premier League matches.
Adding an additional scenario to the game “where a player deserves to score” turns out to be a pretty undeniable recipe for massively increasing the number of goals scored in a single season. But will it persist consistently?
As long as the league continues to add more load time in each phase, there will be more objectives. Still, that’s pretty much part of the goal we’ve been accumulating this season. The tactical and economic era we’re in lately also turns out to have created an environment conducive to more purposes: a lot of money in the league allows teams to adopt more complex passing and urgent systems that seem to lead to a greater number of high-quality goal opportunities at both ends. The most productive players also receive more penalties, although the league doesn’t spend more money on big-name strikers.
Given the degree to which this is potentially due to tactical negotiations conducted through the league’s coaches at this specific time and how goals scored can vary randomly from season to season without any explainable underlying changes, I’m not convinced this is to a large extent. The accumulation of points is here to stay. But as the games get longer and the penalty shootout becomes more frequent, we’ll officially enter a new era of inflated targets.
Perhaps this is the new motto of the Premier League: here you have more chances than ever to see a goal scored.