Does a high number of goals automatically mean that football is more entertaining?

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When you judge the graph of goals scored in the top flight of English football over the past 50 years, last season almost looks like a spreadsheet error.

The 2023-24 Premier League season not only saw the most goals per game in half a century, it also broke the previous record – set 12 months earlier – by a long shot.

Interestingly, there was no single reason.

Increased playing time was a factor, but it doesn’t fully explain things. In the 2023-24 season, 162 extra goals were scored compared to the previous season. But after 90 minutes there were “only” about 100 goals scored compared to the general pattern of 50-70 per season. So even if the goals scored in the first half are also taken into account, this change alone does not explain even half of the sharp increase.

And even taking the extra minutes into account, an unusually high number of own goals were scored and an unusually high number of goals were created. The conversion rate for fines also passed and rose above 90 percent for the first time. There were a lot of shots, but there was also an overperformance on the offensive end, judging by the expected goals, in finishing.

In other words, a number of factors came together and were amplified by the added playing time to produce the highest-scoring Premier League season of all time.

But is this in itself a good thing? The 2023-24 Premier League saw 15 per cent more goals scored than the previous season, but did that make it 15 per cent more entertaining than the 2022-23 season? After all, one of the most important features of association football is that it is essentially the world’s lowest-scoring big team sport.

If you’ve spent the last couple of weeks watching the Olympics and consuming a lot of vaguely comparable sports (two teams trying to get the ball into the goal at opposite ends of a certain area) like handball, basketball, field hockey, water polo and rugby sevens, you’ll sometimes have an idea that the technical brilliance of those sports however, they are actually too high. The more goals there are, the less important each goal is. In these sports, individual shots are not logically celebrated in football to the frenzied varying degrees of goals. They don’t matter that much.

The Premier League’s high goal tally last season was partly because the league simply felt different: more end-to-end, more transition, more… Bundesliga.

Germany’s top team has almost always led the sport in goals per game over the past 15 years, often scoring significantly more than any other league. Watching a German game has usually been a very different experience: less control, more chaos.

Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

So here’s a personal take: around 2.75 per game, which was the general Premier League level for much of the last decade, is about ideal. It offers a balance between excitement and action. Anything above that value is fine – personally, I like a little more patience, more scheming, more building than a basketball-style game. But goals are goals. Goals are exciting in themselves. Goals change the game situation and force the teams that conceded to do something different. Can’t complain about more goals.

On the other hand, go significantly below 2.75 and things can get boring very quickly. It’s surprising how different a 2.50 can feel from a 2.75. In the Premier League, the odds fell below 2.50 in the middle of the first decade of this century, when Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho arrived on the fringes and put more emphasis on defence, and the competition’s entertainment value suffered hugely.

With the rare exception, Arsenal’s 5-4 win over Tottenham Hotspur in November 2004, Chelsea manager Mourinho dismissed it as a “hockey point” and something that should never happen in football.

0.25 goals per game doesn’t sound like a lot, but over a weekend spent on the BBC’s flagship highlights Match Of The Day, and over several months, you’ll really notice. If there are about eight shots per goal and there are 2.50 fewer goals each weekend in the Premier League, there are 20 fewer shots. There is less tension.

The rate is usually lower in international tournaments, but when it starts to drop close to 2.00, football has a problem. For example, the truly horrific Copa America in 2011 produced 2.08 goals per game. It was a tough month of football to survive.

Returning to the comparison with other European domestic competitions, it is worth noting that Italy’s Serie A, traditionally the most cautious of the major leagues, was often so defensive that its goals against ratio was under 2.00. In 1986-87, one of the most famous Serie A campaigns because it featured Diego Maradona leading Napoli to their first ever Scudetto, the value was 1.93.

If the Premier League was ever this miserable, you suggest that the TV companies campaign to change the laws of the game to restore entertainment value.

What will happen this season? Certain features of 2023-24 are unlikely to be repeated. The conversion rate of penalties will definitely decrease. The Premier League has announced that corner kicks will be penalized more heavily, presumably meaning fewer goals will be scored.

Also, the top three in the division probably won’t be such whipping boys this time around, and maybe the amount of overtime isn’t quite so extreme. The new managers/head coaches of the current Premier League clubs – Arne Slot, Fabian Hurzeler, Enzo Maresca and Julen Lopetegui – tend to be probably more in control than their predecessors, and so perhaps the trend of head-to-head games is dying. slightly down.

Still, even a significant drop from 3.28 goals per game to, say, 2.90 would make it the second highest scoring campaign in the last 50 years.

Last season was probably an outlier, but this is also a longer period of high-scoring football.

Enjoy it if you like that kind of thing.

(Top photo: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)