While I’ve always been fascinated by sports statistics, I must admit I did not realize that gathering data for this particular project would be so time consuming. No, it didn’t take me 9 months to tally up all the goals ever scored in the World Cup starting from 1930, but I did lose interest about halfway through the data mining (from Wikipedia, no less), and I never got around to tying up loose ends until now. Nevertheless, I’m proud to present my results in this post.

 

Let’s get straight into the pretty charts shall we?

This first chart shows the pace at which goals were scored for every World Cup in history, and while it is indeed pretty, it does a poor job of showing any trends. You might notice that more recent World Cups have seen more goals scored on an absolute basis (and that is indeed the case if you look at the following chart), but you must also keep in mind that the tournament has expanded drastically since its early days.

Starting with just 13 teams at the inaugural 1930 World Cup in Uruguay (18 matches were played), the tournament expanded to include 24 teams in 1982 (52 matches) and finally to 32 teams (the current format) in 1998 (64 matches). Therefore, it should come as no surprise to anyone that more goals are being scored in the modern era, as there are simply more matches being played.

We can quickly verify this by comparing “% Matches Complete” versus “% Goals Scored” rather than “Cumulative Goals Scored,” as this will normalize for the increasing number of matches played over time. As the following two charts show, the actual pace of goalscoring on a per match basis has remained relatively consistent over time. This should be expected, as the rules of the game have changed little since the inception of the World Cup.

I will leave you with one more chart before I sign off, which I find very interesting:

This is a busy chart, but it shows 2 trends which should be obvious, and 2 trends which are not as obvious. The 2 obvious trends are: (1) the absolute number of goals scored per tournament has, on average, increased over time, and (2) the number of matches per tournament has increased over time. The 2 less obvious trends are: (1) the early years of the World Cup (1930-1958) had the highest number of goals per match and (2) that same early period also had the highest average goal differential per match. There are a couple of explanations for this intriguing pattern. First, soccer as a game was not as developed in the early days of the World Cup. There were only a few powerhouse countries in South America and Europe that dominated the international scene, but seeing as the entire purpose of the World Cup was to bring together teams from all over globe, it was inevitable that lopsided results would arise from powerhouse countries stream rolling some of their less fortunate competitors (e.g. Argentina dismantling USA 6-1 in the semifinals in 1930, Hungary beating the Dutch East Indies 6-0 in 1938, with Sweden overrunning Cuba 8-0 that same year). Second, the format of the tournament was in part to blame, an issue most pronounced in the 1954 World Cup, which featured an astounding 5.38 goals per match and 3.00 average goal differential, statistics which will likely never be matched again in the modern era. From Wikipedia: “The sixteen qualifying teams were divided into four groups of four teams each. Each group contained two seeded teams and two unseeded teams. Only four matches were scheduled for each group, each pitting a seeded team against an unseeded team.” In other words, low ranking teams were forced to play high ranking teams, which led to such absurd scorelines like: Brazil 5 – Mexico 0, Hungary 9 – South Korea 0, Turkey 7 – South Korea 0, Uruguay 7 – Scotland 0, and Austria 5 – Czechoslovakia 0. As the game grew in popularity worldwide and more and more countries began sending their most promising players to play in the most competitive leagues in Europe, the playing field has evened substantially. Furthermore, the modern game places a lot more emphasis on defense, which is why it is now rare to see a lopsided scoreline in any competitive international match (and also why Germany’s 7-1 drubbing of Brazil last year was so unexpected). While further expansions in the tournament seem almost certain (after all, more matches played = more money to be made), I expect the goals per match and average goal differential to remain in line with where they have been in the modern era.

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For those of you interested, the data I aggregated can be found here.