If you look at the graph showing the goal ratio per game in the top English football league over the last 50 years, last season almost looks like a calculation error.
Not only did the 2023–24 Premier League see the most goals per game in the last half century, it also far surpassed the previous record set 12 months earlier.
Interestingly, there was not just one cause.
The longer stoppage time was a factor, but that doesn’t fully explain it. In the 2023/24 season, 162 more goals were scored compared to the previous season. But “only” around 100 goals were scored after the 90-minute mark, compared to the general pattern of 50-70 per season. So even if you also take into account some additional goals in first-half stoppage time, this change alone doesn’t even explain half of the sharp increase.
And even if you include the extra time, there were an unusually high number of own goals and an unusually high number of goals from set pieces. The penalty rate also went through the roof and was over 90 percent for the first time. There was a very high number of shots on goal, but also an offensive overperformance in terms of finishing when you consider the number of expected goals.
In other words, several factors came together, and were amplified by the extra playing time, to create the Premier League’s highest-scoring season of all time.
But is that in itself a good thing? The 2023/24 Premier League saw 15 percent more goals than the previous season, but was it also 15 percent more entertaining than 2022/23? After all, one of the key characteristics of football is that it is essentially the least goal-scoring team sport in the world.
Anyone who has watched the Olympics in recent weeks, and followed many similar sports such as handball, basketball, field hockey, water polo and rugby sevens (where two teams try to get the ball into goals at opposite ends of a given area), sometimes gets the feeling that, for all their technical brilliance, these sports actually score too many goals. The more goals there are, the less important each goal is. In these sports, individual goals are obviously not celebrated with the same enthusiasm as a goal in football, albeit to a different degree. They are not as important.
Water polo: More goals, less fun? (Patrick Khachfe/Getty Images)
The Premier League’s high goal tally last season was partly because the league simply felt different: more organised, more transitional phases, more… Bundesliga.
The German top division has almost always led the way in goals per game over the last 15 years, often scoring significantly more goals than any other league. Watching the German game was usually a very different experience: less control, more chaos.
Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder.
Here’s my personal opinion: the rate of around 2.75 per game that has been the general level of the Premier League over the last decade is about ideal. It strikes a balance between excitement and action. Anything above that rate is fine – personally I like a bit more patience, more intrigue, more build-up play than a basketball-style game. But goals are goals. Goals are exciting in and of themselves. Goals change the course of the game and force conceding teams to do something different. You can’t complain about there being more goals.
However, if the figure is much below 2.75, it can get boring very quickly. It’s surprising how different 2.50 can feel from 2.75. In the Premier League, the figure fell below 2.50 in the middle of the first decade of this century, at a time when Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho came to the sidelines and placed more emphasis on defense, greatly reducing the entertainment value of the competition.
When there was a rare exception – Arsenal’s 5-4 win over Tottenham Hotspur in November 2004 – Chelsea manager Mourinho dismissed it as a “hockey result” and something that should never happen in football.
There weren’t many goals in the Premier League in the mid-2000s (Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
A rate of 0.25 goals per game doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of a weekend of action watching on the BBC’s Match Of The Day highlights show, or over several months, you really notice it. If there are around eight shots per goal, and there are 2.50 fewer goals each Premier League weekend, then there are 20 fewer shots on goal. There is less excitement.
The odds are usually lower in international tournaments, but once they drop to 2.00, football is in trouble. The truly awful 2011 Copa America, for example, saw 2.08 goals scored per game. It was a tough month for football to get through.
Returning to the comparison with other European domestic competitions, it is worth pointing out that Italy’s Serie A, traditionally the most cautious of the major leagues, has often been so defensive that its goals per game ratio was less than 2.00. In the 1986/87 season, one of Serie A’s most celebrated seasons, in which Diego Maradona led Napoli to their first Scudetto, the ratio was 1.93.
If the Premier League had ever been this stingy, do you think the television networks would be lobbying for a change in the rules of the game to restore the entertainment value of the game.
In the 1986/87 season, there were only 1.93 goals per game in Serie A (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)
What will happen this season? Certain features of the 2023/24 season are unlikely to be repeated. The penalty conversion rate will certainly drop. The Premier League has indicated that attacking blocks at corners will be penalised more severely, which will presumably mean fewer goals from set pieces.
Furthermore, the bottom three teams in the league are unlikely to be as keen on playing this time around and the extra-times may not be quite as extreme. New managers/head coaches at existing Premier League clubs – Arne Slot, Fabian Hurzeler, Enzo Maresca and Julen Lopetegui – are generally likely to place more emphasis on control than their predecessors and so the trend towards end-to-end games may ease somewhat.
Even a significant drop from 3.28 goals per game to, for example, 2.90 would mean that this would be the season with the second highest number of goals in the last 50 years.
Last season was probably an outlier, but this season too there have been a lot of goals in football over a longer period of time.
Enjoy it if you like that sort of thing.
(Top photo: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
