Football is getting more boring
I’ve been doing a lot of work on football markets recently. Once the evening horse racing is out of the way, I’ll start turning my attention to football properly. At the moment I am dabbling and revisiting old material and updating new stuff for the season ahead. I’ll miss the odd opportunity, but I always feel the need to improve on prior years.
I was browsing goal data today and thought I’d have a look at how goals have changed over the years. Remarkably not that much. In the period 1970-1979 an average of 2.65 goals were scored per game. Today that is just under 2.60, so the average game has 0.05 goals less on average.
I thought there may be a shift around the period when 3 points were awarded for a win. You can see there was a tiny shift in the following decade, but not much. But the biggest shift you can see is with the dawn of the Premier league. Since the premier league came into being the ability of home teams to hit the net has declined while the opposite has happened for the away team.
It looked to me like the big spending clubs where scoring more away until I split the teams into tiers. In fact this pattern exhibits itself whatever league you are in. There is an underlying pattern that exhibits itself though if you dig a bit deeper. I’ll probably examine that in another post.
But if you judge excitement in football by goals, you can help but notice it is getting less exciting!
Category: Football trading strategies
