Does a high goals-per-game rate automatically mean the football is more entertaining? (2024)

When you assess the graph depicting the goals-per-game rate in English football’s highest division over the past 50 years, last season almost looks like a spreadsheet error.

The 2023-24 Premier League didn’t simply feature the highest number of goals per game in the last half-century, it shattered the previous record — which was set 12 months earlier — by a distance.

Intriguingly, there wasn’t a single cause.

The increased amount of added time played was a factor, but that doesn’t entirely explain things. There were 162 extra goals scored in 2023-24 compared to the previous season. But there were “only” around 100 goals scored after the 90-minute mark compared to the general pattern of 50-70 per season. So even if you factor in some more goals scored in first-half stoppage time, too, that change alone doesn’t even explain half of the sharp rise.

• Want to stay up to date with the best news and features as the PL season kicks off? Sign up (for free) to The Athletic FC newsletter

And even accounting for the extra minutes, there were an unusually high number of own goals and an unusually high number of set-piece goals. The penalty conversion rate went through the roof, too, rising above 90 per cent for the first time. There was a very high number of shots, but there was also an attacking overperformance in terms of finishing, judging from the expected goals numbers.

In other words, several factors came together and were amplified by the additional playing time to create the highest-scoring Premier League season on record.

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

If you spent this past couple of weeks watching the Olympics and consumed lots of vaguely comparable sports (two teams try to get the ball into goals at opposing ends of a given area) like handball, basketball, field hockey, water polo and rugby sevens, you sometimes got the sense that for all the technical brilliance in those sports, they are actually too high-scoring. The more goals there are, the less significant each goal is. In those sports, to varying extents, individual strikes are logically not celebrated with the fervour of a goal in football. They don’t matter as much.

The Premier League’s high number of goals last season was partly because the league simply felt different: more end-to-end, more transitional, more… Bundesliga.

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

Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

So here’s a personal view: the rate of around 2.75 per game, which was the general level of the Premier League for much of the past decade, is roughly ideal. It provides a balance between tension and action. Anything above that rate is fine — personally, I like a bit more patience, more intrigue, more build-up rather than a basketball-style game. But goals are goals. Goals are exciting in themselves. Goals change the game state and force the conceding teams to do something different. You can’t complain about there being more goals.

On the other hand, go significantly lower than 2.75 and things can become dull very quickly. It’s surprising how different 2.50 can feel from 2.75. The rate dropped below 2.50 in the Premier League midway through the first decade of this century, at a time when Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho arrived on its touchlines and placed more emphasis on defence, and the entertainment value of the competition suffered hugely.

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 score” and something that shouldn’t ever happen in football.

A rate of 0.25 goals per game doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of a weekend of action consumed through the BBC’s flagship highlights show Match Of The Day, and over the course of several months, you really notice it. If there are around eight shots per goal and there are 2.50 goals less every Premier League weekend, then there are 20 fewer shots. There is less excitement.

The rate tends to be lower in international tournaments, but once it starts to drop close to the 2.00 mark, football has a problem. A truly dreadful Copa America in 2011, for example, produced 2.08 goals per game. It was a tough month of football to get through.

Returning to the comparison with other European domestic competitions, it’s worth pointing out that Italy’s Serie A, traditionally the most cautious of the major leagues, was often so defensive that it had a goals-per-game rate below 2.00. In 1986-87, one of the most celebrated Serie A campaigns because it featured Diego Maradona leading Napoli to their first-ever Scudetto, the rate was 1.93.

If the Premier League was ever that miserly, you suggest television companies would be campaigning for a change in the game’s laws to bring back some entertainment value.

What will happen this season? Certain features of 2023-24 probably won’t be repeated. The penalty conversion rate will surely drop. The Premier League has indicated that attacking block-offs at corners will be punished more strictly, which presumably is going to mean fewer set-piece goals.

Furthermore, the division’s bottom three probably won’t be such whipping boys this time around and perhaps the amount of added time won’t be quite so extreme. New managers/head coaches at existing Premier League clubs — Arne Slot, Fabian Hurzeler, Enzo Maresca and Julen Lopetegui — are, in general, probably more about control compared to their predecessors and therefore maybe the trend of end-to-end games will die down a little.

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

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

Enjoy it, if you like that sort of thing.

(Top photo: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)

Michael Cox concentrates on tactical analysis. He is the author of two books - The Mixer, about the tactical evolution of the Premier League, and Zonal Marking, about footballing philosophies across Europe. Follow Michael on Twitter @Zonal_Marking