FIFA world cup, and how much would be scored there

Football (or soccer) is maybe the most popular sports on the planet. Last week the most popular tournament (maybe second only to the Olympic Games) had been started in Russia, while Billions will be watching all over the world.

I was curious by the question of scoring, and how it changed over the history of football. I got the feeling that FIFA is doing a lot of efforts to encourage offense productivity, and wondered how fruitful was it.

I found this very interesting database at Kaggle, with the results of (all?) international matches since 1872 (up to, but without 2018 world cup). I researched it for scoring ratios.

I filtered out "friendly" matches. I also took the World Cup tournaments as a special category (without the qualification rounds), and looked for the trends there.

The results that you see in the chart were averaged per 4 years periods, starting at1930 (the first world cup in Uruguay). the green area is the world cups tournaments, while the blue line is all other tournaments (excluding "friendly" games).

My conclusion is that world cup tournaments dragged others down in terms of goals scored per match. Until the 1950's, the average score per match were way over 5. in 1954 (Switzerland) it was 5.38 per game. by 1962 (Chile) it was already below 3.

Ever since, it stayed there with a slight trend of continuous decline. in Brazil (2014) it was 2.67 (50% of the rate in 1954)

since the 2.6x is very stable, and there are going to be 64 games in Russia 2018 tournament, it is a simple math drill to reach a prediction of 171 goals. Actually, I would put a range of 160 (2.5 goals per game) up to 180 (2.8 goals per game).

As these lines are written, the 2018 tournament in Russia has completed its 17 first games. total scored: 42 goals, in 17 games. an average of 2.47/game, which is a little below the lower expected boundary (2.5/game).