English Top Flight Goals

For all the talk about the evolution of tactics within football, no matter what the formation, one thing has stayed constant throughout its nearly 150 years of operation—if you do not score goals, you will not win matches.

If football is the commodity billions of people watch each week, then goals are the currency. If you have been keeping a keen eye on the events of the 2023/24 Premier League season, you may be aware of one thing in particular.

A record number of average goals in a far-from-average season, and as we reach the final quarter of this campaign, the average per game is higher than 3.0. This figure is crucial regarding the tipping point of selecting over 2.5 goals at football betting sites and one that also equals plenty of entertainment.

But has it always been this way? That is the question we will ask ourselves as we both look to the past and the current generation of attacking talent and see what seasons have been worth their weight in goals.

At the Beginning

With English top-flight data that goes back as far as the 1888/89 season, there are plenty of figures to digest as we look at when and where the goals have been scored and to get an idea of how it all started, here are the top 12 seasons in terms of First Division or Premier League goals per game:

As we can see, things were far more relaxed in terms of defending when league football first started in England. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first four seasons of the Football League would go on to generate the four highest average goals per game tallies.

From the ludicrous peak of 4.6288 goals per game during the 1889/90 season to the relative decline of nearly 0.5 goals just a year later, anywhere from 1888 to 1892 would have seen burgeoning football fans get their money's worth.

The 1892/93 season was the first campaign to record an average of fewer than four goals per season, but even with this numerical downfall to 3.9, it would still mean the seventh-highest average figure in history.

When looking at the top 12 seasons in this table, there are two apparent clusters of dates. The 1888 to 1894 era and the 1927 to 1932 era can largely be explained by a change in the offside rule in 1925.

The offside rule originated in 1863. A player was considered offside unless three players of the opposing side were in front of him (including the goalkeeper), but the rule was changed in 1925. A player was considered offside unless two players of the opposing team were in front of him (including the goalkeeper).

Therefore, we can see goals being scored on a rather large scale in football’s formative years, but we can also see a second wave of prowess coming in once the first major offside tweak was made between the First and Second World Wars.

This goes a long way toward explaining why so many goals were scored in our top 11 entries in the table, but it does not go any way toward explaining the glut of goals found in 12th. The season in question is 1960/1961, and the average goal per game value was 3.73.

This is where our deeper focus now begins because as interesting as more than four goals per game sounds, the game that was played way back in the 1880s is a completely different beast from the one that we see today.

At least if we bring our benchmark forward to the 1960s and beyond, we can start to get a better idea of whether scoring goals is back in fashion in the same way that it was in the swinging '60s.

New Order

Like with the all-time data before, we can also rank each of the First Division or Premier League seasons in order of average goals per game since 1960/61 and if we do so, the opening finding is a rather stark one:

Each of the season’s between 1960/61 and 1964/65 lock out the top five rungs on our average goals per season ladder and with this boon in goals being scored, there are perhaps questions to be asked regarding player quality and professionalism.

As the game slowly emerged from its post-war shell, the first real steps into professionalism as we know it today were being taken. As player wages started to finally increase, so did the number of goals scored.

While there is no better way to highlight this than a particular day’s action in 1963, unless you have been living under a rock, each festive period will always dust off the infamous Boxing Day results of 1963 on social media.

In 10 top-flight matches in the English First Division, an astonishing figure of 66 goals scored – an average of 6.6 goals per game. If there were a Match of the Day programme back then, it would have likely carried on to the beginning of 1964.

Of course, this is an outlier regarding the number of goals scored, and the fact that these results took place on Boxing Day when plenty of turkeys had been eaten, and whisky had been drunk neatly ties into professional standards not being what they are today.

However, it also highlights a propensity for goals in the early 1960s, and it is rather interesting to see that no single season in the rest of the Football League era (up to and including the 1991/92 First Division) would ever surpass the 3.7316 goals scored during the 1960/61 season.

1966 and All That!

By the time England had won the FIFA World Cup, goals in English football were on the wane and whereas 3.73 was the goal standard in 1960/61, just six seasons later that figure had decreased to 3.00.

Nearly three-quarters of a goal fewer on average and a start of a declining trend throughout the whole of 1970s:

There would be a slight uptick in the 1967/68 season as the average goals per game figure inched forward to 3.026, but that would be the high-water mark for the game as we knew it. The days of entertainment were running thin, and the defenders were taking over.

By 1968/1969, that figure would drop to as low as 2.62, and any post-World Cup glow from 1966 would stubbornly stay in the range of 2.3 to 2.69 until the start of the 1980s.

Why the 1980s? That is when three points for a win were introduced to English league football. Before the innovation from the late great Jimmy Hill, a share of the points would mean exactly that and if both outfits had one in their pocket, there was no incentive for risk.

There was no incentive, and this meant there was no need to surge forward for a late winner. Why risk everything when the additional prize was just an additional point? Because teams were so risk-averse, the flow of goals had started to dry up.

However, the 1981/82 season is considered the line in the sand for most and with this introduction of all three points now up for grabs, the rule change would begin to see an increase in average goals per season.

Admittedly, it did not kick in during the opening season of its introduction, as the 1981/82 season only saw 2.539 goals on average. Still, the four that followed would all manage to return averages of more than 2.7.

This was a small increase and one that opened the game up in terms of entertainment; however, it did not strap a rocket to the number of goals being scored, and this would be the case by the time a rocket was strapped to the sport in England.

The Premier League

Come the start of the 1992/93 season, the Premier League era had been launched, and this also meant goodbye to the back pass rule that had plagued the viewing spectacle in the three decades of a rocky relationship between football and television.

But once the ability to knock it back to the keeper had been removed, had anything changed?

As we can see, the answer is essentially no. Not one season between the Premier League’s inception in 1992/93 and the last complete season 30 years later saw an average of more than 3.0 goals per game, a far cry from the numbers generated back in the 1960s.

Also, the lowest-ever figure in the Premier League was recorded back in 2006/07 when only 2.45 goals were scored per game. If this was the best league in the world, then its marketing team was doing incredible heavy lifting.

An important footnote to the table above is the introduction of VAR at the start of the 2018/19 season. With technology coming to assist the officials, one of the most obvious things to take from it is the increased penalties awarded.

If penalties increase, an average in goals should follow, and this has certainly been the case from 2018/19 to 2022/23. During that period, an average of 2.78 goals were scored per game, compared to just 2.70 in the five before.

For all its rights and wrongs, VAR has applied an entertainment factor back to the Premier League. To provide more context to this era of English football, we are going to rank the same data and also add in the current average figure for 2023/24.

This benchmark was yet to be beaten within the Premier League era before this season, and it is more than half a goal higher than the competition’s lowest recorded average of 2.45, which was generated in 2006/07.

What is interesting is that the top four Premier League goals per game averages are all within the VAR era, and therefore, we can say that the technology is increasing the number of goals scored.

Interestingly, the two VAR seasons that did not reach the top six were the 2019/20 and 2020/21 campaigns impacted by COVID-19. The technology may have an impact, but empty stadiums have nullified it.

Looking at the VAR era data does beg the question of why there has been such a massive leap from 2022/23 to 2023/24, and this can be partly explained by the weaker competition as a whole.

With the promoted trio of Luton, Burnley, and Sheffield United all suffering in the relegation zone, they conceded 207 goals between them. That's more than two goals against average, and that usually equals demotion in anybody’s language.

At the same time, it also suggests that clubs throughout the division have been filling their boots when scoring in this season’s Premier League. When you add this element to a VAR-based boost, it is no surprise why the magic number of 3.0 has been breached.

This also begs the question of whether this is the start of a new era or whether it is nothing more than a statistical outlier. The way to measure this will be to track the values by the end of the 2024/25 season, and if perceived stronger sides are promoted, this may bring the average down.

To add further context, we can also take all the data from 1960/61, where we know there was a goal glut and see how the 2023/24 season compares:

If you ranked all the seasons from 1960/61 to 2023/24, the table would be as follows. If you take the period of 1960/61 to 1964/65 that we highlighted out of the equation, the current Premier League campaign would have recorded the highest average in more than 60 years.

What are the Odds?

The remaining question is how this influx of goals has affected the bookmakers and whether there is still value in backing the over 2.5 goals market. on the evidence of the past five seasons (2019/20 to 2023/24), you would have to say that the value is decreasing.

After an increase in average odds of 1.8 to 1.865 from 2019/20 to 2020/21, it has been downhill ever since. Although there were incremental decreases in the following two campaigns, you could still get an average of at least 1.82 for any Premier League game to finish with over 2.5 goals.

However, it seems as if the bookmakers have cottoned on to the goal rush. Whereas you could get an average of 1.82 per game across the 2022/23 Premier League season, that has now decreased to as low as 1.68 during this.

This means the bookmakers offer an implied probability of just 59.5%. It's not far off being a literal toss of a coin, and at odds this low, backing the over 2.5 goals market in the Premier League is not the value bet it may have once been.

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Data Sources

Sources

https://www.football-data.co.uk/

https://www.worldfootball.net/stats/eng-premier-league/1/

https://www.whoscored.com/Regions/252/Tournaments/2/England-Premier-League