The Expert: Explaining the increase in Premier League goals this season
Goals. This season there have been huge numbers in the Premier League – an average of 2.86 by Sunday night, on course to set the record of 1066 for a 20-team Premier League season set in 2011/12. The pattern over time has been clear: goals are on the rise, at the top level of club football at least, and that in turn has promoted streams of comment about how “proper” defending is on the wane.
In the Premier League, there was a clear shift in around 2009, from a situation in which it was normal to see 2.5-2.6 goals per game over a season to one in which 2.7-2.8 was. The picture in the Champions League, where the sample size is smaller, is more complex but the trend is still upward, to 2.90 goals per game in this season’s group stage. (The Champions League, of course, represents a very different form of competition, with a record 14 of the 96 group games this season producing a victory by four goals or more – that is 14.6%; in the Premier League hammerings are far rarer, just 6.2%).
The increase in goals may in part be to do with tweaks to the Laws. The gradual liberalisation of the offside law from the early nineties onwards has seen the number of offside decisions half over the past decade in the Premier League, and in turn led to defences taking a deeper base position, increasing the effective playing area. That, allied to a greater tendency to punish foul play, in turn allowed smaller more creative players to thrive without being bullied by larger opponents, one of the major background reasons behind the rise of Barcelona under Pep Guardiola.
That model of play had a profound affect, on attitudes as much as anything. There was a general shift to a more progressive, more expansionist style. And there was also an irony, or a paradox, which is that it was predicated in part on possession and in part of pressing – which in its 1970s and 80s incarnation was reliant on the offside trap for its potency.
Then, in 2013, came the Champions League semi-finals when two Germany teams playing a counter-attacking approach, upset two Spanish teams who sought to hold the ball. The following season, at the same stage, Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid out-countered Pep Guardiola’s Bayern. The juego de posicion of Guardiola suddenly had a rival; the hard-pressing, rapid transitions of Jurgen Klopp, a style of football similar in its principles to that practised by Antonio Conte. If anything, the contradiction is greater: pressing high up the field, relying on a goalkeeper to sweep up outside his own box, and little protection from the offside law.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that defences even among the top clubs have struggled at times this season. Manchester City have kept just four clean sheets, Liverpool just six. Only Jose Mourinho, of managers of the top six, has a predisposition to pack men behind the ball – and he is predictably scathing of talk of a new philosophy. “There is no modern generation,” he said in the summer of 2015 after winning the Premier League with Chelsea in response to criticism of his supposedly “boring” style of play.
And the way teams set up has an impact on the type of playing being developed. All players, goalkeepers and centre-backs, are now expected to be able to pass. A positional sense is privileged over the more old-fashioned virtues of toughness, aerial ability and tackling. The two best central defensive tacklers are Otamendi with 2.5 per game and Jordi Amat with 2.2; compare that with seven years ago when the best two central defensive tacklers were Carlos Cuellar with 3.7 and Lorik Cana with 3.6.
The style of defending and the style of football has changed, and the result is more goals than ever before in the Premier League era.
