It’s the classic trope wheeled out by those who don’t like football – goalless draws, boring! Even those of us who live and breathe football have to confess we’d rather see a game with goals, even if those goals are all a bit comical, as they were in the 2-2 draw between Man United and Arsenal in the week.
Just how frequent are goalless draws? Mark Lawrenson and Paul Merson spectacularly under-predict them; prior to the current season, Lawro had called just 8 0-0 draws in 2,617 recorded predictions, and Merson just 4 in 1,483 recorded predictions (thanks to @MyFootballFacts and @EightyFivePoints for the data). That’s low (about 0.3%), but how low compared to outcomes?
The featured pic for this post shows the frequency per season (northern hemisphere) over the history of data collected on Soccerbase. There’s been quite a bit of variation over time, and perhaps surprisingly for someone who got into football in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that isn’t the period when the most goalless draws were recorded – it’s actually the 1920s.
We can use the econometric technique of Indicator Saturation to determine shifts and outliers in this time series. The R package gets gives us the following plot:
goalless-draws-isat
So we see that since the late 1960s, things have been fairly constant, with (persistent) variation around about 8%. The middle panel gives the residuals, hence the difference each year from that mean level of 8%. We’re on a run now of 12 consecutive seasons with less than 8%, but not statistically significantly less than 8%. If the downward trend continues though, we may be looking at a new equilibrium sometime soon.
The art of defending, maybe, is a thing of the past?