The Ballet of the Masses
Football is the ballet of the masses — Dimitri Shostakovich
“Imagine it’s Saturday at 7.00PM and you will tune the Tigres match. They are playing Chivas today. You don’t care about the result because this is THE game.”
This is how my brother described virtually every Saturday of my teens, when the week was what happened while I was waiting for the Tigres to play again. They were terrible back in the day, but I did not care. That is, after all, the beauty of football: we cheer for our colors, for the 11 players who wear that shirt: our shirt. While Real Madrid and Manchester United win big, there is only one team that drives me nuts: Tigres UANL.
I hope more than one will feel identified with this.
I am writing this article with one question in mind: What makes football attractive to fans? I explored SoccerStats.com, a site that publishes data on football for as many leagues as one can imagine (‘Burundi Premier League’… rings a bell?). I will summarize my findings in the following lines, although a later repetition (at greater depth) will come handy: it should not come as a surprise that the 2019–20 season was an irregular season, by all accounts.
For this article I am only exploring general data, at a League-level: home and away wins, draws, goals per match, percentage of games when both teams score, home and away goals, and the number of games with at least 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5 goals. That is not enough data to make any predictions, but it allows for some descriptions of football and what makes a league worth following.
To that end, I have decided to subset the data and claim that there is a Super UEFA confederation, which is comprised of:
Germany (Bundesliga), Spain (La Liga), England (Premier League), Italy (Serie A), and Turkey (Süper Lig).
I selected these leagues for my ‘Super UEFA’ classification after an article at EuropeanDataJournalism.eu, where they find these five leagues are the highest growing in terms of revenue. The list would include France (Ligue 1) and Russia (Premier League) but had to remove them since their data is no longer available in the league’s overall dataset.
These are the richest leagues in the World, and their best clubs can afford to buy top players (yes, Cristiano Ronaldo included). Thus, one would expect theirs to be the best football on earth: the highest quality show.
According to this table (and my biases, of course), a good show involves:
- A lot of goals. La Liga is somewhere below 2.5 goals per match (on average) while games in Germany average 3.2 goals.
- Some competitive parity. Both teams score (BTS) in more than half of the games (between 50 and 60% of the games played), which means we can expect teams to have the sufficient offensive might to score.
- Not many draws. Around 25% of games end in a draw in the Super UEFA leagues. Of course, some drawn matches are interesting, but I am making some generalizations here.
Speaking of goals and draws, I found an interesting correlation that is seen worldwide: leagues with a higher percentage of matches drawn tend to be leagues where less goals are scored on average. The grid below shows a chart per confederation where each point is a professional football league.
Clearly, except for the Confederation of African Football, there is a downward sloping line-of-best-fit that suggests this correlation holds. The same is true of other leagues in inferior and youth divisions, women’s leagues, and regional tournaments:
One thing is worth noting: a high goal average is not a synonym of high-quality football. There are leagues in the second grid that reach higher goal averages than the upper-division leagues. I think this is because of the wider gaps that prevail in those leagues.
Of course, income is an important predictor of a team’s performance (maybe the most important), but women’s, youth, an inferior division football have another source of inequalities: the lack of information.
First division clubs can study their rivals, because there is plenty of videos, statistics, and analysts following-up on big TV chains. That, on the other hand, is true of only a few teams/leagues at other levels (I think of England’s ‘Championship’ and Spain’s ‘La Liga 2’, as well as USWNT, but that’s a national team, not a football club).
Finally, I discovered that one of my indicators of attractiveness (the BTS) is not as good as I thought. Indeed, there is not much of a difference between the Super UEFA and the rest of the world. However, let us not be fooled by the BTS: 13–1 is a score that classifies as both teams scored, yet the difference is abysmal.
Summary
In this article, I performed a superficial analysis of what makes football attractive to fans. I found that La Liga, Premier League, Bundesliga, Süper Lig, and Serie A share the characteristics: there is an average of 2.5–3.2 goals per match; and around 25% drawn matches (not far above). I found that less goals tend to be scored in first-division football leagues, and explained how, in my views, this is due to a wider gap between clubs in women’s, youth, and inferior divisions football. Also, I found that the percentage of games where both teams score is not a good indicator of attractiveness because most leagues perform between 50 and 60%.
I hope there will be part II. Stay tuned.
The exploration presented in this article is only intended to illustrate one way in which I would analyze football. It is neither an exhaustive nor a serious analysis. The opinions expressed in this article are exclusively my own and represent nothing other than my own views.
