I looked at some stats today for the Premier league and I noticed the very low # of shots on goal and saves. For 3 games none of them had more than 10 saves total in 90 minutes. Has this always been the case or is the style of play more defensive now?
Shot in the dark answer, but I think the saves stat is probably deceiving, since only balls stopped by the keeper are counted as saves, whereas shots that simply go wide are not. And I think there’s probably a bit more “aiming for the corners” than there used to be, since keepers are so long and athletic.
If anything the sport’s become a lot more attacking, especially the Premier League. Rule changes have favoured more attacking play with referees being much stricter on tough tackling. But stats can be very misleading!
I see very few shots when I watch so those stats seem fairly accurate.
I’m guessing it also ignores shots blocked by defenders.
Still, compared to a lot of other sports games can lack goalmouth action sometimes.
I don’t perceive it that way.
In any case, the Number of saves made do not make a game any good. You can have an intensely exciting game where there are plenty of attacking moves but the final thrust is blocked by a defender, or the attacker can’t quite connect with the final ball or the shot flies wide.
On the other hand you can have lots of shots that fly in from distance and the keeper picks them out of the air without drama.
With goals so scarce, a lot of the excitement with football is contained in the potential scoring situations and the time spent in a scoring position.
If you go back to the fifties, there definetely was a lot more scoring. Far more goals than nowadays. They also used to play with 5 forward players. Slowly this became less and less, with a switch to 3 attackers and later 2. I think the beginning of the nineties had the most defensive tactics (no surprise that the Italian competition was the strongest back then). Since then - with the premier league, la liga and the bundesliga becoming stringer - the amount of goals and attacking play seems to have gone up again. I don’t have time to look up any numbers, but this is how I perceived the developments.
Soccer is a very old sport and has changed in tactics considerably. In the early days, teams played with five strikers and and there were more goals. Pretty much in all sports, organization of the teams grows better. This helps defense more than offense. I have no statistics, so this is partly in the WAG (or perhaps TAG) territory, but I’m pretty sure it is much harder to get a shot without being harassed by a defender than it was a hudred years ago.
They played with eight strikers once, back in the days when cross bars were illegal, or rather had to made of ribbon. The first system with an equal number of defenders to attackers would be the WM formation which came in from the thirties onwards. Nonetheless, even when games often went into double figures there were always complaints that the game wasn’t attacking enough, from the pre-War period’s reform of the offside rule to the modern prohibition on back-passes and the introduction of three points for a win.
That sounds about right to me, I’d expect an analysis of the goals-per-game stats to back this up. It actually makes sense for teams to play fairly aggressively in league matches, as they get 3 points for a win but only 1 for a draw.
Looking at the stats for Man City’s 3-2 win over Tottenham yesterday, City had 7 attempts on target and 6 off target, while Tottenham had 7 on target and 5 off target. That’s 25 attempts on goal in about 95 minutes, or one every 3.8 minutes. That sounds quite high to me. However, the raw stats don’t tell you anything about the quality of play. A shot off target could be a very close thing, while an on-target shot could be a tame hit right at the keeper.
Indeed. One of the positive things about football is the large number of upsets, where games go against form. That’s partially a consequence of each goal having such a large value. It also adds to the tension, as the result is genuinely in doubt for most of the match. A low scoring game, even a 0-0 draw, can involve skillful play and be exciting to watch. (On the other hand, there can be some very dull games when neither side can really get going, and they cancel each other out).