Has goal scoring changed in football?

6 min readFeb 8, 2021

If you had to guess where do most goals come from in football, what would you say? It’s probably from open plays or maybe even counter attacks. But what about set pieces or penalties? How many goals are scored that way? I started wondering this since, while staying at home during the pandemic, I started watching more Premier League matches. I saw that a lot more goals seem to be coming from counter attacks, more penalties are being scored and set pieces seems to be very ineffective.

So I decided to dig into the data from the last 10 seasons (from 2010–11 to 2019–2020) and see where are the goals coming from in Europe’s top 5 leagues (Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1) and, of course, the UEFA Champions League (from the group stage to the final). The data I found divided the 53,091 goals scored in all of these leagues’ seasons into 5 different categories: Open Play, Counter Attack, Set Piece, Penalty and Own Goal.

Open Play Goals

Total percentage: 60.51% (32,126 goals)
Highest average percentage: Premier League 62.01% (646.9)
Lowest average percentage: Bundesliga 58.14% (524.8)

Open play is still the most common way of goal scoring with all 6 tournaments having more than 50% of their goals coming from this category in all 10 seasons. In general we can see a small decline on all 5 leagues after some growth in the percentages between 2012 and 2017. Some particular cases are:

Premier League: had the most years with the highest percentage of all 5 leagues.
UCL: almost every year it had the highest percentage, over 60% every year and over 70% last season.
Bundesliga: had a big growth from 17–18 to 18-19 with a slight decrease on 19-20 but it might be showing a growing tendency for more open play scoring.
La Liga: had a great growth from 10–11 to 17–18 but has been seeing a decline since to now be the lowest percentage of all top 5 leagues, a similar behavior can be seen on Serie A.

Set Pieces

Total percentage: 21.5% (11,414 goals)
Highest average percentage league: Premier League 22.26% (232.2)
Lowest average percentage league: Serie A 20.93% (214.7)

Set Piece goals are the second most common type of goal with percentages around 20% on all leagues, except for the UCL.

Even seeing that there is a downward trend on all leagues there are a couple of interesting cases:

Bundesliga: very inconsistent, it goes up (24.35%) in 14–15, down (17.87%) the next season, only to go back up (24.68%) in 17–18, to go back down again (17.76%) the next season, and then go back up.
UCL: the decline is really surprising with a clear downward trend with a small peak on 16–17 of 18.16% but a big decline to only 10.88% in 19–20. It could be because of the special format applied because of the pandemic that resulted on 6 games less, but it’s still surprisingly low.

Counter Attacks

Total percentage: 6.83% (3,627 goals)
Highest average percentage: Bundesliga 10.10% (91.2)
Lowest average percentage: Premier League 5.2% (54.3)

Counter attack goal percentages showed a behavior different than the one I expected. There was a decline until the 16–17 season where the percentages started to go back up. A couple of standouts are:

Bundesliga: the 15–16 was a big counter attack scoring season (12.63%) but it has started to decline even with a slight growth in the last couple of seasons to remain as the league with the highest percentage.
Premier League: not as much as I felt in my initial observation, but it has had a tendency to have more counter attack goals in the past 4 years (3.55% increase since 15–16).
Ligue 1: after having the lowest percentage (2.4%) on 15–16, they have increased the number of counter attack goals to now be in second place overall.
La Liga: its big initial drop matches their big growth in open play goals, on the contrary its increase in counter attacks since 17–18 matches the drop of open play from around the same season.

Penalties

Total percentage: 8.22% (4,366 goals)
Highest average percentage league: Serie A 9.69% (99.4)
Lowest average percentage league: Premier League 6.94% (72.4)

Again this is a different result from what I expected, but because of the leagues that have been increasing their penalty goals percentage. Up until 17–18 all leagues were showing a similar downward behavior, but after that season the Bundesliga and the Premier League remained on similar percentages from what they were showing while the rest started growing up.

Ligue 1: had its highest percentage (10.84%) in 14–15, dropped the next season (7.2%) and then went growing until it reached a 10.21% in 18–19.
Serie A and La Liga: from 17–18 these league have had a clear growth in penalty goals to almost have the same percentage in 13.136% and 13.16% respectively, both started the decade around the same percentages also.
UCL: the growth hasn’t been as big as in Serie A and La Liga but it went from a 6.98% to 9.59% in the last 2 seasons, reaching its highest level of the last 10 seasons.

Own Goals

Total percentage: 2.93% (1,558 goals)
Highest average percentage league: Premiere League 3.59% (37.5)
Lowest average percentage league: Bundesliga 2.46% (22.2)

And finally the own goals, the most embarrassing type of goal that counts the same as an overhead kick or a long range free kick.

All leagues seems to be having a downward tendency, with a couple of them growing back up last season, but there are a couple of interesting results:

Premier League: had until 13–14 the highest percentage of own goals with a peak of 4.56% in that same season. Then it went down almost each year until reaching 3.09% in 19–20.
UCL: also had a growth from 14–15 to 17–18 reaching its peak of 4.49% but not surpassing the Premier League’s highest point.

Some Conclusions

What is the state of goal scoring today then? Looking at the data I see that my initial thoughts were not that far from reality. We are looking at a game where set pieces are resulting in less goals, with a pretty clear downward trend marked specially by the results in the UCL. Open play remains the most common way of scoring a goal that saw a big rise in the 2010’s but has started to see a decline. This decline matches the rise of effectiveness of penalties and counter attacks, but this rise is not as a dramatic as it may seem from watching the game each week.

Football is a constant evolving sport where new tactics, rules and even types of player constantly impact the way it’s played and the way its goals are scored. It will be exciting to see if the trends I found here continue in the next few years or maybe new trends appear that support this constant evolution.

Extra: Total Goals

Since I had already rounded up all types of goals, I took a look at how the total number of goals by season behaved.

The data shows a couple of interesting cases. The drop in the last season of the Ligue 1 is expected since the season was finished earlier than expected, however the UCL still manage to deliver one of its highest scoring season of the 2010’s having 6 games less than a normal season.

La Liga has been dropping after a peak in 16–17 ending it its lowest scoring season in 19–20. On a similar path, the Serie A also reached a peak in 16–17 and started a decline, however their last season is their highest scoring one of the last ten.