Robert Mastrodomenico
speaker
18 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2011
last heard Dec 2011
Robert Mastrodomenico’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hi, my name's Robert Mastro-Domenico and I'm a sports statistician for Global Sports Statistics.
I'd like to talk about 2.97.
This is the average number of goals reported for this season after 98 games on the BBC's Football Tactic blog under the article, Is Premier League Defending Getting Worse?
Now this is a really interesting article as at the time of writing we had a few shock results in the Premier League.
humiliating 8-2 defeat to Manchester United.
Now these are big games where we generally don't expect to see a lot of goals.
Now this 2.97 goals per game is reported as the highest value since the 1967-68 season.
And this is compared to the average number of goals taken from the first 100 games of last season, which they give as 2.59 goals per game.
These numbers seem quite different and the article asks the question, is Premier League defending getting worse?
In the article, former Arsenal defender and BBC pundit Lee Dixon says he thinks it's more likely down to the Premier League attacking getting better combined with the defending getting worse.
And he says that while teams have been more adventurous this season, defenders are being hindered by the growing rule changes which have given their own opponents an advantage.
So 2.97 goals per game seem to support this view if taken at face value, as it appears much bigger than 2.59 goals per game.
However, on more or less I know you don't take the numbers at face value, so delving deeper, the difference between 2.97 and 2.59 can be shown to not be statistically significant.
So given this result, I was interested in seeing how many goals would be needed to be scored over the period of 100 games to show a statistically significant difference when compared to what happened last season.
My findings showed that you'd need to have around 3.1 goals per game to show a statistically significant difference between what we had seen last season.
So is the Premier League attacking getting better and defending getting worse, as Lee Dixon suggested?
Well, the numbers don't really seem to support this.
However, while statistically we're not seeing significantly more goals per game, we still have one of the best leagues in the world giving us one of the best seasons on record.
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