The Power Of Goals.

It is perhaps an indication of the rarity of goals that of the 100's of photographs I've taken at EPL games, I've only managed to record one goal (a penalty) and one disallowed effort. In comparison I've snapped countless pictures of final third passes, shots at goal and the ubiquitous touches.

Locally, where junior football goal counts climb steadily as the skill differential between sides also increases, I've been more successful at capturing some of the defining moments of a match. Uttoxeter's Oldfields Ground may fall well down in the pecking order of sporting venues, although the turn of the (second last) century pavilion did once host over three rain curtailed days, the 1909 touring Australian cricket team. Nowadays, when it stages local junior football, it is the place for goals and when sides are regularly playing matches will lots of goals, that important measure quickly reaches useful sample sizes.

Goal number six in a nine goal shootout.

As the title of this blog implies, goals and the ability of a side to cumulatively score the lion's share in their matches over a prolonged period of time is a good indicator of how successful a team will be. In addition, goal difference doggedly tracks points accumulated, so the proportion of total goals scored by a side would appear to be the ideal way to express different levels of team talent and likely league success.

However, the relative scarcity of goals in the highest ranks of the professional game, compared to its more lowly cousin, park football, has understandably led to a search for a more numerous match action to act as an improved proxy for this comparatively rare event.

In the opening 10 matches of 2011/12 for example, relegation bound Bolton, scored 10 times by their own efforts with generous opponents chipping in with a further three strikes, took 122 shots, including blocked efforts, completed 737 final third passes and made 1190 final third touches. By comparison, their opponents had scored 27 goals in reply, shot 188 times, completed 970 final third passes and touched the ball 1475 times in that area by the time game totals had reached double figures.

None of the figures gave cause to suppose that the 19th place Bolton occupied after 10 matches was anything but a fair reflection of the abilities they had shown in the opening matches. But did more clues to their future performance lie with their 27% goal share (32% in you included gifts from the opposition) or their 39% share of a tenfold numerically inflated shot count.

100+ shots attempted and around 200 shots conceded is immediately appealing because of the inflated sample size. However, shots and every other secondary statistic often come with unwanted baggage. In particular, as this post shows, such figures are prone to inflated or reduced levels due to the course a game takes. In short, shots, passes in certain pitch areas and touches are highly situational.

The path a team takes when attempting to impose their superiority over an opponent may depend on the order in which the goals arrive in a single game. Following an opening goal, the balance of offensive and defensive actions may shift, as illustrated by the large minority of matches where a winning team may find itself out-shot by a defeated opponent, especially if the winners sprinted to an early lead.

If a side wants to win a match, the only option is to outscore their opponent, but fluctuating scorelines on route to that win may allow a side greater flexibility in how they chose to try to guarantee that win.

So even though shots attempted greatly out number goals as match events, the degree to which a team dominates the other in this secondary statistical category may be highly dependent upon the course the game took. We cannot guarantee that matches for individual sides will follow similar patterns in the future. Therefore, shots, especially over smallish sample sizes may prove to be poorer indicators of future performance than that much rarer prize, the goal, over the same time scale.

To test this, I repeated the auto-correlation post here, but charted the correlation as measured by the r^2 values between the cumulative, proportional share of such game events as shots, touches and goals over the first 10 games of a season and each individual side's points total or goal difference over the subsequent 28 matches.

R^2 for Proportion of Game Events Recorded by Teams in First 10 Games and Points/GD in Subsequent Games. 2011/12.

Proportion of  Game Events For Team in First 10 Games.	r^2 Between Event and Points over Final 28 Games.	r^2 Between Event and Goal Difference over Final 28 Games.
Shots.	0.229	0.339
Shots+Blocked Shots.	0.272	0.374
Touches in Final 3rd.	0.287	0.396
Total Touches.	0.348	0.435
Goals.	0.531	0.546

When the individual proportions of match events accrued by teams from 2011/12 are used to try to predict subsequent performance for those same individual teams, shots languish in the table. Only 23% of the variance in team points over the subsequent 28 matches is explained by the variance in team shots over the first 10 games. Adding blocked efforts improves matters, in 2011/12 at least, as does moving to final 3rd touches and total touches all over the pitch in the first 10 games. However, the proportion of total match goals scored by each individual team, despite their rarity, prove far and away the best predictor of future individual team performance over the remainder of the 2011/12 season.

And the same plot, but this time using the proportion of total match goals scored by each side from the 2011/12 Premiership.

The strong tie between the proportion of shots that a side accrued and the unique situations that transpired within those first 10 matches during 2011/12 appears to seriously weaken their use as a predictive tool.

R^2 for Proportion of Total Goals Scored by Teams in First 10 Games and Points/GD in Subsequent Games. 2012/13 to 2004/05.

Season.	r^2 Between Goals & Points Accrued Over Final 28 Games.	r^2 Between Goals & GD Over Final 28 Games.
2012/13	0.499	0.432
2011/12	0.531	0.546
2010/11	0.400	0.390
2009/10	0.669	0.687
2008/09	0.572	0.579
2007/08	0.557	0.466
2006/07	0.420	0.401
2004/05	0.591	0.505

To see if the power of goals in 2011/12 was a fluke, I have also looked at the strength of the relationship between the proportion of goals each side scored after ten matches and their points haul and goal difference over the final 28 matches for 8 of the last 9 seasons. (2005/06 is omitted simply because the race to ten games was an abnormally spread out affair). In most of the years, the strength of the relationship seen in 2011/12 is confirmed and sometimes bettered.

To be usefully predictive of future performance a statistic should be capable of surviving changing context. But in the short term of the first 10 matches for each side during he 2011/12 season, shots, as a proportion of total shots, appear to be too dependent upon such external forces as game state and current score to pass that test.