TO you and me it’s the only Premier League game to ever see nine different goal scorers, but to Jose Mourinho Arsenal’s 5-4 win against Tottenham in 2004 was vile, a scandal, a hockey score.
“In a three-against-three training match, if the score reaches 5-4 I send the players back to the dressing rooms as they are not defending properly. So to get a result like that in a game of 11 against 11 is disgraceful,” he said at the time. But 15 years is a long time in football, and Mourinho is now overseeing a Tottenham team who have conceded at least two goals in all four matches he has taken charge of.
Meanwhile, Liverpool are setting a record pace at the top of the table yet have only kept two clean sheets all season, just one more than that Derby team had at this point in 2007-08. We’ve also seen the Premier League’s first 9-0 since the mid 1990s and Arsenal close in on the record number of 2-2s in a single season despite well over half of the campaign remaining.
2 – This is only the second time in 1,053 Premier League games that Everton have conceded four first half goals (also v Arsenal in Feb 2018). Blue. pic.twitter.com/3HDT7zoKCx
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) December 4, 2019
There are myriad reasons for the state and stance of Premier League football at the end of the 2010s. Law changes such as the goal kick tweak has encouraged certain teams to engage in risky football on the edge of their own box (Arsenal’s 2-2 at Watford owes its existence to this, for instance), while Liverpool’s insistence on a high line, outsourcing some of the danger management to the re-rewind experts at Stockley Park, invariably offers their opponents at least one good opportunity every game.
It’s not just in the Premier League, either. The eternally entertaining Bundesliga has seen 3.29 goals per game in 2019-20, with the Champions League fractionally behind on 3.24. Only Ligue 1 truly offers a reminder of the 2000s, when the defensive theocracy of your Mourinhos and your Rafa Benitezs gripped the continent.
Should the Premier League maintain its current rate of 2.91 goals per game until May then it would be the highest since 1967-68, the last time there were more than three goals per game in English top-flight (3.03). That was the end of a post-war boom that peaked in 1957-58 and 1960-61 with 3.73 goals per game. Yet within just a few seasons, everything had changed.
1970-71 may be remembered fondly by Arsenal supporters but the First Division’s scoring rate of 2.36 is the lowest ever seen, followed in 1973-74 by an almost-as-meagre 2.40. Football in the seventies is remembered as a holy period but England rarely qualified for tournaments and there were barely any goals to watch domestically. 101 Great Goals? In total, yeah probably.
Through a dataset as long as top-flight goals per game you can occasionally glimpse the sudden impact of rule changes and wonder what some archaic social media would have made of the transformation of the game. The most dramatic is the change in the offside law in 1925, when the number of defending players required to be between the attacker and the goal was reduced from three to two.
At the start of the 1920s, goals-per-game was at a pleasant Premier League-style 2.88, 2.76 and 2.69 but by 1923-24 it had fallen to 2.47, with Huddersfield winning the league. Huddersfield retained the title in 1924-25 with the league seeing a slight increase to 2.58 but 1925-26 saw an unprecedented leap to 3.69 goals per game as defences were left, in modern parlance, rattled by the new law. Huddersfield were unaffected, winning their third title in a row, but the manager who had led them to the first two, Herbert Chapman, had by now left for Arsenal.
By the start of the 1930s he had perfected his W-M formation, crafted to cope with the evolution in offside. He added two league titles at Highbury to the two he won at Huddersfield, and his post-death legacy would be three further championships for the Gunners in the 1930s. Liverpool and Manchester City fans fearing the post-Klopp and post-Guardiola eras can take solace from the fact that sometimes the system can outlast the manager.
What does this mean for football as we enter the 2020s? Well, the last few seasons have seen a revolution in approach directly comparable to the 1920s with VAR, law adjustments, refereeing tweaks and goalline technology. Theoretically it’s easier to score now than it has been for a long time, and the trends back that up, but attacking progress is the high summer of football.
The leaves are rustling in the breeze and the going is good. But soon the weather will turn and the defensive priests will usher in another cold winter. The battle goes on. Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy your goals. While you can.
