Without goals football probably wouldn’t be that interesting but what is the right number of goals?  If we had too many goals then the best team would win more of the time and the game might become too predictable (technically, if all of the teams had about the same quality then it could still be unpredictable and have lots of goals).  On the other hand, too few goals would make the game boring.  If you look over many leagues, and many seasons you tend to find about 2.6 goals per game on average.  Since football is popular perhaps we can make a leap of faith and say that 2.6 is a good number.

Goals of course only come if you first have a shot.  In the Premier League, over the last ten seasons, about 22% of on-target shots have become goals.  This number does fluctuate a bit from season-to-season as does the number of on-target shots.  The odd thing is that their fluctuations largely cancel each other out: the number of goals remains relatively constant over time.  2.6 is just special.

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