How Often Do We See Late Goals In A Scoreless Match?

Sep 14th, 2012 - Posted by Andrew_Brocker in Football

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How often are late goals found in a scoreless football match? Today on the blog, Andrew takes a look at each of the major football leages their tendancy for late goals when neither team have put one on the board.

RonaldoGoalManUnited

I am often asked by readers for some time of goal stats. So over the course of this season, I will endevour to answer some of the more frequently posed questions.

Today I will take a look at the occurrence rates for specific scorelines when a match has gone scoreless deep into the 2nd half. The numbers I have compiled are for each of the major domestic leagues of Europe, the Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A and Primera over the last five years, dating back to the 2007-2008 season.

Scoreless at the 75th Minute

Ok, so let's start by taking a look at matches that have gone without a goal up to the 75th minute. The chart below displays the average occurrence rates of fulltime scorelines across the four leagues of study the last five seasons.

LateGoals75thMin

We can see that when a match has gone without a goal at the 75th minute, the match has gone on to end 0-0 just over 56% of the time.

We can also see that the likelihood of the home team going on to win 1-0 was almost 19% while the likelihood of the away team winning 0-1 was just short of 15%. Meanwhile a 1-1 draw occurred almost 4% of the time.

The chances of a 2-0 home victory rose just above 3%, while the same scoreline for the visitors occurred just over 2% of the time.

On average, the chances of a scoreless match seeing 2 or more goals in the final 15 minutes plus added time was just over 10%.

Scoreless at the 80th Minute

We will move now to consider matches that we goalless at the 80th minute. As the chart below shows, and as we would well expect, the likelihood of a match at this point ending 0-0 at fulltime rises to just under 66%.

LateGoals80thMin

The likelihood of the home club winning 1-0 was just above 16% while the chances of the away club winning by the same scoreline was just short of 13%.

A scoreless match at the 80th minute ended in a 1-1 draw on average just under 2% of the time, while the chances of a match seeing 2 or more goals in the final 10 minutes plus added time were just above 5%.

Scoreless at the 85th Minute

So let's finally take a look at the occurrence rates of late late goals. The chart below shows the likelihood of particular scorelines when a match was goalless at the 85th minute.

LateGoals85thMin

We can see that the chances of a match ending 0-0 with just 5 minutes plus added time remaining was just over 76% by the four league average.

Meanwhile, the chances of the home club winning 1-0 held at just under 13% while the chances of the away club plucking a 0-1 result was almost 10%.

Finally, the likelihood of a scoreless match seeing 2 or more goals this late, was short of 2%.

So What Did We Learn?

As we would have expected, the likelihood of a match ending scoreless rises from 56% at the 75th minute to 66% at the 80th minute, to 76% at the 85th minute. This steady increase should come as no suprise, although the frequency of multiple late goals may be, particularly the 10% occurrence of 2 or more goals in the final 15 minutes plus added time in scoreless matches at the 75th minute.

We should also note the enhanced frequency of late goals for home clubs as distinct from away clubs. Although this tendancy is slight, it is something to keep in mind. Also, we should always take into account the match circumstances and the particular ambitions of the competing clubs. For example, a significant underdog playing at home, is perhaps less likely to have scoring ambitions late in a scoreless match than their more fancied visitors who are less likely to be content with a 0-0 result.