Goals, Upsets and Injuries: What will football look like post-lockdown

Football is coming. After three months of absence, the beautiful game will finally be returning to English, Spanish and Italian television screens over the coming days.

The upcoming two-month bonanza of football is completely unprecedented. It has been speculated that there will only be six days in between the resumption and the end of the season which don’t feature Premier League football. 

This relentless schedule, coupled with limited preparation and fitness worries, presents a whole host of challenges for players and managers. Moreover, the lack of fans in stadia might also profoundly affect what happens on the field of play.

Pundits have speculated the impacts that these changes might have on the sport once it returns. Will we see a gluttony of goals? Will upsets be more prevalent? Will home advantage be eliminated? And should we worry about an increase in player injuries?

Luckily, we have a means of finding some answers to these questions. The Bundesliga has already completed five full Gameweeks since its return on 16th May. Studying what has happened in the German top division might give some insight into what to expect in the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A.

Goals

A popular theory is that there will be more goals when football restarts. Fitness levels might be questionable on the return to action, leading to more open games with lots of chances at either end. More crucially, teams are likely to be less well-organised defensively – it can take weeks of training together as a unit to develop a strong defensive cohort.
But do the stats back up this theory?

The 224 Bundesliga matches to have taken place this season before the restart saw a total of 728 goals – a rate of 3.25 goals per game. Post-lockdown, there have been 139 goals scored in 46 matches – a rate of just 3.02 goals per game.

The data shows that post-restart matches have actually seen fewer goals than the period prior to lockdown. The difference between these figures is minimal enough to attribute to natural variation, indicating that there has been no real difference in the scoring prevalence of teams post-restart.

Upsets

Another prominent theory is that upsets will occur more frequently in the post-restart world. Some teams have more to play for than others, meaning some might have kept fitter over the break and be more driven to succeed once the restart occurs.

Consider the opening weekend clash between Brighton and Arsenal. The Seagulls, fighting relegation, will have had much more incentive to train properly and give the run-in their all than the Gunners, who have little hope of achieving anything other than a mid-table finish.

Moreover, the potential elimination of home-field advantage might further murky the waters when it comes to predicting the outcome of matches. We have seen that only 10 of the 46 Bundesliga games played since the restart have resulted in home victories – a rate of just 21.7%.

In order to test the theory that more upsets are likely post-restart, WhoScored have collaborated with oddschecker to determine if Bundesliga results have gone the way that the leading bookmakers expected.

For each match, we can average out the odds from each of the twenty-two bookmakers featured on oddschecker to determine how likely each team were of emerging victorious. Comparing the bookies’ expectations to what happened in reality will give us an indication of how volatile Bundesliga results have been post-restart.

The average implied probability that the bookmakers’ assigned the favourite in each game (i.e. the team with the better chance of winning) was 54.14%. In other words, the bookies expected the favourite to win in just over half of the matches played since lockdown, with a draw or the other team winning 44.86% of the time.

In reality, the favourite has emerged triumphant on just 47.83% of occasions since the restart – on 22 of the 46 games. Thus, the better teams have dropped points 6.31% more often than they would have been expected to. 

This is not a massive difference, and we should be appreciative that 46 games is a relatively small sample size, but this is still an interesting feature to note ahead of the resumption of the English, Spanish and Italian leagues.

Injuries

There has been considerable concern for player wellbeing, given the demanding schedule and limited time to get match fit before the campaigns restart. Some footballers have gone so far as to renounce themselves from playing over injury concerns – most notably, Charlton’s star-striker Lyle Taylor.

In a bid to ease injury worries, the Premier League have approved the usage of five substitutions during matches. This is the protocol that has been adopted by the Bundesliga, but has it alleviated the burden on the players and led to less injuries?

According to Online-Betting.me.uk, there were 188 player injuries sustained over the course of 142 games played in the Bundesliga since the beginning of 2020 and before lockdown – an average of 1.32 injuries per game. Since the restart, they report that there has been 79 injuries in just 46 games – an average of 1.72 per game.

This rise is significant – players have been 29.7% more likely to sustain injuries since the resumption of football. However, we must once again acknowledge the relatively small sample size of matches from which this data has been collected from before jumping to conclusions.

Overall, the Bundesliga data does not indicate that football will be drastically different once it returns to other nations. However, we should certainly keep an eye out for favourites struggling to collect three points, and perhaps coaches should work to relieve some of the workload on their more injury-prone players.