The average goals per game average at every FIFA World Cup
The 2022 FIFA World Cup is not far away and the excitement for the tournament is building. The thrills and spills of tournament football is always fascinating and, for many, the highlight and main event of the entire sport.
Tactics have evolved and influenced or even overshadowed entire periods of the game. From catenaccio to total football and tiki taka to Cholismo; the variety of styles of play is what makes the global event so intriguing.
With that in mind, this is a look at the goals per game averages throughout the history of the tournament and how that particular statistic has fluctuated through the years.
As the graph shows, the early tournaments had a remarkable amount of goals per game. Those World Cups, of course, had some anomalous hammerings and perhaps lacked a tactical sophistication defensively.
What is very interesting to point out, though, is the fact the goals per game rate has remained below three in every single tournament since 1958 – a run of 15 successive World Cups. That could well be a clear indication of the enormity of the occasion potentially stilting an overwhelmingly attacking style of football, although that doesn’t mean the excitement, suspense and tension of a World Cup is not entirely intoxicating.
