Goal Time Analysis
Ford Bohrmann
If you had to place a bet, at what minutes do you think the most goals are scored during the course of a soccer game? I was asking myself this exact question, so I decided to try to figure out what the answer was. If scoring is completely random we would expect the distribution of the count of goals scored to be roughly even across every minute of the game. Of course, it is not going to be perfectly distributed because of random errors, but every minute should have roughly the same number of goals, assuming the sample is large enough.
I had a hunch that this would not be the case. Specifically, my guess was that there would be more goals scored between the 85th and 90th minutes, whereas there would be fewer in the first 5 minutes of the game. To test this hypothesis, I used data from the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation page from 8 years of the Premiership.
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