At the office where I work we always have at least 1 television showing a live match from somewhere in the world. And I relatively see a lot of Friday night matches, because – due to the time difference with Europe (I work in Argentina) – those matches are broadcasted in the afternoon here, precisely when work is supposed to be pretty much done for the week and I try to see some football. Lately I started to get the feeling that I hardly saw any goals in those games. Week after week. As I am keeping a database with all the results of the big 4 leagues (La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Premier League), the Ligue 1 and the Eredivisie I figured out that I could easily check if this was correct (spoiler: I was not..). This resulted in the following tables with data: A simple average per country, with the Eredivisie clear on top:
Here is the average of goals per weekday:
So far, Tuesdays see the highest average amount of goals per game (4.2), but it must be said that only 10 league games have been played that day. Wednesday has so far been the day with the least goals (1.9 per game). Most noticeable from the table is that, although expected differently, there is very little difference between weekdays and weekends. An interesting coincidence (because of the low amount of matches it is hard to say it is proof..) is that all leagues that had matches played on Tuesdays (4 out of 6) had that day as day with the highest average of goals.
And some more extensive versions of this last table with all info per league:
When analysing the table of the Eredivisie, you see the difference between home goals on weekdays and in weekends is small. However, the enormous difference between the average of goals of away teams on Friday and in weekends is interesting.
Football in numbers 