Tag Archives: Haller H.

Feb 25 2018

In Search of the Greatest World Cup Goal Scorer – Part III: Introducing the Goal Importance Factor

So, let’s get down to the nitty gritty: So far, we have done rather straightforward things like averaging and adjusting the tallies so they become comparable over time. But every goal still had the same value within a tournament and no goal was discarded. Well, that’s about to change! I already mentioned in the previous post that in order to get things right we also have to consider the order and magnitude of the goal. And that is where I came up with the goal importance factor (IF).

Full disclosure here, this factor is inspired by a statistic I read in “The Hockey News” where the idea was to devalue NHL goal scorers who get their goals (and assists) at times when the game was already decided. And I adapted it here to soccer and it is basically determined as follows:

  • a goal counts for 1pt if it is a go-ahead goal or a game-tying goal.
  • a goal counts for 0.5pts if it puts the scoring team up by two goals or reduces the deficit to 1 goal.
  • any other goal counts for 0pts!
  • If it is an own goal, the corresponding negative points are awarded.

Here are a few examples from World Cup finals that should illustrate the idea, but also will showcase some weakness of it:

Well, the focus on older World Cup finals is simply because these had a lot more goals and thus it is easier to demonstrate the computation. Now, I like how goals that run-up the score do not count (1998 final), but the points given are not entirely perfect. The goals making the score 3-1 in 1938 and 1958 should count more than 0.5 pts since they basically were the winning goal (more on that in the next post). Also, the second and third goals in 1954 also are arguably undervalued. In particular, the third goal putting Germany back into contention. Now, I could have made an adjustment and have these goals count fully, but  this would make for a much harder implementation (admittedly not a great reason, but hey it is my time spent here 😉 ) and less consistency. In future posts, we will try to address these issues in a different way, but to be honest I have thought a lot about the IF and came to the conclusion that I like it the way it is for its simplicity.  Of course, to fairly compare over time, we also have to adjust the IF by the goal value, GV, from the previous post and compute the importance factor value as

IFV = IF*GV

And with this, the updated scoring lists would look like this:

Name Goals IF IFV Rank IF
1 GER Miroslav Klose 16 10.5 10.678 1
2 BRA Ronaldo 15 9.5 9.539 2
3 GER Gerd Müller 14 9.5 8.615 3
4 ITA Paolo Rossi 9 8.5 8.031 4
5 GER Jürgen Klinsmann 11 8.0 7.849 5
6 ITA Roberto Baggio 9 7.5 7.361 8
7 POL Grzegorz Lato 10 8.0 7.358 5
8 ESP David Villa 9 7.0 7.141 9
9 ITA Christian Vieri 9 7.0 6.927 9
10 ENG Gary Lineker 10 7.0 6.862 9

Well, I gotta give it to Klose. This was my first real attempt at toppling him from the top spot and yet, he is still there! He obviously scored many vital goals and even though his score is reduced to just above 65% of his goal tally (that is actually slightly above Ronaldo), Miroslav Klose remains in the top spot. That percentage, btw, will be called the importance ratio, IR, and is computed as IFR = IF/Goals = IFV/GV. I guess, my personal dislike for Miroslav Klose being in top spot is less based on his feats at the World Cup but rather the fact that at club level, he was never really playing at the highest level. But then, only the World Cup is being considered here and he clearly made his mark. So hats off to Miroslav Klose! We will have to dig more!

So, with my new found respect for Miroslav Klose, what else do we observe: Well, Ronaldo’s 15 goals are not really more impressive than Klose’s 16 – at least for now – but scoring twice in a World Cup Final is probably the one edge he holds over his successor as top scorer. Gerd Müller has the same IF as Ronaldo, but gets hammered on GV. Other than that, we suddenly have a strong Italian presence with Rossi, Baggio and Vieri entering the top 10. It kind of validates my feeling that Italy frequently had scorers of vital goals. Still, the best scorers still seem to come from Germany with Klinsmann rounding out the top 5.

From now on, I will also present only the top 10 after adjusting for GV. But just for completeness, here are the players in the top 10 of IF, that did not make the top 10 in IFV:
Just Fontaine (8.0), Vavá (7.0), Helmut Rahn (7.0) and, of course, Pelé (7.0). Also, getting back to IFR. At first it seems as a nice measure of goal scoring prowess: what percentage of all your goals are actually important. And looking at the top 10 above, Paolo Rossi’s IFR of 0.944 is super impressive, while all players in the top 3 have IFRs of below (0.68). Pelé is even at 0.583! So, should we consider them lower? Maybe, but most importantly, it is definitely easier to have high IFR if you score less goals. In fact, there are 596 players with IFR=1.0 and none have more than 6 goals overall. So, as a prolific goalscorer, you are bound to score a few not so important goals. And while the top 5 in IFV are all World Cup winners, only one World Cup winner (Romário) has IFR 1.0 and at least 5 goals, while 477 players have IFR=1.0 and only one goal. So, to me this statistic is imperfect and I find IFV a better value to describe “greatness” but still one we will try to improve on.

So, how about taking the average, as we have done before? Will we get Oleg Salenko off his throne? Before revealing this list, just a little note: while my writing might be interpreted as me not liking certain players, I want to note that if I sound disparaging, I may not like their name to be considered as the best goal scorer ever. However, their individual achievement should never be tainted or questioned. I just want a good hard look at every goal tally! So, here are the average IF values, the IFAs:

Name GA IF IFV IFA
1 FRA Just Fontaine 2.167 8.0 5.890 0.982
2 ITA Salvatore Schillaci 0.857 6.0 5.901 0.843
3 RUS Oleg Salenko 2.000 2.5 2.457 0.819
4 POR Eusébio 1.500 5.5 4.755 0.793
5 SUI Josef Hügi 2.000 3.5 2.353 0.784
6 BRA Leônidas 1.600 6.5 3.915 0.783
7 ITA Christian Vieri 1.000 7.0 6.927 0.770
8 NIR Peter McParland 1.000 5.0 3.681 0.736
9 DEN Jon Dahl Tomasson 0.833 4.0 4.022 0.670
10 GER Gerd Müller 1.077 9.5 8.615 0.663

Again, I find myself liking the pure IFVs better than the IFAs – even though as a professional statistician, I should love averages more than totals! The players in the top 5 all played only a single World Cup and only Gerd Müller played in a World Cup final – and he is 10th. I agree that Just Fontaine should always be highly rated among great goal scorers simply by netting 13 in a single World Cup, but both IF and IFV are not all that high. Salvatore Schillaci probably had the most amazing World Cup goal scoring run ever and I do value him highly, but not necessarily in the top 3. And Oleg Salenko had super unique feat by scoring 5 in a single game, but then again, his Russian team did not make it past the group stage despite all his scoring efforts. Eusébio and Leônidas would have strong cases for higher positions, but I do not regard them as highly as say, Gerd Müller, who was top scorer at the 1970 World up and scored the game winners in a de-facto semifinal and the final in 1974.

Well, the IF is a first step, but it is obviously not flawless as already mentioned above. It also disregards another factor and one that might be Miroslav Klose’s and Oleg Salenko’s undoing: scoring game winning goals and scoring goals in the latter stages of the World Cup. So, in the next post, we will try to expand on the importance factor concept.